The Mountain of Hope:

Christmas in Payatas

It is 4 a.m. in the morning on December 30^th as the garbage dump truck, with Rafael and his fellow scavengers perched on top, winds its way through the narrow streets of Payatas, a suburb of metro Manila. Yet even before arriving at the waste disposal site, Rafael and his friends have sorted through the garbage they have collected from the streets of Quezon City, and have set aside the precious tin cans, glass, plastic and aluminium that they can sell to the local recycling shops. If it is a good day they can make up to two hundred and thirty pesos (six Canadian dollars), enough to pay for basic food and housing for their families in the squatter housing surrounding the Payatas waste disposal site--the garbage mountain.

Photo: Kim Beard

"I saw, through the rising dust of the garbage, that the scavengers had built a life-size nativity scene in which all the figures, including the baby Jesus, had been made from their recycled garbage."

Rafael and his fellow ‘Paleros’ are able to collect up to fifty percent of the recyclable materials from each of the five hundred truck loads of garbage that arrive at the Payatas site each day. Once inside the disposal site, the trucks dump their loads at the top of the garbage mountain. Here, another group of up to three thousand scavengers, who are divided into eight scavenger associations, wait for their opportunity to search through the incoming garbage for recyclable items that they can collect and sell. These scavengers are allowed twenty minutes to pick through the garbage before it is flattened by bulldozers and covered with soil. During this brief interval they collect another eleven percent of recyclable material from the seven thousand cubic metres of waste products that arrive here each day.

The Republic of the Philippines has the highest birth rate in Asia, an unemployment rate in metro Manila of seventeen percent, and low wages for those who do find work. This is what draws Rafael to scavenge. Despite the severe health risks that confront those who live near and work at the garbage mountain, his earnings from scavenging mirror what he could earn from other jobs. Even so, he remembers the grim landslide here on July 10, 2000, when the combination of heavy rains and methane gas build-up caused part of the garbage mountain to collapse. Over two hundred people were buried alive.

Since then the local government and the Payatas scavenging community have worked together to improve the safety of the waste mountain. Schools and clinics have been established, and potable water provided. People are also forbidden from constructing their homes within the hazard zone surrounding the mountain. It is hoped that these measures, along with venting and collection of methane gas, will prevent another major landslide from occurring.

The Reverend Canon Kim Beard is the incumbent at St. Paul's-on-the-hill in Pickering, Ontario.  In January 2004 he visited three Anglican dioceses in the Philippines