In Pergasa, you breathe the unmistakable acrid smoke of smouldering garbage coughed up by fires that never go out. In Pergasa, there are thick clouds of flies, millions of flies humming their monotonous song of decay as they swarm about the mountains of garbage rising ten, fifteen, thirty feet into the air.
Catolino Trancy, his wife and nine children live off the dump. Near the entrance to their mud-floor shack, there is a pan with eight pigs and an oil drum filled above its rim with blood-stained bones. I asked Mr. Trancy why he collected these.
"There is a ... that skulls and bones."
"And how much money do you get for skulls and bones?"
"About seventy-five centavos a kilo."
There is a dumpster in front of Trancy's house that says "Donated to Olongapo city by the US navy". Another sign bears one of the slogans of a former mayor. It reads, "It's forbidden to be lazy in this city."
Some two hundred families live here in Pergasa. Chickens and dogs and rats can be seen running about. A little girl walks through the flattened cans and the bottle caps, dragging a plastic bag on a string or a sort of kite. She falls into the broken glass and ashes and doesn't cry.
In the Pergasa, the houses are of wood, tin and cardboard boxes that say things like "This side up" or "Fragile". There's a house with a faded green "Merry Christmas" sign, another that says "God bless you". There is irony here for journalists, but there is no electricity or basic services.
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