The Meaning of Smoky Mountain

YOU'D HAVE TO SAY SOMETHING MORE THAN THAT. Most of the time I spent in the Philippines, I walked around feeling angry--angry at myself when I brushed off the latest platoon of child beggars, angry at the beggars when I did give in, angry at the rich Filipinos for living behind high walls and guardhouses in the fortified Makati compounds euphemistically called villages, angry as I picked my way among piles of human feces left by homeless families living near the Philippine Navy headquarters on Roxas Boulevard, angry at a society that had degenerated into a war of every man against every man.

It's not the mere fact of poverty that makes the Philippines so distressing, since some other Asian countries have lower living standards. China, for instance, is on the whole much poorer than the Philippines, and China's human beasts of burden, who pull huge oxcarts full of bricks down streets in Shanghai or Beijing, must have lives that are among the hardest on the planet. But Philippine poverty seems more degrading, for reasons I will try to illustrate through the story of "Smoky Mountain.'

Smoky Mountain is, I will admit, something of a cliche, but it helps illustrate an important and non-cliched point. The "mountain' is an enormous heap of garbage, forty acres in size and perhaps eighty feet high, in the port district north of Manila, and it is home to some 15,000 Filipinos. The living conditions would seem to be miserable: the smell of a vast city's rotting garbage is so rank and powerful that I could not breathe through my nose without gagging. I did finally retch when I felt my foot sink into something soft and saw that I'd stepped on a discarded half-full blood-transfusion bag from the hospital, which was now emitting a dark, clotted ooze. "I have been going to the dumpsite for over ten years now and I still have not gotten used to the smell,' Father Benigno Beltran, a young Mod Squad--style Dominican priest who works in Smoky Mountain, has written. "The place becomes infested with millions of flies that often get into the chalice when I say mass. The smell makes you deaf as it hits you like a blow to the solar plexus.'

The significance of Smoky Mountain, though, is not how bad it is but how good. People live and work in the garbage heap, and say they feel lucky to do so. Smoky Mountain is the center of an elaborate scavenging-and-recycling industry, which has many tiers and many specialized functional groups. As night falls in Manila, hundreds of scavengers, nearly all men, start walking out from Smoky Mountain pushing big wooden carts--about eight feet long and shaped like children's wagons--in front of them. They spend all night crisscrossing the town, picking through the curbside garbage dumps and looking for the most valuable items: glass bottles and metal cans. At dawn they push their carts back to Smoky Mountain, where they sell what they've found to middlemen, who own fleets of carts and bail out their suppliers if they get picked up by the police in the occasional crackdowns on vagrancy.

Other scavengers work the garbage over once city trucks have collected it and brought it in. Some look for old plastic bags, some for rubber, some for bones that can be ground up for animal feed. In the late-afternoon at Smoky Mountain I could easily imagine I'd had my preview of hell. I stood on the summit, looking into the lowlands where trucks kept bringing new garbage and several bulldozers were at work, plowing through heaps of old black garbage. I'd of course heard of spontaneous combustion but had never believed in it until I saw the old garbage steam and smoke as it was exposed to the air. Inches behind the bulldozers, sometimes riding in the scoops, were about fifteen or twenty little children carrying baskets, as if at the beach. They darted among the machines and picked out valuables that had been newly revealed. "It's hard to get them to go to school,' a man in his mid-twenties who lived there told me. "They can make twenty, thirty pesos a day this way'--$ 1 to $ 1.50. "Here the money is so good.'

The residents of Smoky Mountain are mainly Visayans, who have come from the Visayas region of the central Philippines --Leyte, Negros, Cebu--over the past twenty years. From time to time the government, in embarrassment, has attempted to move them off the mountain, but they have come back: the money is so good compared with the pay for anything else they can do. A real community has grown up in the garbage dump, with the tight family bonds that hold together other Filipino barangays, or neighborhoods. About 10 percent of the people who live in Smoky Mountain hold normal, non-scavenger jobs elsewhere in Manila; they commute. The young man who guided me had just graduated from college with an engineering degree, but he planned to stay with his family, in Smoky Mountain, after he found a job. The people of Smoky Mountain complain about land-tenure problems-- they want the city to give them title to the land on which they've built their shacks--but the one or two dozen I spoke with seemed very cheerful about their community and their lives. Father Beltran, the young Dominican, has worked up a thriving business speaking about Smoky Mountain to foreign audiences, and has used the lecture fees to pay for a paved basketball court, a community-center building, and, of course, a church. As I trudged down from the summit of the mountain, having watched little boys dart among the bulldozers, I passed the community center. It was full of little girls, sitting in a circle and singing nursery-school songs with glee. If I hadn't come at the last minute, I would have suspected Father Beltran of putting on a Potemkin Village show.

The bizarre good cheer of Smoky Mountain undoubtedly says a lot about the Filipinos' spiritual resilience. But like the sex industry, which is also fairly cheerful, it says something depressing about the other choices people have. When I was in one of the countless squatter villages in Manila, talking with people who had built houses out of plywood and scavenged sheet metal, and who lived eight to a room, I assumed it must be better to be poor out in the countryside, where at least you had some space and clean air to breathe. Obviously, I was being romantic. Back home there was no way to earn money, and even in Smoky Mountain people were only a four-cent jeepney ride away from the amusements of the big city.

In Smoky Mountain and the other squatter districts, I couldn't help myself: try as I would not to, I kept dwelling on the contrast with the other extreme of Filipino life, the wealthy one. The contrast is relatively hard to see in Manila itself, since so much of the town's wealth is hidden, literally walled up in the fortified "villages.' But one day, shortly after I'd listened to scavengers explain why some grades of animal bone were worth more on the resale market than others, I tagged along with a friend and visited one of Manila's rich young families in the mountains outside town.

To enter the house we had to talk our way past a rifleman at the gate--a standard fixture not only of upper-class areas of Manila but also of banks, office buildings, McDonald's--and then follow a long, twisting driveway to a mountaintop palace. The family was, of course, from old money; they were also well educated, public-spirited, sincere. But I spent my day with them in an ill-concealed stupor, wandering from room to room and estimating how many zillions of dollars had been sunk into the art, furniture, and fixtures. We ate lunch on the patio, four maids in white dresses standing at attention a few paces off, each bearing a platter of food and ready to respond instantly when we wanted more. Another maid stood behind my chair, leaning over the table and waving a fan back and forth to drive off any flies. As we ate, I noticed a strange rat-a-tat sound from inside the house, as if several reporters had set up a city room and were pounding away on old Underwoods. When we finished our dessert and went inside, I saw the explanation. Another two or three uniformed servants were stationed inside the cathedral-like living room, incessantly twitching their flyswatters against the walls.

Excerpt from "A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines?" by James Fallows