Under the Bridge

Towards the southern end of Manila, on the Bay, lies Las Piñas City. There is a series of short bridges you must drive over to get there. And there must be a thousand cars and trucks and jeepneys and buses every hour that rumble across one of those nondescript bridges over just one more canal in this archipelago nation.
But this bridge is more than just a bridge. Underneath it is an entire community. Just below the rumble of traffic is a group of people eking out a living in the nearby Las Piñas dump.
For me, the “one billion” slum dwellers of our world now have a face, thanks to that bridge community. In fact, faces. An entire family. Spending time this week with this family is helping me move past the statistic and into the realization that each and every digit in that “one billion” has hopes and aspirations, dreams and wishes. I heard them today in our interview with the Alquino family beneath the bridge.
We (Piper Kucera, Peter Hessels and I) first met Jose Alquino Jr. and his wife, Elvie, in the dump in Santa Cruz, a small town in the Pulon Lupa Barangay in Las Piñas City. They and three of their six children were huddled down in garbage. Literally. Trucks from the city come in, disgorge their fetid contents and the residents of the dump swarm over it with short, curved metal hooks to help them get at the recyclables as quickly as they can. The Alquino’s 12-year-old son, Arnel, is the best at this as he’s small and quick. Jose and Elvie, with Jovelyn, their 15-year-old daughter, then sort through the garbage looking for plastic, aluminum, tin and best of all, copper. They, and dozens of other people from this community, spend their days sifting through other people’s garbage, trying to make a living.
Jose says on a good day, the family can make about 200 pesos. At an exchange rate today of about 47 pesos for one dollar, that’s about $4.25 a day. Jovelyn is the only one of the six children in school because they can’t afford to send any more.
Elvie also sells fish in a market further north. She gets up at 3 a.m. to buy the fish near the sea where they live, then travels by bus and jeepney to a different market to sell.
These are hard working people. Uneducated, but desperate to see their children do better than themselves. We interviewed them and asked questions about their lives. They were open and honest and cheerful … mostly. Jovelyn cried—though she tried desperately not to—as she told us about going to school hungry. Elvie cried—before quickly bouncing back to her more exuberant self—as she talked about having one meal a day, usually. She said she wants her children to have a better life than she does, but it’s so hard.
Meanwhile, the traffic continues to pound the pavement just a few feet above our heads, and the KLM jets continue to roar overhead because this slum is directly under the flight path for the Manila International Airport.
We left at the end of the day to drive back into the center of Manila. As we left the slum and maneuvered our way back to the main roads, we finally got onto the highway and went North. As we did, we rumbled over a bridge. And I looked back and realized we had just rolled over—literally—Jose and Elvie’s bedroom.
And I almost didn’t notice.