Tondo's Ulingan: Life in Manila's Inferno

Aling Nelia Gumapac, 45 years old, and her brood of five live a quiet but difficult life in their shanty in Vitas, Tondo, Manila. The word shanty, however, may be an understatement to describe their abode. Built with scrap wood, discarded tarpaulin, Styrofoam, and other scavenged materials from the garbage dumpsite, it is nothing but a withered old tent--covered with soot as a charcoal factory is a whiff away-- a makeshift ramshackle shack if you will, some four feet in height and around five square meters in size. But Aling Nelia and possibly her children seem content enough, even if they have to crouch in order to get in or out of their shack. “At least,” Aling Nelia says,”we have something to sleep in. It’s very hard to sleep in the streets."

Their rickety shack is located right on the dumpsite and near the charcoal factory just aft the new Smokey Mountain. Thus they have to contend all day with the heat, fumes, dust, stench, the flies and, at night, the mosquitoes and the vermin. Aling Nelia and her children have grown accustomed to these hazards, however. For them, these are the features of ultimate poverty which they accept to be their lot. “It’s just a matter of adjusting yourself to the situation. We are poor, so we have to live like this,” she says, sounding resigned to their fate.

Aling Nelia with her five brood, and with some friends

Aling Nelia works in the charcoal factory of Ulingan which is a few blocks away from their house. She is a widow; her husband, a trash scavenger, was killed in Smokey Mountain when one of the cranes carrying trash accidentally fell on him. The husband’s death in 2007 was a big blow to the family.

“Every night,” Aling Nelia laments, “I sleep with my one eye open, wondering if I would be able to support my children, and whether there will be food for them tomorrow. Ang hirap ng tinitiis naming mga mahirap! Hirap na hirap talaga ako. Kung ako naman ang mawawala, ano na ang mangyayari sa mga anak ko?”

In order to survive and make ends meet, Aling Nena works as coal packer. She puts the uling inside small yellow plastic bags. For eight hours of work, she gets paid forty pesos, just enough to buy a kilo of poor-quality rice and a few pieces of dried sardines.

At the end of each work day, Aling Nelia comes home with her face and body covered with soot. Oh, yes, her children still recognize her under the thick grime, she says laughing. More than that, they must see in her the means to survival: the rice that will be their sustenance for the morrow.

Her children—who never attended school-- help augment the meager family income by collecting trash in the nearby dumpsite and selling their collection to the junk shops. At the end of a busy day rummaging through piles of garbage, the children are happy to bring a few more pesos so that they will have money for a lugaw (rice porridge) in the morning. The lugaw assures them that they will be not go hungry for the next two to three days.

But it is not every day that they can eat three square meals. There are days when it is worse -- when the charcoal ovens didn’t have wood to burn and Aling Nelia would be out of work. To make matters worse, the children would go home empty handed. The garbage trucks may have brought only useless trash. With no money and food to eat, they would spend the night sleeping with empty stomachs, dreaming about food, and hoping that the morrow would bring in sustenance.

As a last resort, they dig into trash cans for left-over foods. These discarded foods—known as pagpag in the slums-- are trash to well-off people but manna from heaven to Aling Nelia and her brood--even if these stinking foods are already infested with maggots. The poor has a way to kill the maggots by boiling the food in cooking oil. But it is not everyday there is pagpag. Sometimes all they find are empty food packs. The rats—so numerous in the dump site-- have already beaten them to it.

In a neighboring shack nearby, Mang Julio Dela Cruz, his wife Linda and two small children live. Mang Julio is employed as a wood burner in the same charcoal oven where Aling Nelia works. When Mang Julio first saw me, he shyly asked for a picture with his youngest daughter, Tin, barely two years old. Apparently, he has never had a photo before with her daughter. But Little Tin was afraid of the camera. When I was about to click the shutter, she began to wail. Embarrassed, Mang Julio apologizes to me. I have already taken the shot, however, and the picture that emerged showed a father and daughter smeared with soot and grime.

Mang Julio is a very poor man. He has yet to receive his pay for five days of work (100 pesos a day, or roughly, US$2 ). The scrap woods must be burned slowly—around three to four days of continuous slow burning to become good quality charcoal. It could not be done quickly. Increasing the fire can reduce the wood into powdery soot and therefore render it worthless. Afterwards, when the wood has turned into good charcoal, it is packed by workers like Aling Nelia. Once packed, the uling (charcoal) is then sold wholesale to a market retailer. Thus, Mang Julio must agonizingly wait for a few days in order to get his pay. Meanwhile, penniless, he momentarily relies on the neighborhood sari-sari store to give him a short-term loan of provisions like rice and canned sardines.

Aling Nena’s and Mang Julio’s are just two of the more than 1,600 families living a subhuman existence in a place called Sitio Damayan a six-hectare slum area in Vitas, Tondo, Manila. Sitio Damayan, also called “Ulingan” because of the charcoal industry in the area, may just happen to be the most depressed of all the depressed slums area in all of Metro Manila. It is located just a few meters away from the infamous Smokey Mountain.

During the course of several months, I kept coming back to Ulingan, to immerse myself on the condition of extreme poverty, to study and photograph how the people in this most depressed slum area exist, so that I can report faithfully what they go through everyday. I have been brought up in a middle- class family and the condition of extreme poverty is strange to me.

It is not a very encouraging work. Each time I visit Ulingan, my heart breaks as I witness how people live in a destitute state. It is not easy to see small naked children running around barefooted begging for money so that they can buy food, or to see their fathers carry multiple sacks of garbage and charcoal on their shoulders to earn a few pesos. I know that in general life is hard indeed, but no one needs to live in utter destitution. Indeed, some animals live better.

As a photojournalist, I consider it my duty to expose the social illnesses afflicting the poor, the very social cancer that everybody else neither wants to see nor touch. But photography has a stark way to force people to look into a subject that we have long thought to deny. We can no longer ignore the facts. The truth is staring us in the eye.

This is my first article on my series on Tondo's Ulingan.

This article is published originally at The Philippine Online Chronicles, now one of the world's leading web resource site about the Philippines. Please check our website here!