Life inside the cemetery slums of the Philippines

The Manila North Cemetery was inaugurated in 1904 and is one of the largest and oldest in the Philippines. Sconfined rows of graves that seem stacked on top of each other and mausoleums of all kinds extend for 540,000 square meters, hosting about a million dead and at the same time about six thousand people living in the largest cemetery in the metropolis.
With its twelve million inhabitants, Manila is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Many Filipinos have moved to live from the countryside to the city in search of better opportunities. Unfortunately, finding a job is not easy and, over time, people arrived from the countryside have gone to increase the communities that live in the slums of the capital.
Some of these slums have developed within public cemeteries. People live in shacks built with salvaged materials over the tombs, or inside mausoleums furnished with beds and furniture. The basic necessities are scarce: clean water, sanitation and electricity are almost completely absent. The families take the electricity illegally from the public line, and inside the cemetery there are only two or three wells of water.
This condition, albeit with lower numbers, is the same in other cemeteries of the city (such as that of Pasay City) and other major cities of the country, such as the cemetery of Cebu City, the capital of the Central Visayas region, where about a thousand people live in the public cemetery.
In the North Cemetery of Manila, the first barracks emerged in the early 50s. Many people were born and raised in the cemetery where they also started their own business, such as Maricar De La Cruz: "I was born and raised in this place, I've lived here for forty years. With my husband we opened a shop where we sell many different things". Maricar lives here with her three children of six, eight and eleven years old.
Some members of the community work as guardians, paid by relatives of the dead for the maintenance of the tombs. Others, like Leni Cabaña, do the same without an agreement, in the hope that the family of the deceased give them a small fee. "The days here are all the same: I clean the graves, so if the families come to visit their relatives they find them clean" explains Leni, sitting on a tomb with her son in her arms. Her companion raises pigeons with a friend in a large aviary. "So we make a living," concludes Leni.
Other residents work as bricklayers to build tombs, or make candles with recycled wax for the people who go to visit their loved ones; others engrave the tombstones, a very fruitful job given the number of funerals that are celebrated every day: about eighty.
The density of the tombs is so high that it often prevents funeral cars from getting to the place of burial: it is common for relatives and friends of the dead to carry the coffins on their shoulders, climbing on the gravestones and making their way through the houses.
The cemetery is a small town with shops, bars that provide wifi, karaoke or video games, ice cream vendors and street food, basketball courts. Many have chosen to live on the graves of their family, many others in the mausoleums of unknown people.
In these homes, those who can afford it watch television. The numerous children play among the tombs, where it is easy to run into bags of human bones and torn clothes of exhumed and abandoned bodies, waiting to be incinerated. Since the tombs are generally rented for five years, if the relatives of the dead stop paying for the space, the cemetery administrators exhume the remains
creating new spaces. In the cemetery there are also groups of children without families, who are often stunned by the glue used as drug and are dedicated to begging in the streets of the metropolis.
In 2016, the war on drugs started by President Duterte and which cost 12,000 lives in the country has created a sense of fear in the community. Here numerous police and extra-judicial killings have taken lives from dozens of people, often suspected of somehow dealing with drugs. According to the PNP Filipino police, the cemetery was home to a large number of methamphetamine pushers, because many people were involved in drug dealing to survive due to poverty.
In 2018, the situation seemed to be calmer due to a balance between the decrease in police operations, a drop in extra-judicial killings and the fear generated in the previous two years, which prompted many drug users to turn themselves in for not being executed.
Over time, several mayors have tried to displace the community inside the cemetery, as told by Joalberto Locañas who has been living in a mausoleum with the family for over twenty years: "Some time ago, they destroyed the houses to send us away, but the situation now is quiet, the mayor lets us live here. It is not easy, we are here because we are poor and we have no other places to go".

share home terms powered slideshowslideshowHD