Stories by Mike Comerford
Photographs by Mark Welsh
Daily Herald Staff
First of five parts

A barefooted boy races down the center of the railroad tracks that run through a slum in metro Manila.

TONDO, Philippines — In the shadow of the Smoky Mountain garbage dump in the middle of one of the world's worst slums, families are scavenging to survive.

Adults carry bags of trash into an abandoned warehouse. They sift through the garbage for food or recyclables, leaving the leftovers of others' leftovers to rot while flies swarm, rats scurry about and their children play nearby.

Longtime Lisle residents Manny and Margie Hermano and longtime Woodridge residents Esok and Sally Andraneda grew up in middle-class families near here. They knew of the slums, but never witnessed anything up close like this.

The sweat, stifling heat and stench from the rot creates a toxic combination that causes the women to gag and nearly pass out.

"I felt like I was having an asthma attack," Sally Andraneda recalls. "There was no fresh air at all."

Smoky Mountain got its name from the methane-heavy mist hovering over it on certain days. The squalor she saw two years ago still haunts Margie Hermano.

"We have better places for our dogs," she says, referring to her life in the United States. "It breaks your heart. No one should live in that kind of place."

Yet, legions of scavengers in metro Manila make a life sifting through mountains of trash. In shantytowns, under bridges and along railroad tracks, dump pickers and the rest of the crushingly poor live in conditions unfathomable to most Americans.

More than half the country's 86.2 million people say they are poor. Nearly 13 million, or about the same as Illinois' population, went hungry last year. The World Bank estimates half the people in the Philippines live on less than $2 a day.

The need is staggering. It compels the Hermanos, Andranedas and others who immigrated to the richness of Chicago's suburbs to make substantial sacrifices to help those back home.

The Hermanos and Andranedas are four of more than 63,000 immigrant Filipinos in Chicago and its suburbs who make up the region's fourth largest immigrant group. They are among many who have traveled a long arc from the islands and back again.

Significant sacrifice

Members of a mostly evangelical Catholic movement founded in the Philippines called "Couples for Christ," the Andranedas and Hermanos share a dream of replacing shantytowns with new homes.

The Andranedas, both in their 50s, met while studying for financial planning degrees on the main island of Luzon decades ago. The Hermanos, raised in a middle-class community on the southern island of Panay, also met at college, married and came to America to make a new life.

Longtime Lisle resident Manny Hermano, left, a Philippine immigrant, prays with other members of a group called Couples for Christ at the Marianjoy Rehabilitation Center in Wheaton. The group raises funds to help build homes in Philippine slums.

"My uncle told us the roads are like ribbons in America," Manny Hermano says. "He told me about the opportunities here."

The two couples lived in the suburbs and worked to achieve affluence but now have given much of it up.

The Andranedas sold their Woodridge home and raffled off their 1997 E320 Mercedes Benz last year. They now live in a son's home in Romeoville until they can find someplace inexpensive. The sale of their most valued possessions garnered more than $50,000, which will build dozens of homes.

"We call it simple living because we can continuously contribute as much as possible, not just this one-time deal," says Esok Andraneda, who works as a Downers Grove financial planner. "We both felt we had to do this if we are going to follow the Gospels."

The task seems insurmountable given the sheer number of Philippine slums. An estimated 5 million families need permanent housing. Around Manila alone, about 3.4 million people live in slums, according to the Asian Development Bank. That's about the same number of people who live in Chicago.

A tour of some of Manila's most infamous slums shows each with its own character, its own brand of misery, its own signs of progress.

It also shows how the Hermanos, Andranadas and other middle-class immigrants are making a mark back home.

Creating community

When his gambling interfered with his relationship with his wife, Margie, and two children, Manny Hermano turned to Couples for Christ.

Soon, he quit gambling, became a DuPage County leader for Couples for Christ and began work on helping his poorer brethren.

Margie Hermano works as an executive administrative assistant for an insurance company. A mechanical engineer by training, Manny Hermano now gets a small stipend from Couples as a full-time activist.

