Democracy: A View From Manila’s Slums

I met Tita Comodaz six months ago, as she sat in the window of a cooperative store in the Manila slum district of Leveriza, selling dried fish, sugar and eggs.

Around us, Leveriza formed a maze of scrap-wood shanties with rusty metal roofs that houses 18,000 people, a block from a high-rise Sheraton. Fewer than half of the people enjoy running water or toilets. In the alleys, women squatted over soapy basins of dirty clothes, twisting and beating them clean. Shouting children, some naked and some clothed, ran aimlessly at play. A few families were boiling rice over outdoor fires.

My introduction to Tita came by way of Sister Christine Tan, a prominent Filipino nun who lives and works in Leveriza. She told Tita that I wanted to move in with a Leveriza family and asked if she had room. The solemn and nervous expression on Tita’s face betrayed her unease.

In deference to Sister Christine, she agreed to let me stay with them.

“Don’t cook him anything special,” Sister Christine said before leaving. “If he gets sick, too bad.”

In the months that followed, I slept on Tita’s floor, shared her meals and accompanied her and her neighbors to churches, schools, markets, political rallies, funerals and fiestas. About a third of Manila’s 8 million people live in places like Leveriza. I wanted to learn something about their lives, and the way they viewed their nation’s new democracy.

Materially, the change in government has changed little in Leveriza. About four out of five children still suffer from malnutrition. In Barangay Seven, where Tita lives, one infant died after being attacked by rats. And Leveriza’s poverty is far from the city’s most brutal.

But what was surprising about the demeaning poverty was that it had largely failed to produce a demeaned or desperate population.

By contrast, in many urban areas I’d visited in the United States, a less harsh, though still difficult, material poverty seems to have produced a more broken people--as seen in higher levels of violence, family disintegration, drug addiction and hopelessness.

What seemed noteworthy about Leveriza weren’t just the examples of individual dignity, but also the emphasis on community and country. The more I came to know Tita, the more she seemed to embody those virtues and stand as an example of what is most admirable in Leveriza.

Much of the credit for this public-mindedness belongs to the work of Leveriza’s Basic Christian Communities, small groups that meet for Bible studies and sponsor economic and political projects. In Leveriza, these groups have banded together into an organization known by the Filipino name Alay Kapwa, or “help your neighbor.”

The prevalence of the 3,000 to 5,000 Basic Christian Communities in the Philippines, and the controversy that has often surrounded them, makes the Leveriza example one with lessons for the country at large.

The organizing work in Leveriza began in 1979, with the arrival of Sister Christine and several other nuns. As members of the Good Shepherds, the nuns had trained as traditional social workers in the 1950s while studying in a Los Angeles convent. With the arrival of liberation theology in the 1960s, and martial law in 1972, they became increasingly active in human-rights advocacy, labor activism and other social-justice work.

Like most BCCs, Alay Kapwa originated with small Bible-study groups that sought to apply scriptural lessons to events in neighborhood and national life.

Later, its members started economic projects--making soap, knitting carpets, opening cooperative stores. Later still, the work of Alay Kapwa found a more overtly political expression as its members began attending rallies that denounced the Marcos dictatorship and the presence of the U. S. military bases.

In Leveriza, as elsewhere in the Philippines, many authority figures eyed the BCCs warily, accusing them of communist collaboration. One Leveriza barangay (district) captain, a part-time government official, raided a Bible study, confiscated its religious comics and threatened to arrest the participants. Other barangay officials and the parish priest resorted to a more subtle resistance that included denying the organization use of public facilities.

A Communist Party cadre active in Leveriza told me that he had in fact tried to use Alay Kapwa as a vehicle for agitation, but had encountered only minor success. He expressed respect for Sister Christine’s work, but accused her of having a reformist mentality that ignored the causes of poverty (a criticism she would deny).

Despite the opposition, Alay Kapwa now claims about 500 members, mostly women, who are active in countless projects. But its impact can’t be measured in the number of song contests sponsored or pounds of rice distributed. The real work of Alay Kapwa, as articulated by its members, lies in the transformation of personal values.

New values, unlike new roads or houses, are a subtle product, and it took me a number of months to appreciate what Alay Kapwa has meant to Tita.

At age 40, she is the eldest of 11 children born to a tenant farmer in the nearby province of Cavite. She left school after grade six and arrived in Manila at age 16, to begin work in a glove factory. She shared a room with a relative in Leveriza.

