The slum behind the Sheraton; a Philippine struggle between Marcos loyalists, Marxist youth, and a woman with 2,000 eggs in her living room.

• Author: DeParle, Jason

The Slum Behind the Sheraton

"Ask him if he eats rice,' she said. "Ask him if he has a girlfriend. You ask him if he wants to marry a Filipina!'

The inquiry began outside a cooperative food store in the Manila slum district of Leveriza. As dusk fell on the neighborhood's slouching homes and busy alleys, Tita Comodaz sat in the storefront window, selling dried fish, sugar, and eggs. We had just met, and an excited neighbor was feeding her questions.

With each of my answers, the neighbor dissolved in laughter and planted a plump elbow in Tita's side. But Tita looked somber. After all, it was her house, and I was asking to move in.

Our introduction came through Sister Christine Tan, a Filipino nun who lives and works in Leveriza. She told Tita that I was looking for a family to live with and asked if she had room. If not, she said, just pass him on to someone else. "And don't cook him anything special,' she said, walking away. "If he gets sick, too bad.'

My conversation with Tita poked along for about two hours, slowed by the gaps in her English and the chasms in my Tagalog. Yes, I eat rice, I said. No, I'm not married. And I came to Leveriza, I explained, to try to learn what life there is like. (I tried to imagine a Filipino squatter serving up a similar explanation when arriving uninvited on the doorstep of, say, my parent's north Florida condominium.) Early that evening, over a plate of mungo beans and rice, Tita agreed to take me in.

For large portions of the next eight months, I slept on Tita's floor, shared her meals, and accompanied her and her neighbors to markets, churches, funerals, schools, Bible studies, and political rallies. I learned to stomach the feathers and yolk of incubated duck eggs, a local delicacy, and to stifle a squeal when mice skittered across the dinner table.

I got acquainted with the neighborhood's Marcos loyalists and communist cadres. But the person I got to know best was Tita, an unlikely activist whose politics had her keeping watch both on ballot boxes and on the co-op's eggs.

About a third of Manila's eight million people live in squatter areas like Leveriza. I wanted to learn something about their lives and the way they viewed their nation's grope towards democracy.

A surprising diversity

Squatter areas can be found across most of Manila, ranging from a few displaced families to communities of tens of thousands. Only a few American-style subdivisions, with guards and gates, have escaped the intrusion. Elsewhere, shanties even dot the periphery of expensive hotels and walled residential compounds. At an art exhibition soon after my arrival I was introduced as someone who worked with squatters. "Oh good,' said one wealthy landlord. "I wonder if you can help us get rid of ours.'

These squatter settlements would pose difficult problems for even the best-intentioned government. And during his 21 years of rule, President Ferdinand Marcos seldom had the best intentions. While the Marcoses poured public money into the high-rise hotels and casinos that line Manila Bay, the only government projects offered to most squatters were the whitewashed walls that obscured them from sight. Along Manila's South Superhighway, the walls have begun to crumble, leaving incongruous cement arches to frame the sprawl of shanties.

The city's most notorious encampment is its main trash dump, Smokey Mountain in Tondo-- named for its constantly smoldering acres, which span perhaps 25 football fields. About 15,000 people reside upon the heap of refuse and eke out a living by picking from the muck bones, bottle caps, and other salvageable scraps. Squatters in every sense, they don't even own their trash but relinquish it to middleman concessionaires who operate a lucrative industry in partnership with local politicians.

On Easter Sunday, I attended a sunrise service there. In the predawn darkness, two candle-bearing processions snaked down the dump's broad slopes, carrying statues. One held the veiled Virgin and the other carried the crucified Christ. They met under a canopy where a young girl dressed as an angel lifted the mourning Virgin's veil. Fireworks exploded and the crowd cheered: Christ has Risen! Christ has Risen! My companion, a Filipino newspaper publisher, began to cheer as well. "Look at this,' he said. "Faulkner was right: "Man will not merely endure; he will prevail!''

In a subsequent homily, the parish priest reminded the scavengers that Calvary, too, was a garbage dump. Living on Smokey Mountain, he said, gave them special knowledge of the agony Christ suffered and the joy His redemption promised. A small statue beside the chapel depicted Jesus as a scavenger, toting a wicker basket full of scraps.

While Smokey Mountain can be seen and smelled from afar, Leveriza (LEH-ver-EE-sah) lies tucked away like a secret in the city center. Except for those who live there, few passing nearby would guess its existence. I certainly didn't until I met Sister Christine, though during my first few months in Manila I often rode the elevated train that passes on its eastern edge and shopped in the mall that borders to the west. When I swam in the pool at the high-rise Sheraton adjacent to the mall, like most foreign visitors I remained oblivious to the neighboring geography. The two-story buildings that line the streets along Leveriza's perimeter give no hint of the chaotic maze within, home to 18,000 people.

Leveriza is one of the city's oldest squatter areas. Some of Tita's neighbors could recall childhoods spent there before World War II, when it was still a mudflat. In the early 1980s, a minor upgrading program financed by the World Bank cemented some of the alleys and added some drainage. Though the drains easily clog and the runoff spills into homes sunk lower than the sidewalk, Leveriza residents still appreciate the project. My intentionally vague questions about how Leveriza had changed in the course of their lives usually brought a very specific response: it's less muddy now.

It isn't less crowded. A typical morning would find the alleys outside Tita's home filled with women squatting over basins of dirty clothes, twisting and beating them clean. Unemployed teens and men spent hours in the alleys playing a game that resembles pool, using checkers instead of balls. Some simply sat, petting fighting cocks. In front of their homes, women set up stands where they fried fish and bananas and stirred pots of vegetables.

Each morning, a Sikh trader and moneylender would pass from home to home. At Tita's he collected 15 cents a day as payment on an $11 debt she owed after buying some pants; she could have bought the same pair for $7 in the market if she'd had the money all at once. People in Leveriza said the Sikh smelled bad and called him the "BOOM-bye,' a Filipinized pronunciation of Bombay, where they said he came from. As in most of the Philippines, children far outnumbered the rest of us. A few years ago a doctor examined several hundred Leveriza children as part of a feeding program. She found about 80 percent of them malnourished.

The uniform chaos within Leveriza can disguise what is actually a surprising amount of economic diversity. Some Leveriza residents live in cement block homes with running water, comfortable couches, and even telephones. Others live in one-room scrapwood shacks, six or eight to the room. A few even lack electricity. While about 90 percent of Leveriza residents have televisions, fewer than a third have toilets, a pattern typical of Manila's poorer neighborhoods. Those without plumbing defecate on newspapers and toss them into a nearby creek, jokingly referring to the discarded bundles as "flying saucers.'

Tita lived in one of Leveriza's nicer homes. When I arrived, her husband, Emmet, was in the final months of a two-year work contract in Saudi Arabia. He earned $350 a month cleaning a swimming pool at a Jeddah sports club, triple what his previous wage had been. His earnings had allowed him to expand his home from the single room he bought 20 years earlier to a sturdy four-room structure. One room formed a separate apartment, rented to Tita's cousin for $15 a month. Tita, her two daughters, and her two youngest sons slept in an upstairs bedroom. Another four of us--including a nephew and a brother-in-law who'd come to Manila from the provinces to study--slept on the living room floor. Tita kept a fluorescent light burning all night in the kitchen to scare away the rats, a tactic that met with only limited success. The house contained a toilet.

Like Emmet, who returned from Saudi Arabia during my stay, some people in Leveriza had regular jobs. They worked as drivers, carpenters, cooks, and cops. One of Tita's neighbors swept the floors at the presidential palace. Another gave tennis lessons. At the other end of the scale, one section of Leveriza consisted mostly of streetcleaners and scavengers. I joined one of them, 49-year-old Mariano Ordista, on one of his nightly forays. We headed out at dusk, with Mariano's eight-year-old son, Bong, in proud accompaniment, happy as any son for the chance to join his father at work. We stopped a few blocks away at Gotamko Street, under a sign that said "Don't throw your garbage here' and threatened violators with at $50 fine.

As harsh as Leveriza's poverty could be, it did not seem to have produced a correspondingly demeaned or desperate population. I found less violence than I expected, and less than I had seen in blighted areas of New Orleans when I worked there as a reporter. The same could be said for family disintegration, drug addiction, and general hopelessness.

"What can you say about our place?' was the standard Leveriza refrain. I'd heard that question posed before in housing projects in New Orleans. But in New Orleans, the tenants expected a shocked and sympathetic reply. They wanted to hear me voice outrage at their crumbling ceilings and broken windows, or the sewage stopped up in their courtyards...