Filipino economics

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, May 23, 2006
Manila Journal
Eking Out a Living, of Sorts, From a Mountain of Muck
By SETH MYDANS, International Herald Tribune

MANILA ? Some people in her old village look down on Teresa Janoras, who 
traveled to Manila 30 years ago to find a better life and has earned her 
living digging through garbage ever since.

"They say it's smelly," said Ms. Janoras, who is now 46 and supports a 
family of five as a scavenger. "They say we've come all the way here to 
Manila just to work in the garbage."

But garbage has been good to her, she said in her little house, adorned 
with mismatched curtains she pulled from the refuse.

"Think about it," she said. "We don't have bosses. We live a free life. 
Here, your only concern is survival, your daily needs, and the dump can 
take care of that."

Ms. Janoras is usually deep in the garbage for 11 hours, and on her best 
days she can earn a bit more than $3. "If I get lucky one day, we eat 
well," she said. "But sometimes we have to make do with just rice and fish 
paste."

A sparrow-thin woman who has lost most of her teeth, Ms. Janoras is one of 
150,000 people who scavenge or recycle the 6,700 tons of garbage produced 
each day in Manila, something of a symbol of the poverty and urban collapse 
of this vast city.

A quarter of that garbage is simply dumped in fields and fetid rivers and 
in the polluted bay, according to the Asian Development Bank. The city's 10 
dumps are overflowing, but no alternative sites have been found.

Ms. Janoras's workplace is the most famous of the dumps, Payatas, a 
100-foot-high mountain of garbage that collapsed six years ago and buried 
more than 200 squatters.

Since then, the mountain has been graded to a gentler slope and the 
squatters have been moved outside a bright yellow security fence. Signs 
read, "No ID, no entry" and "Children under 14 not allowed."

From time to time, loudspeakers play a catchy inspirational tune whose 
words, heard on top of the garbage mountain, thread a line between tragedy 
and hilarity.

"Filipino, you're a Filipino!" the song goes. "Show the world what you can 
do. The Filipino is unique. Don't be afraid, be proud. I'm a Filipino. 
We're Filipinos."

But there is no disguising the fact that this is a garbage dump and that 
Ms. Janoras's work is filthy and degrading.

With the other scavengers, she joins the hungry flies that swarm over the 
spilled guts of the city, in constant motion ? bending, reaching, turning, 
tossing, lifting, digging, heaving ? as the hot sun climbs into the sky and 
begins to sink again.

When it rains, the putrid flavors of the muck can send even lifelong 
professionals staggering down the sopping mountainside, their hands over 
their faces, the sludge slopping in over the tops of their rubber boots.

"Sometimes the smell gets so strong that I feel like throwing up," Ms. 
Janoras said.

In the dry months, trucks painted with the bright slogan "Service at its 
best" stir up a fine, foul dust, choking the lungs with an aerosol of 
waste. Dizzy and coughing, the scavengers dance with the wind, turning like 
weather vanes to keep the noxious powder at their backs.

The scavengers are the great levelers of society, recycling the remains of 
the city, perhaps to see it return again as garbage and cycle through once 
more.

The process starts with the garbage trucks, a sort of serial intestinal 
tract, which arrive minutes apart, more than 400 a day, bringing 1,800 tons 
of garbage to the Payatas dump in 16-hour spans.

Computers log them in as they arrive, but as in so many areas of life, 
those amazing machines cannot match the natural gifts of man. "We know 
where the trucks come from by the smell," said Jameel Jaymalin, the dump 
administrator. "It's an inhalant skill."

The bounty of the trucks is sifted and sorted by the scavengers, who pass 
it on to scrap shops specializing in copper wire, old newspapers, aluminum 
cans, plastic, cardboard, bits of machinery, box springs, raffle tickets, 
tires, broken toys ? virtually all the infinite components of civilized life.

The queen of recyclers is Imelda Marcos, once the first lady of the 
Philippines, who now designs jewelry from discarded plastic. "The world has 
produced enough garbage to be recycled to bring paradise again," she said 
in a recent interview in her luxury apartment.

Ms. Janoras, however, specializes in rotten food, mostly from restaurants 
and hotels, which she sells to a broker as feed for pigs. She also keeps an 
eye out for plastic packing strips, which she brings home, cleans and 
weaves into baskets for sale. "I used to collect tin cans, bottles, 
cardboard, the usual stuff," she said. "But the scraps are easier, easier 
to carry."

At the end of the day, she walks down the mountainside to her little home, 
a mile away, where her jobless husband Edgar and two jobless teenage sons 
are waiting. Her teenage daughter is still at school.

Yes, she said with a laugh, it is normal in the Philippines for a woman to 
support the men in her family.

"You can't force them to work," she said. "In the provinces it's the same. 
If the husband doesn't work, it's up to the wife to find a way to support 
the family."

While she is away, the men in the family tend to the house and it is 
immaculate, as if cleanliness were a fetish here at the edges of the dump.

The little rooms are free of even a speck of dust. A pet kitten and a dog 
are fluffy and clean. The few pots and pans gleam with scouring.

With the mountain of garbage to tempt them away, there are few flies in the 
spotless house. But during the hot and muggy nights, while her family 
sleeps and Ms. Janoras sits and weaves her baskets, it swarms with mosquitoes.

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