The neighborhood terrified her. Garbage and mud choked the alleys and washed inside when it rained. Rival gangs shot at each other with poison darts. The malicious gossip of her neighbors drove her inside her house and inside herself.

As Tita and her neighbors tell it, she succumbed to a life of isolation and bouts of anemia. Marriage at age 20 and three births in four years (two followed later) only compounded her sense of burden and completed her withdrawal. “I was very talkless,” she said.

In 1979 she began attending Alay Kapwa Bible studies, and her life slowly, almost imperceptibly, began to change--from submission toward questioning, from isolation toward involvement.

To be sure, when I arrived in Leveriza eight years later, much of her life remained harsh.

She arose as early as 4:30 a.m. to begin cooking the breakfast rice. There were times when she was still wringing the laundry dry until midnight.

With her husband, Emmet, gone for two years as a laborer in Saudi Arabia (where $350 a month more than tripled his local wage), Tita was left alone to care for five children, plus a nephew and brother-in-law who had come to Manila to study.

But clearly there was more to her life than loneliness and domestic drudgery.

There were eggs, for example.

As the purchasing agent for the 12 Alay Kapwa cooperative stores, Tita buys about 2,000 of them a week, carefully stacking them under a florescent light at night to protect them from rats.

The trust that the nuns and her neighbors show in asking her to handle hundreds of dollars in eggs and sugar each week is an ongoing source of both anxiety and pride in Tita’s life. She lives in terror of broken eggs and shattered trust.

In addition, Tita showed an impressive zeal in monitoring her country’s fragile return to democracy, and an eagerness to participate.

When the 1986 Constitutional Commission held a hearing on urban poverty, Alay Kapwa sent her to testify. (“Wow, the inside of the Congress is nice,” she said.)

When Namfrel (the National Movement for Free Elections) needed pollwatchers for the constitutional plebiscite in February, Tita spent a frightened day among the voting soldiers at Camp Villamoor Air Base, eyeing the ballot boxes in case of a theft attempt.

More than once I found her struggling to follow political reports in an English-language newspaper, with a Filipino-English dictionary in hand.

One of the most awkward moments between us came late one night when I suggested we eat at a nearby McDonald’s, the only restaurant open. Once inside, she fell silent, clearly disturbed. Then she began a polite, but earnest, series of questions about whether Americans owned the franchise and whether foreign corporations hurt the Philippine economy.

The range of Tita’s diverse concerns, and the richness of her life, reveals itself in a diary I gave her shortly after moving in.

Her excitement about the diary surprised me. “I have so many stories to tell about the things that happen to me every day,” she said. More surprising still, for a woman of little formal education and many time-consuming chores, she began taking the time to record them.

Months later she showed me some of her work. Her entries, jotted down in her Tagalog dialect, range from the price of dried fish to the funeral service she attended for the late Sen. Jose Diokno, a human-rights lawyer and acclaimed voice of Filipino nationalism.

Her writing emphasizes sacrifice and duty in a way that might make Diokno proud. After computing the egg accounts until late one night, she wrote, “Your body’s tired but the feeling is good because you’re serving your fellow man free without payment.”

A number of observers have commented that Corazon Aquino has succeeded in providing the Philippines with a president the country can take pride in. A corollary might apply to the work of Alay Kapwa: It is helping provide the president with a citizenry she needs and deserves.

For all the progress that Tita and others like her have made, a host of problems continue to plague Leveriza.

Fewer than a quarter of the men have steady work, by Sister Christine’s estimate. Too many sit idle, only to drink or fight.

Lives are still being lost prematurely to tuberculosis and other diseases. Vote-buying during the May 12 congressional elections, though diminished from elections past, showed the continued presence of both corruption and corruptibility.

At the Comodaz home, Tita’s husband returned from Saudi Arabia three months ago and has been unable to find work. With his savings almost gone, he is contemplating another two years abroad, separated from his family. Emmet, a gentle person, came home recently after job-hunting and began beating the wall in frustration.

The family lacks even the modest amount of money needed to keep their eldest daughter in public high school.

But last month, as the first summer rains were turning the squatter area again to mud and Tita was still defending her eggs against the rats, I asked her what she’d like people in the United States to know about life in Leveriza.

“Of course,” she said. “Its beautiful.”