The poor and the dead: Strange bedfellows in Philippines
MANILA — Emmalyn Ramos’ home has spectacular views of the Philippine capital’s skyline, if you don’t mind the human bones scattered outside her door. The poor and the dead have little choice but to mingle together in a graveyard in the northern Manila port district of Navotas, one of the world’s most densely populated areas behind only a few Indian cities. “We would like to live elsewhere,” Ramos, a 20-year-old pregnant, unwed mother of two, told AFP as she fed her children inside a shanty made of plastic sheets, bamboo and bits of wood. “But we were born here and we grew up here. I don’t think we will be able to get out of here.” Ramos’ tent is one of several pitched precariously atop a row of concrete tombs, themselves piled five-high, like shipping containers, at the crowded Navotas Municipal Cemetery. Ramos and her extended family of 12, plus her jobless boyfriend, are one of about 600 families in the cemetery compound, a community ironically called Bagong Silang (Newborn). The residents of the cemetery sleep, cook, eat, bathe, and wash clothes atop the tombs, and life can look grisly for an outsider. There are no toilets or running water, garbage piles up among the tombs and the area is infested with cockroaches that particularly like to parade across the tombs at night. Source: The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100629com3.html |
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