Dumpsite Project

The Philippines has the world's 12th largest population, 88 million people. 47% of its people live on less than $2 per day, and 15% live on less than $1 per day. 40% live below the nationally set poverty line. Although you can get by on this type of salary here, you don't have much left over for things like medicine, school, even electricity and water.

While I am looking at Wikipedia, I see that 1.1 billion people in the world live on less than $1 per day, and 2.7 billion live on less than $2 per day! I am guessing that these poverty statistics have contributed to the job type known as "scavenging".

Scavengers can be found all over the world, again mostly in developing countries. They go to garbage dumps and pick through the garbage, mostly finding recyclable materials to sell as scrap. A quick internet search shows that there are estimated hundreds of thousands of scavengers in Latin America, and in Manila the 10,000 scavengers have been organized into unions!

VFV's "Dumpsite Project" is located at the Tacloban City Dump in a far flung baranguay (neighborhood) called New Kawayan.

There are 29 kids at the dumpsite who help their families scavenge for recylable materials. At the most they earn 30 pesos a day, which is equivalent to about 70 cents. Some of them scavenge to help buy food for their families, and some just to keep themselves in school! Imagine an American child running around the garbage mountains just to save the $15 per year necessary to register and get school supplies!!

The dumpsite project was started last year by Wim Wim, the Center Coordinator at VFV. She has raised money for school supplies, donated used clothing, done periodic feedings, and set up activity sessions for the kids, to add some enrichment away from the harsh environment of the dump.

She has already managed to get school supplies to all of the kids. This has kept 7 of them out of the dump.

Next week we are holding a fundraiser concert, Rock the Community. Most of the money earned will go towards this project.

Wim Wim's mom, Nanay Lillibelle, who works at the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), is partnering with her daughter on this project. Her department is working to set up the adult scavengers with a composting business, just outside the dump. Little environmentalist me has been interested in this project and I have been accompanying her to these meetings.

These are some pictures Christian took while we were there one day.









This is Lucio Vivero, the nearby school that many of the dumpsite children attend. It has been "adopted" in a different program that VFV runs called "Adopt a School". The school is paired with a foreign donor. For $75, the children at the school receive basic school supplies for the year, like paper and pens, which you can imagine they would have a lot more trouble learning to write without.

We visited on the week before classes started. You can see the children are already there with the teacher, helping to clean the classroom!! Again, I just can't imagine something like that happening in the US, children volunteering to come to school the week before school begins to help their teacher clean up!