Read Part 1 here.

Even more bewildering was Smokey Mountain itself. Other staff told me how there were still families who lived there, who refused to accept any offers of housing or relocation. “It’s like life in the province up there,” they told me. Early in March this year, I went to Tondo with a communications colleague and a photographer, so that we could produce a story on our project. We climbed to the top floor of a building, just so we could see what Smokey Mountain was like.

I could not make sense of it. It was a large hill, covered in grass. A soft afternoon breeze blew in, presumably from Manila Bay, and you could almost imagine an idyllic life in some rural mountain village. Except we were not in some peaceful province. We were in the middle of Manila, and this grassy knoll was, in fact, a literal mountain of garbage, so old that grass had grown over it. People grew vegetables, and I wondered what kind of nutritional value it had, growing as it did in soil that was deeply saturated by garbage. Someone told me you could get lost up there. I could only imagine.

We had walked alongside the mountain a few times, and I remember seeing some areas where the walls looked like shallow caves. There had been landslides there before, someone told me. From above–it would have been a rock ceiling, I suppose, if the mountain had been made of rock and soil–we could see bits of plastic and fabric hanging.

Around the perimeter of the mountain was a wire fence, but leaning against the fence, and even within the fence, were small dwellings, shops, parked motorcycles, tricycles, pedicabs. Some seemed sturdy, all things considered: tin roofs and wooden walls. Others looked like fragile shacks with nothing but tarpaulin to protect them from the elements. Here and there were small cages, for chickens, or pigeons, and who knows what else.

I think everyone knows that urban areas produce a lot of garbage. It’s one of those bits of information that you read somewhere, and then you think about how the plastic pollutes the oceans, how smoke pollutes our air. I imagined landfills, and industrial trucks of some sort, dumping tons of old computers and boxes and plastic. But an actual mountain of it was just something else.

It was so hard to wrap my head around the fact that people lived there. I couldn’t imagine the air they breathed, the water they used. So many things that I took for granted in my life–a kitchen, a large bed, clean running water–were a luxury here. Even harder for me to understand was how people who had been given the chance to leave simply refused, unwilling to trust anything that was offered for free.

I could not find the words for how difficult and desperate their lives must be. I could not even imagine how to begin telling friends and family how people lived on Smokey Mountain, how they could breathe this air, how they could walk amongst these plastic bags of trash. I could only close my eyes in despair as I thought about how these communities had been overlooked, forgotten, ignored. If I thought too long about the systemic oppressions they suffered because of poverty, lack of education, ill health, I started weeping because it all just seemed impossible and formidable and hopeless.

I stood on the top floor of that building, looking out the window with my colleagues as the photographer took pictures of Smokey Mountain. I paused to catch my breath, and to take a sip of water from my tumbler. I stepped away from my colleagues to take off my mask for a moment. I was dizzy from the climb, and Mark, our staff and erstwhile guide, had set a rather brisk pace.

The breeze grew cooler as the sun set over Manila Bay. Children played in the street, and housewives were starting to cook their dinners. Shopkeepers were closing up. We looked at the greenery on top of the mountain, and it was easy to forget that underneath it all was garbage. I suppose much of the world has forgotten that, too.

But we must make them remember.

Part 3 is here.