Manila Journal
Eking Out a Living, of Sorts, From a Mountain of Muck
By SETH MYDANS, International Herald Tribune
Published: May 23, 2006
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.
In a tidy home a mile from one of Manila's most notorious garbage dumps, Teresa Janoras supports her unemployed husband and three teenage children on the $3 a day she earns from rotting food that she gleans.
Alex Baluyut for The International Herald Tribune
Ms. Janoras, who is 46, also saves packing tape to clean and weave into baskets that she can sell in the local market.
"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.
