Inside the world’s largest slum where four million people live in squalid shacks in Manila
THIS is what life is like inside the world’s largest slum in the Philippines where more than four million people live in squalid shacks and face fires, crime and deadly toxic fumes.
Incredible photographs show hard up residents struggling to survive in makeshift homes surrounded by piles of rubbish and streams of polluted brown water.
Dilapidated buildings stretch for miles across vast shanty towns in the metropolitan area of the capital city Manila.
Locals face daily struggles as their homes are threatened by fires in the 32 degree summer heat and they scavenge through rubbish to earn just $1.70 a day.
Heartbreaking images show families weeping by charred structural remains where their properties once stood.
In other snaps, Filipino children can be seen desperately trying to salvage materials from piles of ash.
A third of the enormous city’s population are understood to be living in the cramped and dirty slums.
SHOCKING SHANTY SLUMS
Local Jayaan Cabiog, 37, had her life rocked when the dump she used to work at was forced to close down after a landslide of garbage killed 300 people.
With her husband behind bars for drug possession, she has to take care of her three children on her own in the squalid Payatas slum, located some 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) to the northeast of Manila.
The landfill’s toxic fumes killed one of her sons when he was only four months old.
But Jayaan has no other option than to continue rummaging through the trash to scrape together a tiny wage.
In the slums that are dependent on garbage dumpsites, residents often fool hunger with “pagpag,” a broth made out of leftover scraps found among the trash.
Nearby in Tenemen Jennet Katipunan, 40 lives with her large huge family in one of 27 social housing buildings.
RUBBISH, FUMES AND FIRE
Some 600 families – triple the space’s capacity – are crammed into the slum, which suffers flaking facades, leaks, broken stairs, rusty railings, overflowing drains.
Shacks have been built over the rooftops and people have built fragile extensions to their apartments that hang over the central patio areas.
Around 18 people are living currently in Jennet’s small apartment that initially housed just herself, three siblings and parents.
Her eldest sister, pregnant again at 41, already has ten children and is living along with her husband in the original accommodation.
Absolutely nothing could be saved from the flames, only what I was wearing. The fire spread very fast.
Local Fire Victim
Their parents, now elderly, and her siblings live in an extension constructed on the rooftop.
Elsewhere, embedded among modern Manila skyscrapers in one of the 16 cities that make up the city is Quezon, an illegal settlement is home to some 5,000 families. It once housed 20,000.
Locals claims construction companies have been burning down their properties to make way for new builds.
One resident, who now lives outdoors without a roof over his head with his wife, four children and four grandchildren, said: “Absolutely nothing could be saved from the flames, only what I was wearing. The fire spread very fast.”
most read in world news
In northwestern Manila, on the other side of Pasig river, which acts almost as an invisible border between the rich and the poor, is the sprawling district of Tondo, home to some 700,000 people.
It is on of the most densely populated areas in the world with an average of 80,000 people per square mile.
Urban poverty is the most hostile aspect of a problem that affects 21 percent of the 106 million people living in the Philippines, according to the 2018 data released by the Philippine Statistics Authority.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368. You can WhatsApp us on 07810 791 502. We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours.