Payatas

Today we travelled to Payatas. We met with Edwin, an activist with Cadamay. He advocates on behalf of the people of Payatas who were the victms of a "garbageslide" in 1990. Most of you are probably not familiar with a "garbageslide". Allow me to illustrate. Imagine that you are living on the outskirts of a major city. This city then decides to turn your backyard (and I do mean backyard) into a garbage dump. And they stack the refuse so dangerously high that, when the seasonal monsoons blow through, a wall of wet trash crushes and kills hundreds of your neighbors. Now you are familiar with the expression "garbageslide." Here is Edwin explaining how to properly stack garbage in terrace formation so that it doesn't fall on and kill people.



This is the condition of the current dumpsite - not two hundred feet from the backyard of a Payatas resident. The white letters say "WELCOME PGMA." PGMA = President Gloria Macapalgal, the president of the Philippines. Despite their plight the residents of Payatas are not without a sense of humor.



This is a little girl whom I chatted with in a mixture of my bad Tagalog and her broken English. I didn't catch her name. She was too busy playing in the rain.