This is Manila Bay.

It was a cloudy Wednesday morning, the air heavy with warnings of rain. The sky was flatly gray, no way to tell where one cloud ended and the next began.


We arrived at the dock in the fisherfolk village of Navotas at roughly 9:30, where we were to meet a man who calls himself The Chairman. The water level was high that day owing to Sunday's typhoon, which washed piles of debris onto the land by the dock.

Dogs pink with hair loss nosed through the garbage for food, and two barefoot boys shared the weight of a basket as they sifted through old flip flops, plastic bottles, air conditioner filters and salvageable car parts for goods to cash in on at the market. While they would find about 20 pesos (45 cents) of resalable goods in a day over the dry season, typhoons meant a lottery of litter would wash up to land, hopefully up to 100 pesos worth.

Five of us -- Joseph, a local organizer, Ken, an organizer from Canada, friends Khara and John, and me -- stood gazing out onto the smoggy bay where The Chairman would soon guide us.

The bamboo dock had trapped enough rubbish to completely conceal the water beneath. Past that, papers, sandals and fast food wrappings floated sporadically for several yards.

A barefoot boy walked past us onto the dock, and without hesitation dove in and headed for the market to our left, where boats were pulling in to pick up gas or to drop off local catch. We involuntarily shrieked while standing in shock.

Half an hour later (punctual in "Filipino time") The Chairman was at last ready and pulled up one of his four fishing boats. We clumsily piled in behind Captain Chairman and his first mate onto the bamboo-outrigged banca and motored north along the coast.

Sunday's tides not only brought in a treasure of litter for the fishing village's scavenging residents, but left 38 missing and disheveled dozens of the 2,000 homes propped up over the bay.

In front of these stilted houses, clothes hung out to dry under the sunless, humid sky. Bancas hung roped in under the clotheslines or sat on bamboo docks. Groups of friends ignored the debris and floated on inner tubes or hung onto the dock as they passed the time. Families and friends who gathered in the windowless, doorless shelters stood to wave as our boat tooted by.


The banca chugged along the shore to the end of the village until the only noise we heard was the sound of our motor. Stilted homes gave way to quiet trees and shrubs. Small silver fish suddenly skipped in and out of the water alongside our boat, evidencing that the water, however polluted, was certainly habitable enough for the fish that feed Navota's families.

The Chairman, in his late twenties, has been working on the boat for ten years. He says on good days his catch might amount to a good 400 pesos worth (about 9 dollars), enough to feed his small family and the many formerly homeless or abandoned animals that have sought refuge in his home near the dock of Navotas, now far behind us.

As I studied the silent trees on the shore, I noticed the ground beneath them -- a shimmering mass of cans and plastic, the rubbish decomposing just enough to fertilize rows of vegetation. Looking down the shore we spotted the looming neck of a garbage crane.


Joseph, a Navotas native who works with the local Alliance of Fisherfolks in Navotas (ALMANA), says the Philippine government has agreed to let Japan bring its refuse, growing uncontainable on the densely populated island chain, to Manila Bay, where cranes were moving masses of garbage into mounds to make room for more. He also says the Japanese government is already funding the reclamation of an area up the bay in Bulacan to develop resort homes for retired Japanese.

To make the bay a more aesthetic place to live and vacation -- and therefore jump-start a revenue stream -- the city's former mayor put forth a 50 billion-peso ($1.1 billion) reclamation project to clean up and remodel 160 hectares (1.6 square kilometers) of land along the bay, a project that will supposedly employ up to 245,000 Filipinos into the tourism industry.

Condos and hotels will line the bay, inevitably spurring the creation of new restaurants, tours and aquatic sport services. Fishing boats will be replaced by yachts and sailboats, and, according to a brochure illustration, the murky, debris-filled water will transform into a shimmering blue.

The government plans to make way for the new construction by moving the 2,000 or so fisherfolk families -- including The Chairman's -- away from the bay to a location yet to be determined. Groups like ALMANA fear that moving the families inland will strip the fishermen of their livelihoods and force them to clamber for new ways to make money. Protesters of the project argue that the government merely wants to hide its country's poverty in order to attract foreign business.

However, the project is currently at a stalemate, due not to opposition but to a lack of funding.

Rounding back to the dock, we wove through several fish traps-- giant nets propped up by poles that trap thousands of fish. A small stilted house nearby shelters the caretaker who stays there alone for days or weeks at a time to tend to his catch.

At the dock, The Chairman's fishing hands were ready to bring us in, and Mrs. Chairman brought out crackers and Coke as we mingled with her and a woman lounging in a hammock. She was several months pregnant with her second child, but has just once received prenatal care.

We said goodbye and headed to the elite quarters near Fort Bonifacio, or simply "the Fort," where we had gourmet Mexican for about $5, roughly what our friend The Chairman makes in a day. Despite the delicious ingredients in my enchilada, the day's events left a bitter taste in my mouth. I asked my expat friends if they ever felt guilty for indulging in the upper-class life here after all they've seen. It's a reality they've had to come to terms with -- every well-cooked meal has become something served with a tinge of guilt.

Traffic on the way home slowed to a chaos of parked cars, a common occurrence on the packed roads of Manila. We inched past a mass of people surrounding a man lying on the ground, presumably hit by a car. Someone had covered his body with a cardboard refrigerator box, so all we could see were the sandals on his feet as we passed.

I took a deep breath and we tried to change the subject. Three half Filipinos, all pretty grateful for having been born American. Once I got home I picked up a pencil and wrote:

Wednesday, 8/11/10

I am unshakably unsettled. I don't know if it was the sheer amount of garbage that covered the land and sea at the Bay of Manila, or the animals, hairless and starving to death, or the kids taking advantage of Sunday's typhoon by cashing in on the garbage they picked off the land by the dock. Or perhaps it was the kid swimming amid a lake of debris towards the local fisherfolk's market, or the tiny, cracked out pregnant mom playing with her son in a hammock by the bay, or the little girl peeing on the street, or, of course, the dead man lying on the road, shielded from the public eye by a mere cardboard refrigerator box. Causing traffic congestion at Baclaran market. Or maybe it was because most of this I witnessed before lunch, the best Mexican food I've had in a year, which I paid for with my point-earning American Express card...Mexican food was always a guilty pleasure.

Dead guy must have ruined my appetite.

And then I started to cry.

Thanks to Joseph, Khara and John L. for their help.