Eddie was a little boy I met on Smokey Mountain on Good Friday 1986. Smokey Mountain was the Manila garbage dump situated in barangay Tondo, Manila. All day, every day, garbage trucks unloaded their cargo of rubbish on top of the “mountain” and the residents scavenged among this garbage for their livelihood. In the hot months the mountain smoldered and little fires would break out because of the heat generated. In the wet months there were less fires but the dump was a morass of stench.
Not just anyone could walk into Smokey Mountain to have a “look and see”. The residents had their own dignity and their structures; permission to enter this enclave had to gained by those from outside who wanted to experience firsthand how they lived and how they wrestled a subsistence livelihood from the smoking hill of garbage. When I went there I lied about who I was, if they knew I was a priest they would have been too ashamed to invite me to live with them for a few days. Hence, I went incognito with a cover story, as an exchange teacher from Australia.
At this time it was not just the garbage that generated heat. Another form of heat was rising among the residents as the government mooted plans to relocate the residents to the “field of toilets” as it was called, a place on the far outskirts of Manila where there was clean air and no garbage. Small cement slabs had been laid as flooring for small houses and each had a little toilet. However the garbage was not going with them. We might consider that a blessing, but the garbage was their livelihood and there was no alternative employment anywhere near the field of toilets. Nor were there schools or shops. Nor were there houses, they would have to build these themselves, as they had in Tondo. Where would they scavenge the material for houses if there was no garbage?
The plan, eventually enforced, was integral to the Beautification Plan of the Governor of Metro Manila, Imelda Marcos. In 1986 many – but not all – of the residents were organizing to resist the relocation. Among the residents who favoured the plan were government agents and informers, people who sowed discord and sought to intimidate. This was the further source of heat within Smokey Mountain.
The couple I stayed with for the two days and nights had three small children. Eddie was the oldest at ten years though to look at would appear as only six or seven. As did his parents, Eddie scavenged Smokey Mountain on a daily basis. His life was violent upon him, it was an ugly existence. When he reached out and held my hand in his I felt the woundedness that was his life. I also felt the very real physical wound on his hand. It too was ugly and though it was against all the rules before I left I pressed his parents to take some money to pay for antibiotic medicine to treat Eddie’s hand.
With his wounded hand on this mountain of suffering Eddie was for me a symbol of the Christ nailed to his cross.
Two years passed before I returned to Smokey Mountain, driven by the need to see how Eddie was. By that time the situation was dire for the opponents of relocation and I could not find Eddie nor his parents and other siblings. Their house, as they called it, was gone, swallowed up by the mountain. At night when I laid out the straw mat – or banig – on the floor to sleep, my head touched one wall and my feet the other. It was no palace. I wandered around for a while, not asking questions, but waiting until someone recognized me from those two years past. There were few words spoken, but it was confirmed that Eddie and his youngest sibling had died of sickness and his parents with their second child had gone somewhere. Hopefully God knows where.
Eddie of the fires
In the dim light of evening
The fires break out on
The smoldering slope of
The hill of garbage
There walks little Eddie
Scavenging fork in his
Child’s hands
Wounded into ugliness by
The savage thrusts of his
Impoverished existence
Eddie of the smoking mountain
Eddie of the fires
Life extinguished daily
Smothered
Burnt out by
Flame smoke stench and
The radical cruelty
Of being abandoned to
Violence
All his night-filled days
Yet Eddie
You took in your wounded hand
Mine unscarred
I felt the fire of life
In your touch
As though I held the nailed hands
Of that other Man
Of history and life
Together we stood on the
Smoking ruins of another Calvary
I was consecrated
May 1986
