To spend a night at the cemetery sounds like a teenage prank, but this sort of thing has nothing to do with juvenile kidding in the cemetery of Cementerio del Norte.

This burial ground is not your average final resting place for it is not populated by the dead alone – very alive and breathing squatters roost among the tombstones and mausoleums. Among them are gravediggers, caretakers of tombs and other official nine-to-fivers for whom the city has allowed housing in the burial site, but most of them have no work and no place else to go.

Some estimates say there are close 10 000 people living among the dead. When we visited the site we talked to several dwellers, some of them residents of the cemetery for 15 years now, who all were in opinion that the number is not that high. They said there are approximately 300 families living in the cemetery.

For odd jobs, cemetery dwellers don’t have to pay for their “house”, electricity or water. The house is often a self-made shack or discarded mausoleum, where the relatives of the deceased have stopped visiting – apartment tomb, if you will.

If they thought of living among the dead men gives you heebie-jeebies, there are no ghosts here, the tomb dwellers assure. Only bones. The people living here can not afford to be afraid or superstitious. But that doesn’t mean they don’t believe in higher power.

“It helps a lot if you have faith for all the things you do,” one of the tomb dwellers told us. “I have faith to survive. If you have hope, you will live, if you don’t have hope, you will die.”

]]> http://www.madventures.tv/blog/2010/07/16/life-with-the-lifeless/feed/ 0 http://www.madventures.tv/blog/2009/10/08/the-warden-threw-a-party-in-the-county-jail/ http://www.madventures.tv/blog/2009/10/08/the-warden-threw-a-party-in-the-county-jail/#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:03:03 +0000 Antti Pesonen http://www.madventures.tv/blog/?p=209

6553 known murders a year in country of 90.5 million and relatively big in corruption, the Philippines is still certainly better than its reputation and truly cleaning its crime rate numbers, if the statistics are to be trusted.

By comparison, for example the United States loses to the Philippines in almost every possible crime category per capita.

But we were not in Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center for the statistics, but to witness a phenomenon that originated in this facility.

At this counting, the original upload of inmates re-enacting Michael Jackson’s Thriller has had 33,820,768 views in YouTube.

Meeting the prisoners and the director of the facility, who had set the whole thing in motion was quite eye opening.

According to the director, this prison has no inmates who wallow in self-pity – he was quite proud of the fact that the CPDRC prisoners have high self-esteem. If you make the prison hell, you create demons. His wish is to release angels back to the society.

Apparently, disco dancing is the way to make seraphs out of the most evil of men.

We were allowed freely among these hardened men, many of them rapists and murderers. No one monitored what the prisoners said to us. The conversations were very relaxed and we had no reason to suspect what we were told.

I guess this time we were the cynics, for the prisoners’ reaction to dancing was overwhelmingly positive. We weren’t expecting that. They did not view the re-enactments as punishment.

Some of the energy the men would usually channel into either fighting amongst themselves or solitary apathy was now routed in to strict choreography, high energy dance steps and togetherness.

Many of them truly believed dancing made them better men.

Not necessarily angels, just men who had been given a chance in a system that wasn’t about to spit them out the same as they came in.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, once again, big hand for the Dancing Prisoners of CPDRC!

We were crossing over the river Pasig, when the smell hit our nostrils.

The Jeepney driver didn’t seem to mind. He smiled at our discomfort and slowed down enough for us too see clearly the “river” below, the narrow stream in the midst of the Manila’s poorer neighbourhoods. Here and there the river was not much more than sludge of discarded plastic floating in industrial and household waste.

“They call it the dead river,” our driver said.

In the 90’s, the whole river was declared completely lifeless. The most problematic points of this waterway have become biohazardous dwelling place for thousands of Manilas homeless. The government is trying to revive the river that is constantly struggling to survive in the middle of Manila metro area.

We continue our journey in silence.

Once again, our nostrils sense we have arrived before our eyes do. Soon the eyes pick it up too. The air is hard to breathe and the smell makes the water rise into your eyes.

We arrive in Montalban dumpsite. And we have no way of getting in. The armed guards make sure of that. Too much bad publicity and no need for two nosy Finns to add some more.

So we move on. Our next stop is Payatas, another dumpsite. Another set of guards. This time we take a chance. Money changes hands. Understanding is reached.

We prepare our cameras and consider ourselves lucky, until we see what waits us behind the gates of the landfill.