Regine David, 8, Maribel David, 6, and Stella David, 3, stand next to their father's coffin in a newer home in the Manila slum known as Baseco. The house was built with the help of donations from U.S. Filipinos. No one knows what caused 29-year-old Reynaldo David's death.

"Couples realized it had to help the poor materially," Manny Hermano says. "But it had to be more than just building a house. … We have to build communities with jobs, so the men can have pride."

Like the Andranedas, the Hermanos sold their Lisle home last year and moved into a cheaper Chicago condo. A portion of their profit helps build homes for Filipinos.

"We want to wipe out slums, and I know that sounds impossible, but we really believe it," Manny Hermano says. "Jesus says, 'Whatsoever you do unto the least of my brothers,' and we believe that."

Through Couples for Christ's alliance with a secular fund-raising group, Ancop Foundation, an anti-slum program emerged called "Gawad Kalinga," in Tagalog, the Philippines' predominant language. Translated it means "to give care."

Gawad Kalinga pledges to build 700,000 homes in 7,000 communities in seven years.

The Chicago region tops all others in America in fund-raising. Launched in 2003, Gawad Kalinga collected $225,000 and pledges for $600,000 at a Hyatt Regency O'Hare fund-raiser last fall.

The nondenominational Gawad Kalinga builds homes for Muslims too. On the southern island of Mindanao, Muslims inhabit homes in a project called a "Chicago village" because of local donations.

On a corporate level, Oak Brook-based McDonald's Corp. has an entire Manila village named after it because a percentage of Philippine sales go to Gawad Kalinga. The homes have small golden arches painted next to addresses.

Chicago-area dollars already have built more than 100 homes near Manila and on the southern island of Mindanao.

Each person given a home has to assist in building a neighbor's. Manny Hermano calls the building program holistic because it doesn't just encourage volunteers to build homes, it also provides training, jobs and medical assistance.

The deplorable conditions of Philippine slums existed even before the United States made it a colony in 1898. Some suggest the lack of a winter makes cardboard and tin shanties a survivable habitat. An exodus from rural areas to the big cities in recent years also has contributed to overpopulation.

The so-called "culture of slums" has many root causes, Manny Hermano says. "I think people just got used to it, the slum lifestyle of scavenging for food and just getting by."

Getting by in Baseco

Hope may be in short supply in the hellish slums of Manila, but it isn't entirely missing.

At the entrance to Baseco, families live under bridges, in abandoned buildings and patchwork shacks that line the road into the shipyard-turned-slum minutes north of Manila's main tourist district.

"In the old days, if there was a hold-up, and the robber ran into Baseco, even the police wouldn't go in here to get him," says Raul Dizon, a former Manila software salesman and current Gawad Kalinga volunteer. "It's different now."

Men sift through trash bags alongside the road. Small fires burn trash that can't be sold or bartered. Some women help while others keep an eye on children. Almost every child seems to have a dirty T-shirt and a runny nose.

Baseco is encircled by barges and the brackish waters of the Pasig River and Manila Bay.

Children use the river as a toilet. They also fish it for trash, floating on rafts made of wood, packing material and string.

Widespread tuberculosis, flash floods, storms and devastating fires plague Philippine slums. In the past year and a half, Baseco suffered three such fires, wiping out large tracts of squatter homes.

Near a bridge on Baseco's outskirts sits 44-year-old John Apostol. Like many here, he came to Manila from a rural area seeking a better life. A native of Cebu island, his home burned to the ground last year. Now he and nine relatives live by the river in a cardboard and plastic hut.

He sifts through garbage for paper and glass to sell. He says he can earn 200 pesos, $4 a day, but he's being squeezed for bribes by the local dump guards.

"We have not lost hope because there is always God," Apostol says as he smokes a homemade cigarette.

Ralph Anthony Israel, 1, waits for his father to finish picking through garbage outside the Baseco slum. Ralph’s parents worry about him because he has had diarrhea for too long, they say.

