Binson.

Smokey mountain. This was his home, where his loved ones were.

Jerry

On my first day at the dumpsite trudging through the mud in the pouring rain with Mio’s friends, a little boy in the distance caught our eye. He was limping in the rain, against a backdrop of mountains of trash and smoke.

“Cerebral palsy,” I thought resignedly, “Nothing we can do.” We went nearer, and I saw his right leg contracted in spasms. Completely naked, the little boy crouched down low, shivering in the cold. The medical student in me leaped out and I began to examine his right leg. On closer inspection, we then saw terribly infected wounds on his injured leg. He was limping severely, not because he was crippled, but because he was in great pain. Yellow pus oozed out from where he was hurt. He was shivering, shivering, shivering, and did not answer any of our questions.

“Can we get him a shirt?” I asked. “Maybe from a store nearby?”

“Anung panggalan mo?” I asked in Tagalog. What is your name?

“Bunso.” Pronounced Boon-sor. It means Little One. His real name was Vinsen, pronounced as Binson.

He was shivering, shivering, just as we were, except that while we were clothed, he was as bare as a stone. His brown skin glistened in the chilly rain like brown marble. Mio’s Filipino friend, Aji, another photographer whom he had linked up with online and just my age, took off his white shirt and I clothed him.

“Come,” I said. He was afraid of us. Aji asked him why he wasn’t clothed and he said he had no shirt. We walked him home. Little Bunso in a large oversized shirt.

His home was a little makeshift shelter on low stilts made from wooden cardboard and plastic, situated right in front of the coal-making sheds, where it would get full measure of the noxious fumes. It was next to the coast as well, so any floods (which were common) would make his home most vulnerable. We found his mother, who spoke good English because she had gone to school till she was 15.

I learnt, that many of the people in Smokey Mountain live there not because they are “stupid” or uneducated, but simply because, coal-making is, to them, a decent job, one of integrity, a better alternative to other options, and it was a place they were familiar with, away from the big world out there which had no place for people like them.

Back home, at least they felt accepted.

Binson sat on the floor while we asked his mother to bathe and clothe him. She was a dark, strong woman with a face like a horse and a charming smile. His wounds on his leg were raw, oozing with pus and covered with black soot. Three days old, she said, Got injured from hot coals.

Hot coals. They were everywhere. This was the children’s world. Trash heaps were beanbags and coal pieces, their building blocks. Just the next day I was horrified to find four three-year old kids crouching around a small fire and playing with it with bits of plastic they had found.

It was common to find children helping their parents collect coal from the shed. I saw a little girl, who could not be more than 7, scooping up rusty nails with her bare hands, caked with black soot, to return to her parents for reuse. It was no wonder Binson got injured.

Ricky and I

Such is the situation in Smokey Mountain. The Sunday School Teacher in me wanted to rise up to teach those bad boys a lesson, but when I looked into their eyes and saw their ragged clothes, I saw that they, too, were poor, hungry and empty inside.

Along the way, we dropped by a pharmacy to buy antiseptic cream and alcohol to clean Binson’s wounds. I learnt, that Ps Nickson had started a feeding programme that fed hundreds of children in Smokey Children, but they had hardly enough funds to sustain that, much less start a hygiene programme for the children. Each feeding session, which provides every child aged 4 to 11 a packet of rice and a piece of sausage the size of a small fishcake, costs about $300. They need a continuous supply of $1200 each month to nourish the scrawny children there.

We had a delicious meal that night. We were all famished. We nursed Binson’s wounds over the next few days, cooing “Magandang, magandang (be brave)” as he winced and teared from the pain. It frustrated us, me especially, to know that the soot continually infected his wounds and nothing could keep him indoors for long. At one point, I chided him, and him, in his shame, cried and tore himself away from me. Just the day before, we were best friends.