Hundreds of hunched figures shift through the rubbish. What at first gander looks like a flock of gulls, turns out to be plastic bags whirling high in the wind. The birds do come, but only in tides, as if they have to go and get some fresh air every once in a while, to gain some energy to join the damned who are prodding the mountains of waste in hope of finding something recyclable and therefore, sellable.

In the United States alone from 380 billion disposable plastic bags only 1 percent is recycled. And all that is just a tip of the iceberg compared to plastic waste used in bottles and other containers, wrappers etc. Then there’s the rest of the world…

What was just a nightmare prediction when our generation were still children, has become reality: world is drowning in plastic.

Here in the Payatas wastelands, small children scavenge trough this trash, searching for recyclable junk like it was gold. Young men and women join them, for many this is the only way to make a living. We see old people at it too.

On occasion, these high piles of garbage are known to collapse and crush people underneath them.

Most of the people working here also live at the site.

Imagine all the waste you produce daily and do not even give a second thought to. Now imagine living in the middle of all that waste, trying to make your living out of that waste.

It is a sad sight, but when we talk to these people, they have a clear sense of what keeps them going.

It’s the work.

It’s what makes them feel like human beings.

Almost two weeks ago we got word that Payatas and Montalban were places hit hard by the typhoon Ondoy, which brought down month’s worth of rainwater in mere hours, resulting in devastating flash floods and landslides.

This is no time to be eloquent – it’s just so fucking unfair. These people live in shit and then this thing hits them.

You want to do something about it? Here.

At this count, 246 people died and 38 others went missing in the catastrophe.

R & T

Raised as a typical Finnish Lutheran who grew up to be a typical non-practicing Scandinavian protestant who goes to church only to attend weddings and funerals, I never thought I would find myself in a situation straight out of a Mel Gibson movie.

I am talking about the mile-long walk to symbolic Via Dolorosa to the equally symbolic Mount Cavalry in the town of Cutud in Philippines. We were told some other western journalist had tried this before but halfway through the trip chose to keep life, sanity and most of his blood to himself.

I was not quite sure what I was getting myself into.

First, my back was opened with implement called Burdios, a sort of concrete comb spiked with shards of glass. Yes, it hurts, thank you for asking. My head was covered with a hood and a crown of thorns.  I was given a whip made of bamboo and rope.

I am joining the rows of men about to undergo this ritual, each for their individual reasons. It’s usually done as penance for sins and I am just mentally making a list of my own transgressions of divine law, but have to give up as it is go time, entirely too soon for my liking.

I take the first step and start lashing my already bleeding back.

Self-flagellation is a weird thing. First you try to keep the licking light, but soon you realize the harder you whip, more numb your wounds become. So you give it all you got.

I walk and realize after only a few meters, that I’m bathing not only in my own blood but my own sweat too.

Now, when I say it was hot, I realize that word has suffered a bit of an inflation in English language. It doesn’t quite cover the temperatures I was facing on this little stroll. Infernal, hellish, blistering, baking, perhaps even broiling all do a much better job describing the conditions.

I walked the mile barefooted too, and the ground is scorching. So the soles of my feet were burning, adding a piquant little touch to this torment.

I’m about to faint, vomit and scream all at the same time.

What little I can see though the eyeholes of the hood and the stinging sweat in my eyes, it looks like the other flagellants are sleepwalking through this, with no apparent hardship. I think they are just better at hiding it or, you know, hard, noble and strong.

Bleeding like pig, sweating like one too, I walk the mile, whipping the wounds on my back like a maniac to keep the pain away.

At some point, I hear Tunna shout at me from a very far away place, although he is standing right next to me. He is saying I made it. I made it.

I walked the mile.

I was now officially a “penitente”.

But the most extreme form of penance was still ahead.

Kristos are the men who take the imitation of the Christ’s suffering all the way by getting nailed on a wooden cross through their palms and their feet. They believe it will keep them and their families in good graces with God.

We really thought one of us should have through this crucifixion – it would have made the ultimate rock-paper-scissors.

Now, I need my hands for many things, mainly writing and Tunna obviously wants to operate a camera until they pry it from his cold, dead hands. And we didn’t want to end up with those cold, dead hands quite just yet. Every expert on the scene told us not to do it if we fancied keeping the nerves of our palms intact.

So we didn’t get on the cross. But we got some pretty good close-ups of those who did, by infiltrating the crowds guerilla-style and not staying put where the media had been told to stay.

Later we heard that in another town called Kapitangan John Safran (he of the John Safran vs God fame) had actually gone through with the crucifixion ritual.

You can see a glimpse of this in his new series’ trailer.

We salute you, sir. It’s no skin off our backs.

So to say.

R & T