Essaying poverty in our midst

About two weeks ago, the Rotary Club of Makati trooped to Payatas to sponsor a community day featuring a rugby clinic conducted by Fil-Brit Marcus Smith, a rugby international superstar, and our club’s book-giving advocacy for Fairplay For All Foundation, a community development center and privately funded NGO founded by a well-meaning British transplant, Roy Moore.

The foundation promotes sports development and is a DepEd recognized alternative learning center for the morale, dignity of the community and to provide hope to the underprivileged children of the former Quezon City dumpsite that has become synonymous with the abject poverty in our society.

For those of us old enough to remember and are aware — and for the rest of society who might be unaware, who live in a bubble, free of the dirt poor conditions of the dregs of life, particularly the youth and the privileged of today’s instant gratification, social media junkies — the community of Payatas is rightly a twin of Tondo’s previous infamous dumpsite, Smokey Mountain, which for almost half a century was the poster boy of the Philippines’ dire economic straits because of the mountain high pile of trash and tons of foul smelling, methane emitting garbage.

But nonetheless dumpsites are the main source of livelihood for thousands, if not millions, of slum dwellers, the uneducated who are unable to find employment, and the masses living below the poverty line who are unable to put food on the table, forcing them to live off the waste of society.

That is, until the government finally decides to do a forced make-over and convert the site into low-cost housing project because of frequent accidents. It is an unsightly reminder that we are still very much a poor country pretending to already be out of the dumps, and for the plentiful politicians, of the barrage of criticisms, of the government’s continuing inability to alleviate poverty.

Payatas, like a Smokey Mountain 2.0 version, also gained notoriety for being the graveyard of hundreds. Although informal anecdotes of living witnesses claim that actually thousands of informal dwellers living off the refuse of humanity died during a landslide in 2000, again compelling the government to close the dumpsite, which is only a short 11 kilometers from La Mesa Dam which is a reservoir for the water needs of the NCR.

The dumpsite was to be transformed into an environmentally safe green community. Checking in Google, I saw appropriately adorned pictures of the before and after. With these images in mind, I was quite eager to see for myself the “transformed” Payatas of today.

After the fun-filled clinic of the Fairplay kids happily learning the ABC’s of rugby from no less than Marcus and his equally athletic younger brothers, we decided to take a guided walking tour, never mind the heat of the noontime sun, intrigued by a promise we would be shown the “real” Payatas.

So off we went, up and down the narrow alleyways of the “real” Payatas, trodding on the roads circling the infamous mountain range, which are more like hills, planted over by tons of wild grass embellished with a sprinkling of trees. As we walked past the particular location where the landslide happened burying hundreds of slum dwellers living at the foot of the garbage mountain, one could still discern the faint smells of decayed garbage which, according to the residents, would emit a much stronger stench during summer.

At the foot of the now “greened” hills, I saw embedded trash remnants protruding from the bottom as if serving as a foundation to the contrived structures towering over the roads and shanties across the road a mere few yards away. Officially, 218 persons died but this count was based only on the corpses recovered. Easily, about another 300 persons were reported missing with many more unreported, so most certainly their rotten corpses are very likely still enmeshed in that “transformed” mountain.

The population of Payatas is officially at about 120,000 but in reality, according to the residents, closer to 500,000. Why the real number is so much higher and not accounted for is another story in itself. Suffice it to say that skeptical residents attribute the underreporting to enable the government to claim a much lower statistic of people still below the poverty line.

After the tour, I felt deeply the burning images of the ‘real’ Payatas and instinctively knew that they will stay long in my mind.

The residents we saw were friendly, smiling as our Rotary vests were familiar to them obviously because of previous Rotarian visitors also eager to help. Out of curiosity, I cautiously peered into a few shanties made of cardboard and a mish-mash of construction materials where I saw families of four or five huddled, cramped in a six by six-foot “house,” squatting on the floor in a circle partaking of their lunch.

After the tour, I felt deeply the burning images of the “real” Payatas and instinctively knew that they will stay long in my mind, affirming what we all really know, that there are millions of Filipinos who desperately need everyone’s help and that unless we strike oil, our government will never have enough resources to eliminate poverty in our midst.

This will truly require living up to the Rotary maxim of Service Above Self.

Until next week… OBF!

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