Angel of the dump' saves Filipino kids

Jane Walker

Jane Walker picks her way barefoot through stinking black mud at Manila's Smokey Mountain dumpsite, an apparition among the myriad garbage collectors she wants to rescue from their wretched poverty.

"Why are you not in our school today?" she asked a malnourished child with a gaunt frame and bloodshot eyes.

"I told you I would be looking for my students. You should come even if you are late," she gently scolded the child, before giving him a tight embrace.

"I want you to come back to school and join us tomorrow," she said as she releases him to resume picking through a fresh hill of rubbish for items to salvage in exchange for a few pesos.

Walker, 43, a former executive with a British publishing house, has been a fixture at Smokey Mountain for more than a decade, searching for children to feed and send to school in what was initially a quest for personal salvation.

She first arrived in Manila as a tourist in 1996 expecting a Southeast Asian tropical paradise.

Instead, she stumbled into an overpopulated and chaotic city, where children were left to beg on the streets and homeless families lived in cardboard boxes in cemeteries.

Covering a sprawling bayside area near Manila's Tondo district, Smokey Mountain was an embarrassing symbol of the crushing poverty and social inequalities that still exist in the Philippines.

Smoke from accumulated methane gas regularly wafts from the site, covering parts of Manila in soot.

Much of the site has now been transformed into low-cost tenement housing for the poor. But clusters of families still squat on its fringes, and a large portion remains a permanent open dump for thousands of tons of daily refuse.

Three years after Walker's first visit, another dump in Manila's northern Payatas district—ironically called the "Promised Land"—triggered an avalanche that buried alive an estimated 200 garbage pickers.

"I was taking a taxi ride and we stumbled in this squatter area. I was shocked to find people living in such dire conditions and I knew I had to do something," Walker told Agence France-Presse as she walks barefoot in the dump, having given her boots to an elderly man with sores on his feet.

"I saw the children, there was a void where a smile should have been, emptiness in their eyes," she said. "I had a garden shed back home which was a mansion compared to where these people were living in."

With the images she saw haunting her, Walker returned to Britain and set up the Philippine Christian Foundation.

Her transformation and zeal worried friends, and alienated some who chided her for throwing away a career she had worked hard to build.

Walker eventually quit her publishing job and took on three others to save more money.

Her personal life took a tumultuous turn after her partner left her following their birth of their son. As her savings dwindled, Walker packed her bags and relocated to Manila to be closer to what she called her "other children."

"I had enough of the fast cars, the night life. I had it all. I had taken so much in life that it was time to give back," Walker said, adding that she had always felt an "emptiness" despite her success.

Her foundation converted an old government warehouse near Smokey Mountain into a school offering basic elementary education to children of garbage pickers as well as vocational training for their parents.

Running the program has not been easy—the monsoon rains bring foul-smelling floods, while volunteers try to protect the food from marauding rats.

Mercifully, volunteers are not in short supply and Walker's vision has spread to the point that the foundation now employs dozens of teachers and health workers. It has also been attracting a lot of attention from potential donors.

"She is an angel around here," says senior teacher Filemon Jubta, who left a government-run school to help out.

He said about 500 children are currently enrolled in the school. Books and supplies are free, but they have to make do with near-spartan accommodation.