Spaced out in Manila
I always thought it was India or China that’s teeming with people. We recently had a glimpse of hard life in overpopulated India via Oscar award winning “Slumdog Millionaire.” I remember a scene of a young Jamal Malik – the story’s central figure – waiting for his turn to use a public toilet. That was a powerful portrayal of life in Mumbai’s slums, so gory that I could almost smell the septic pit while watching the movie.
I thought it couldn’t get worse anywhere else but in reality it could. In our very own country bits and pieces of “slumdog” are mirrored in many of our growing cities, particularly the nation’s capital where 11 to 20 million people settle, formally or otherwise.
Too many people
Unreported World, a UK-based program features the world’s most dangerous and desperate places, among which is Manila, a city grappling with its ballooning population and the problems it poses. In its documentary aired last Oct. 15, 2010, Manila is described as one of the most populous places on earth with too many people sharing a small land area.
India with its soaring birth figures has vast territories so there’s enough land for everyone. So does China. But Manila – with its population of about 20 million – barely has breathing space within its 636-square kilometer domain.
But the claustrophobic population density has never been a deterrent for people to adventure in Manila as thousands continue to relocate in the National Capital Region each year. This city is their land of dreams, where work, opportunity and modern conveniences abound.
The downside of resilience
People from the provinces are lured by the promise of a “good life” so to Manila they take a chance only to come to grips with hard life lurking beneath the urbanity.
Yet they dream and hope for the best in Manila, never leaving it despite overwhelming odds. Besides, the countryside is not necessarily teeming with life-changing opportunities. This is why the government’s “Balik Probinsya Program” which encourages the urban poor to go back to the provinces, failed.
There’s also the proverbial Filipino resiliency and sheer fatalism that are helping the destitute thrive. We “make do” (at times, to a fault) as we live by heart the adage, “kung maiksi ang kumot, matutong mamaluktot,” (learn to crouch if blanket is short).
No other mindset aptly describes why illegal settlers persist in cramped spaces in Manila’s vacant lots, estuaries, underpasses, cliffs, embankments and other geo-hazards. They flourish anywhere even where human settlement is impossible. “Puwede na, bahala na,” they’d reason.
Manila as seen through an outsider’s lens
Unreported World Reporter Jenny Kleeman in her video blog describes Manila as one that is stretched to breaking point due to population boom.
Manila’s primary schools operate in shifts to teach the thousands of children in overcrowded classrooms while its graveyards have no more room for the dead. Manila’s case of overpopulation serves as a warning to other fast-growing, poor nations.
Kleeman’s team sought out Manila’s poorest for their stories. At the Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital, Kleeman described the maternity wards as one that “operated on an industrial scale” with four mothers and their babies sharing a bed while nurses patrol to make sure no mother “sleeps on their babies and suffocates them.”
First taste of poverty
The Fabella hospital itself is a microcosm of overpopulation. Aside from hosting mass births, it is a place where a child born to a poor family comes face to face with a world where resources are meager and life is guaranteed, difficult. In their first beds, newborns have a taste of their cramped lives ahead.
The team also spent a night at the Baseco compound in Tondo to get a feel of life in this half a square kilometer slum area which is home to about 90,000 people.
The documentary states, a third of Manila’s population live in similar squatter colonies where women bear and raise many children and where “there is no sanitation and families live around rubbish.”
No space for the dead
The booming population in the Philippines’ bigger cities does not just eat up on real estate resources for the living. Unreported World says there is even no space for the dead.
At a cemetery in Manila “as many as 80 funerals take place everyday.” The poor can lease a tomb (if they cannot afford to buy one) but the dead can still be “evicted” if the family doesn’t make “rent.” The remains are exhumed while a new “tenant” takes over. These evictions happen mostly in cheap, “high rise” tombs – an innovation in the absence of burial spaces on land.
People – dead or alive – also jostle space in cemeteries that are not spared from illegal settlers as mortality can never keep up with exponential births and the incessant urban migration.
Another nudge for Reproductive Health
Poverty, disease, crime and constant threats of eviction often hound populations in shanty colonies in the Philippines whose government Kleeman reports, does not endorse contraceptives for fear of losing the Catholic vote.
The government, the church and even the poor continue to be indifferent to population control. It is more apparent in recent debates over the Reproductive Health Bill, which the Philippines continues to dilly dally on, with grave consequences.
Meantime our population problems go from bad to worse right before our eyes. The lack of definitive government policies on population control is now even a hindrance to the fulfillment of our Millennium Development Goals.
As the Philippines’ population story is shared to the world, other countries are expected to see just how critical population control is to a better life quality. Sadly for now, Unreported World’s episode “The Philippines: A City With Too Many People” remains every nation’s lesson, but ours.*
