Tondo
The Daycare is located in the biggest slum of Manila, called Tondo.
Tondo used to be the largest dumpsite of the Philippines, called Smoky Mountain. Amongst the waste live 25,000 people who have found refuge here, calling it their home. Trash is not only something that is beneath them or around them, it is their way of life. A livelihood, where their source of income is based on scavenging through the garbage, sorting it out, and recycling.
Despite being in extreme poverty, the community always saw the light in things. In the photos, it is quite evident that the people of the community always shared a smile or a wave saying "hello!"
(source: Collaborative Movement)
Tondo used to be the largest dumpsite of the Philippines, called Smoky Mountain. Amongst the waste live 25,000 people who have found refuge here, calling it their home. Trash is not only something that is beneath them or around them, it is their way of life. A livelihood, where their source of income is based on scavenging through the garbage, sorting it out, and recycling.
Despite being in extreme poverty, the community always saw the light in things. In the photos, it is quite evident that the people of the community always shared a smile or a wave saying "hello!"
(source: Collaborative Movement)
"If you wanted to be polite, you could say the area is totally unfit for human habitation, but you wouldn’t be wrong if you simply called it the closest thing to hell on earth. Garbage is piling up everywhere, sometimes meters high, and the streets leading through the area are nothing more than muddy pathways filled with trash and adjourned by open sewers. Men, women and children can be seen working in the mountains of garbage, scavenging for materials that can be resold or collecting fast food remains from trash bags which are to be re-cooked and sold as the infamous “pagpag”. All this is happening just a short distance away from the glitzy designer stores of Makati and the posh neighborhoods of BGC and Forbes Park, but we may as well be on another planet.
Children can be seen playing in the streets, barefoot and oblivious to the dangers surrounding them, while dump trucks deliver new mountains of trash that will quickly be dissected by waiting men and women trying to earn the few pesos they need to survive another day.
There are three main areas: Helping Land, Happy Land (a name derived from the Visayan word Hapilan, meaning ‘smelly garbage’) and Aroma. The whole area belongs to Temporary Housing Tenements and consists of 32 warehouse-like structures that were built as temporary housing for scavengers who were forced to move after the closure of the infamous Smokey Mountain landfill site. What was only meant as short term solution has by now become a very permanent fixture of Tondo, with the three areas essentially forming a massive refugee camp at the fringes of Metro Manila. Time and the elements have not been kind to these structures and virtually all the buildings are by now missing parts of their roofs and appear structurally unsound. This hasn’t stopped residents from living in them, tough, and the estimated 40,000 people calling the area home have done what they could to create living spaces out of salvaged wood, tarpaulins, corrugated iron sheets and whatever else they could get their hands on. " (source: www.wheninmanila.com)
In this settings, Childreamers Daycare Center is a piece of heaven for children of Tondo.
Children can be seen playing in the streets, barefoot and oblivious to the dangers surrounding them, while dump trucks deliver new mountains of trash that will quickly be dissected by waiting men and women trying to earn the few pesos they need to survive another day.
There are three main areas: Helping Land, Happy Land (a name derived from the Visayan word Hapilan, meaning ‘smelly garbage’) and Aroma. The whole area belongs to Temporary Housing Tenements and consists of 32 warehouse-like structures that were built as temporary housing for scavengers who were forced to move after the closure of the infamous Smokey Mountain landfill site. What was only meant as short term solution has by now become a very permanent fixture of Tondo, with the three areas essentially forming a massive refugee camp at the fringes of Metro Manila. Time and the elements have not been kind to these structures and virtually all the buildings are by now missing parts of their roofs and appear structurally unsound. This hasn’t stopped residents from living in them, tough, and the estimated 40,000 people calling the area home have done what they could to create living spaces out of salvaged wood, tarpaulins, corrugated iron sheets and whatever else they could get their hands on. " (source: www.wheninmanila.com)
In this settings, Childreamers Daycare Center is a piece of heaven for children of Tondo.
To learn more about Tondo, you can see Aljazeera serie, THE SLUM:
Childreamers Tondo Inc, Brgy. 105, Tondo, Manila, Metro Manila, Philippines,
+63 9959 31 4645, [email protected]
+63 9959 31 4645, [email protected]
