| We were set to visit a community once known as Smokey Mountain, so-called for the methane gas that perennially enveloped the place, the smell of decay a constant reminder of the surrounding rottenness. The international community knew of the pictures of emaciated men and women who scavenged barefooted through the city’s dumped garbage, like forgotten children bounded by the systemic putrefaction.
I requested a friend to organize the visit, for such exposure can bring about an understanding of the injustices in society. And in these times where crimes are done with impunity, a comprehension of the roots of structural iniquity is necessary.
So I asked you, ever hopefully, to come with me, as I did many times before. And you answered the same answer to all my previous invitations – “I cannot.”
It was a dangerous place, you say, pointing that thieves, pickpockets and all sorts of criminals roamed the area. It will not be a pleasant experience, you argue, because it was the kind of environment that gave you the “creeps.”
Despite all my resolve, I was caught off guard when you exclaimed how complicated my demands have become, how radical I have grown since I joined Kulê. I wonder, though, if you knew me well enough that you can make such judgments.
You, of all people, should know by now my family’s history; the hospital you dream of working for is the same hospital where my Lolo learned to practice beyond the confines of material gain. This is the same lesson I fervently hope you will imbibe every time I ask you to accompany me.
Yet again you refused me.
You were right in one aspect, though. The visit was not a pleasant experience. For how can the sights of suffering delight one’s eye? Instead, the experience was unnerving, stirring a restlessness that discarded the illusive comforts of my everyday reality.
Just six decades ago, Smokey Mountain was a peaceful fishing village named Barrio Magdaragat where waters were clean and the harvest, plentiful. Yet, like the many poignant ironies that characterize this country, it was the Department of Public Service that determined the community’s eventual ruin. Financed by World Bank, the Tondo Urban Development Project started by depositing piles of trash into the sea until the pollution expunged all traces of marine life. The blue water turned murky, a premonition of dark forthcomings. Today, we know the village as an archetype of the nation’s urban slums; the Barrio Magdaragat fishermen are now the Smokey Mountain squatters.
As part of Ramos’s Philippines 2000 Program, cheap housing projects were built for Smokey Mountain dwellers, alongside assurances of jobs and area restoration. The Smokey Mountain Development and Reclamation Project was granted to R2 Builders, owned by Reghis Romero II who is now implicated in the cash hand-outs scandal. Smokey Mountain was renamed Paradise Heights, a deceptive name for cramped five-floor buildings without ventilation and running water.
The mountain of garbage is now gone, buried underneath the cement that form the shaky foundation of the buildings. Most of the dwellers have no permanent source of income besides collecting trash; the area still retains the suffocating odor of decay. It is now 2007, but the promises of Philippines 2000 have yet to materialize.
These images haunt me, even as I sleep beside you.
I am certain you will pass the National Medical Admissions Test this December 9; you are one of the nation’s most brilliant. I can only hope that your eyes may awaken not just to the physical ailments that impair Filipinos, but more importantly, to the structural and systemic infirmities that damned them to their unforgiving conditions. For true doctors do not only mend the body, they also strive to heal the social cancers that keep their people incapacitated.
*I write this, not with condemnation, but with hope, and love.
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# Philippine Collegian |
