“It’s a garbage dump, papa, as big as a mountain. And people live on it—they find their food in the garbage. They get their clothes in the garbage.”
When she was 11 or maybe 12, and living in the city of Dumaguete on the island of Negros near the center of the Philippine archipelago, Maria Santos had fallen hard for Jesus.
She’d gone to Mass since before she remembered; her father taught at the small college run by the Sisters of St. Paul, a French order, and since there was a primary school attached she’d grown up with nuns. But religion was mostly background noise till a young priest—an Irishman—had taken the parish youth group on their first trip to Manila, and after the cathedral and the zoo they’d visited Smokey Mountain, the endless landfill where tens of thousand of people subsisted on what the vast metropolis threw away.
There were, she knew even then, poor people in Negros too. But mostly they stayed out in the rural barangays and the coastal towns. If you were growing up on the campus of one of Dumaguete’s four colleges, with Girl Scout badges to earn, it was perfectly easy to go a week or a month without thinking about them. But harder once you’d smelled that garbage dump, and seen the families bent over all day picking through the scraps. Some of her classmates on the field trip had made fun of the ‘garbagemen,’ but Maria had just stared. Father Niall took them to the small church made of slabs of scavenged tin. A painting of Jesus hung on the back wall: Jesus standing in a garbage dump, the smoke from the always-smoldering fires wreathing his head. He looked so sad, in a way that had made Maria catch her breath, and that stayed in her mind.
“Father Niall said Jesus was sad because no one should have to live like that,” she told her father when she got back. “He said that some have too little because others have too much. He said it’s not what God wants. I asked him why God doesn’t change it and give them a good place to live, and he said because that’s our job.”
Forty years later Maria could still remember that smell, and the face on that painting, and the sense of Jesus that came with it. Jesus was kindness. He suffered the little children to come unto him. She spent the next three years raising money for the slum—first for Christmas presents and then, with the Girl Scout Council of the whole town, funds for a medical clinic. Before long she knew about bake sales and then about bank accounts and then about how to make sure the really popular girls were involved so that everyone would contribute. Father Niall went back to Ireland because the local government thought the farmer’s cooperative he’d set up in the mountains near Dumaguete was ‘communistic,’ but he stayed in touch with Maria, and soon the youth group from his parish in Dublin was sending money for the clinic too. The newspaper ran an article, and a picture of her wearing her Scout sash.
She could recall much more clearly what came next. In fact, she’d been thinking about it all week, since reading a not-very-good essay one of her students had written on the Filipino “people power” revolution. At 16 she’d gone back to visit Smokey Mountain, for a celebration of the new clinic. But that morning—a Sunday, with a Mass at the small chapel with the painting—she’d seen the men at the back of the service whispering to each other, and then starting to leave. When communion was done and people were walking away, the priest told her small group from Dumaguete the news:
“The celebration is cancelled. Ninoy’s been shot.”
They’d hurried to a small shack nearby, where a black-and-white tv was replaying the scene. Maria could barely see, and the replays were grainy anyway, but it was clear what had happened. Benigno Aquino, the leader of the opposition to the government, had flown back to Manila that day from exile in Boston, and as he set foot on the tarmac, with thousands watching, a gunman shot him in the head. Officials from the Marcos regime announced within minutes that the gunman was a communist but the people in Smokey Mountain just hooted at the tv. A communist had infiltrated the 1,000 police and military guarding the airport? Who riddled him with bullets seconds after he killed Ninoy?
Several days of martial law kept Maria on Smokey Mountain, unable to go back home to Negros. She stayed in a shack of a family that lived close to the church. It was clean-swept, and she found herself noticing the stench and the smoke less as the hours went on; still, to stay with strangers, two parents and four children sleeping in one room, was hard. She was embarrassed when they gave her the one real bed, and they were embarrassed when she insisted on helping the other kids carry buckets the three blocks to the standpipe, where they waited in line to fill them. To have no bathroom had been horrible, especially since no one told her what to do, but she followed one of the girls—Celina, her age—outside after dark. They lived, after all, in a dump.
For most of two days the family huddled around the small clock radio Celina had found in the trash months before, listening to Radio Veritas, the voice of the local diocese and the only independent media on the air. And on the third day they walked for hours to join two million others along the route of the funeral procession to Rizal Park. Maria’s father came to take her home the day after that, when martial law was lifted, and life resumed its normal course: high school, Girl Scouts, church. But not really normal. It surprised no one a few years later when Maria graduated college and joined the Apostolic Sisters of St. Francis, a small Filipino order of nuns.