Apostol's neighbor, 1-year-old Ralph Anthony Israel, plays nearby. His cap turned to one side, he looks like a poster boy from a late-night infomercial on the plight of poor children. Relatives say they are worried about Ralph. He's had diarrhea for too long.

Dysentery is common in Philippine slums. A Gawad Kalinga study estimates about half of slum children also will suffer from tuberculosis at some time.

Across the road from Israel and Apostol, Hanangel Nobieres, 32, collects cardboard, hauling it on his bike. He wears a worn and dirty T-shirt, but his eyes are clear and he seems upbeat. Gawad Kalinga gave him a house in return for his labor. He credits that with stabilizing his family.

"I make enough to send the kids to school," he says. "And, as long as we have a house, we're good."

Not far down the main road made muddy by a soft rain, a red, blue, green and pink oasis of row houses appears like a mirage. Neat sidewalks outline the demarcation of a Gawad Kalinga village.

On the perimeter stands a cluster of unfinished homes under construction. Some men weld while others lay bricks. Women cook a large pot of rice for the workers. Children play or help the fathers with buckets of sand for the concrete mix.

Baseco homeowners president Mario Garlan has been plastering gutters this morning. A former driver of a pedicab, he says the communal nature of the work has made residents better neighbors.

"Before, there were a lot of fights, but not now," Garlan says.

Homeowner patrols keep crime to a minimum.

Eventually, Gawad Kalinga wants to put 3,000 homes on 37 acres in Baseco.

Still, around the Gawad Kalinga village, the ills of the old, disaster-prone Baseco have a way of jumping demarcation lines.

Inside a Gawad Kalinga-built row house, 29-year-old Reynaldo David lies in an open casket in the family room.

No one knows why he died. Slum families can't afford doctors to diagnose disease or determine causes of death. Some said he died of dehydration brought on by diarrhea.

His three young daughters sit by his coffin, innocents grieving on a rainy day in one of the world's worst slums.

Unsure of their own futures, they can be sure of one thing: a roof overhead.

Chicago connections

In a second-story schoolroom in the slum called Don Manuel, the sound of rain hitting the corrugated tin rooftops creates its own thunder as teens and pre-teens dance to pop songs from a boom box.

Sixteen boys and girls perform perfectly choreographed dances. Poor kids in a slum, they dance and beam.

In Don Manuel, inland and northwest of Baseco, the sheer number of children playing and singing makes it look like only children populate this place. About 50, mostly grade school-aged children clap and sing along at school desks.

Outside, a boy plays in the water pouring down from a rooftop gutter. Kids seem to be running headlong down every narrow walkway.

Seven-child families in Philippine slums are common, plunging families further into poverty. Some fathers have more than a dozen children by several women, advocates for the poor say.

Chicago-area donors built 39 of the 60 homes in this barangay, or community. Each pledge of $1,000 results in a single home being built. Metro Chicago dollars built the entire neighborhood leading up to the main square.

A community of newly built homes funded by donations from U.S. Filipinos appears like an oasis of color and tidiness compared to the Baseco slums surrounding it in Manila.

Many of this slum's walkways already display brightly painted homes in trademark Gawad Kalinga pastels.

This rainy afternoon, the once-unemployed men work in nearby warehouses or lay bricks for new homes.

Local project leaders giving a tour of the homes laud every improvement. Organizers point out the happy households, steering clear of sadder cases.

A year ago, the nearby Dario River kept flooding the town, carrying waste and disease into homes. Most people lived in shacks. Too many men could not find work, Dizon says.

These days, Gawad Kalinga volunteers work on flood prevention measures and new homes replace shacks.

"Don Manuel went from a squatter camp to a homeowner project," Dizon says. "People in Chicago should know their money is going to real homes."

Shabu shatters hope

Back in the heart of Tondo near the Smoky Mountain dump the Hermanos and Andranedas visited two years ago, a group of young men play basketball, shirtless and barefoot. Walls of trash bags are piled high around them.

After dark, the basketball will be put away. The players will head for the local dumps to work the overnight shift, sifting through trash in search of recyclables.

Off court, a 20-something man eagerly breathes from a clear plastic sandwich bag filled with a methamphetamine known locally as "shabu." No care has been given to a bloody, festering gash on his leg nearly covered in ash and dirt.

Methamphetamines such as shabu dominate the illegal drug trade in the Philippines, according to the United Nations. In Tondo and other slums, dealers sell a cheap derivative to children for a few pesos.

The Philippines consumes the third-largest amount of amphetamines in the world. An estimated 3.4 million Filipinos regularly use amphetamines — up from 20,000 in 1970, according to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency.

Philippine officials call shabu and related drugs "public enemy No. 1." Addicts say shabu offers an escape from reality and dulls hunger pangs.

Drugs, money, gang turf and garbage are the combustibles of gang violence in Tondo. Gang graffiti on the walls of buildings tout the "13 Judases" and "Angry at the Flesh" gangs.

A man in the Manila slum known as Tondo inhales a methamphetamine called "shabu," from a plastic bag. Drug abuse is such a familiar sight in the neighborhood, some local children look on laughing.

Sometimes gang battles are fought with homemade guns called paltiks, steel pipes filled with explosives or a bullet. A rubber band or a hard shove from behind creates a sudden impact that sprays the pipe's contents at the foe. Philippine gangs also use poisoned arrows and crossbows.

Government officials intend to move this neighborhood to an apartment complex for a fresh start, but there's evidence of fresh starts already attempted here.

Nearby stands a tidy, clean Gawad Kalinga community center.

Across from the center is what appears to be a typical poor Tondo neighborhood with trash bags dumped in front of doorways, droopy balconies and billowing clothes lines.

Yet, under the debased exteriors, a closer look reveals the faded signature colors of Gawad Kalinga homes.

Moving this neighborhood to a new site will be a second try at a fresh start.

When Gawad Kalinga homeowners and activists moved on to another project more than a year ago, squatters moved back in to this part of Tondo. And the slum jungle grew back.

Believing in miracles

Dark silhouettes of human scavengers appear atop the sprawling Payatas dump at sundown as they zigzag their way downhill.

A soft red sunset lights the scene on the outskirts of Manila, giving it a burning glow as bats swoop overhead.

Fe Vitancur carries two bags, one on her head, filled with what will be slop for her pigs.

Fe Vitancur walks off an open garbage heap on the outskirts of Manila, in Payatas. She carries bags of slop she's collected for her pig business. She says she hopes proceeds from it and her husband's job will support her two children in college.

"It was so hot up there today, I only got two sacks of food for my pigs," she says. "Since life is difficult, I have to do this."

Two years ago, heavy rains triggered a landslide here, killing about 200 scavengers.

Still, Vitancur, 40, continues to pick for slop. Her pig raising and her husband's mechanics job give them enough to get two kids to college.

Colleges cost about $1,000 a year. That's usually beyond reach in a nation where half the people live on less than $2 a day.

"My objective," Vitancur says, "is that they don't have to make a living this way."

The Hermanos and Andranedas share that goal for the next generation of poor.

Despite the gangs, gripping poverty and rot that seems to fester from within here, the Andranedas and Hermanos haven't given up trying to convert the slums.

An evangelical zeal fuels the campaign. Manny Hermano and other Couples for Christ members gather weekly in DuPage County homes for prayer meetings.

He can pray and work for the end of slums, Hermano says, because he believes in miracles.

"We don't see the poor, not from Lisle," he says. "But we believe one entire nation will be lifted from poverty."

When she reflects on her own staggering tour of the slums, Sally Andraneda knows she has found her mission.

"We have joy doing this," she says. "It is a completion of our lives. We felt the Lord was talking to us to just live a simple life to help our brothers and sisters at home."

IN PART 1:
• 'It breaks your heart'
• One man's fight to save the children
• Elgin firm's Manila venture
• More photos from part 1