Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (27 page)

The plan was to make it to Manila tonight, but en route we were supposed to stop at a jeepney factory. Unfortunately I had no clear idea where it was and no idea at all how we were going to get there. There was no sign of Sam or Robin either. I thought Jet’s driver might take us but he dropped us at a sprawling, dusty bus terminal in the middle of Lucena.

We grabbed a Coke in a small café and I gazed across the lines of dirty buses. ‘I have to tell you, Claudio,’ I said, ‘even if we knew where we were going, I’m not sure I can face another bus.’

‘We could always hitch a lift in that.’ Claudio pointed to a massive white limo that had just pulled in. It looked like a Hummer, but stretched to ridiculous proportions.

It stopped right in front of us with the engine idling; the windows were smoked glass so we couldn’t see inside. Being the nosy so-and-so that I am, I decided to take a closer look anyway. As I walked over, the passenger window was rolled down. I expected to see some Filipino gangster giving me the evil eye. Instead it was Sam, grinning at me.

‘Do you want a lift to the factory, Charley? Or would you prefer the bus?’

The Hummer was, in fact, a Hammer - a replica based on the Nissan Patrol. Looking at it from the outside you would swear it was the American original. Inside was another story - it had leather bench seats and wine glasses that were stuck down with double-sided tape. It wasn’t as comfortable as you would think either. The seats were narrow and hard, but hey, this was a limo and who was I to complain? It had been made by the Sarao family who ran the jeepney factory we were on our way to visit. After travelling in the back of a farm truck with two goats for hours on end, it was nice to stretch out and close my eyes before we got to the city.

Sarao Motors Inc. is a large plant on a busy suburban road. Pulling in, we were greeted warmly by co-owner and works supervisor Ed Sarao. A big, amiable guy, he showed us around the various open-sided workshops, and explained how the US military jeep had evolved into the iconic jeepney.

The company had started converting the jeeps in 1955; first taking a military vehicle and reworking it into something more suitable for civilian use. Over time they reconfigured the chassis, stretching it into a slightly larger version, before embarking on the elongated buses they produce now. There were a number of different workshops - the machinery was basic and traditional, but then, as Ed explained, the jeepney is basic and traditional, a vehicle that’s simple enough for its owners to repair and service.

He showed me steel chassis together with raw, unpainted coachwork. The seats were wooden bases stuffed with coconut fibres and trimmed in leatherette. The whole vehicle is assembled there at the plant and each one is customised. Ed said that ordering a jeepney is like ordering a tailor-made suit - whatever colour you want, however decorative you want it, all you had to do was say. The average cost is 490,000 pesos, which I worked out to be about £7000.

We had to get across town and Ed very kindly agreed to let me drive one of his creations. It was silver and red with three air horns on the bonnet and God knows how many lights. I loved it - it was really loud and clunky, and when you revved the engine it sounded like somebody farting.

The roads were choked with the most manic traffic imaginable. Behind the wheel with one of Ed’s men alongside me, I was crunching gears and hooting the horn, heading for the skyscrapers. It was a mass of snarling metal - cars, vans and motorbikes along with hundreds of other jeepneys. I soon began to realise that 90 per cent of the congestion is caused by jeepneys. They pull out when they want; they stop where and when they want. I was behind this big yellow one that kept cutting up the traffic, pulling over to drop off and pick up passengers. The driver didn’t care and didn’t indicate - he would just hit the horn and do pretty much as he pleased.

There was a little respite as we crawled to the toll gates and I could see the skyscrapers that encircled the bulk of the city. Manila is one of the most densely populated cities in the world and the closer we got to the downtown area the madder it became. All I could smell was diesel; all I could hear was the harsh grunt of diesel engines. Combined with the heat in the air it was pretty wild. At one junction flowers were struggling to grow in the concrete plinth that formed the central reservation and I saw a street kid flaked out, trying to grab some sleep - a reminder that tomorrow we were going out again with UNICEF.

 

 

Some UNICEF projects are easier to deal with, emotionally, than others. The water purifier had been hard physical work but emotionally very rewarding. My visit to talk with the street kids of Manila will stay with me for a very long time. UNICEF has been involved with street kids in this country since 2000, when there were an estimated 246,000 across the islands of the Philippines. Some 50,000 of them were what is known as ‘highly visible’, meaning they had no relatives and were fending entirely for themselves. The reasons why children end up on the streets are many and varied but poverty, of course, is the root cause. Often it can lead to family break-ups and varying forms of child abuse.

On the morning of 19 July I was introduced to a couple of boys who were living among the market stalls of the Divisoria area of Manila. One of them was Edwin, a young guy with floppy hair who walked the streets as if they belonged to him. He was a thief apparently - a ‘snatcher’ was how my guide, Butch, referred to him.

Butch had been a street kid himself and was now working with UNICEF as a street educator. His story was slightly different from the others I’d heard, mind you, as he had been born in a decent neighbourhood and to an educated family. But his parents died when he was a child and with most of his other relatives in the United States, he had been brought up by his grandmother. Unfortunately she also died when he was still young, and Butch found himself living on the streets.

Initially he eked out an existence as a newspaper boy, but he couldn’t make enough money to survive, so he progressed to thief, drug-runner and finally pimp. He might have ended up either dead or in prison, but thankfully when he was eighteen a social worker persuaded him to go to a shelter run by a Jesuit priest. That shelter changed Butch’s life. ‘His name was Father Ben,’ he told me. ‘A good man, very down to earth. He took me in without asking any questions, though of course he knew where I’d come from and what I had done. He gave me food and somewhere to sleep, and because of him I was introduced to faith.’

We were making our way through the market. A multitude of multicoloured parasols shaded hundreds of stalls that sold everything from slabs of meat to cheap children’s toys. The streets were heaving with people - on foot, in sidecar taxis and on bicycles. It was hot and sticky and the air was filled with the rank smell of water from the open drainage pool on the other side of some battered-looking railings. It was alongside those railings that the street people cooked and washed; and where they went to the toilet.

‘How long were you in the shelter, Butch?’

‘In all, six years.’

Getting into that shelter had changed his life. Off the streets and with someone to care for him, Butch left behind the prostitution and drugs and got his act together. He told me that he had been a lost sheep and now he spent his life looking for other lost sheep.

The kids trusted him, and walking those grim little streets I was amazed at how many people seemed to know who he was. There was a quiet purpose about him. His face was weathered from his years living on the street, his hair styled in dreadlocks and tied at the back of his head.

Together with the National Network of Street Children, UNICEF operates what they call an Alternative Learning System. A mobile classroom, donated by the Body Shop, travels through the rundown areas of Manila with the driver showing videos to kids of all ages. Helped by the videos and other media, they perform learning tasks that prepare them for normal education. I did some of the tasks with them - little things like dressing up to go to work, or identifying a life situation from a picture. We did one where I turned my back as if we were playing hide and seek and they formed a tangle of arms and legs that I then had to unravel. It was about problem-solving, and Butch explained that these little tasks were designed to introduce them to options; they asked questions of the children, forced them to make a decision that a formal education would then take to the next level.

He took me deep into Divisoria, where we found Edwin and the other boy I mentioned, who was called Jayson. Edwin was the younger of the two and, as I said, he strolled around confidently with his shoulders back, snapping his fingers. Jayson was quieter and more thoughtful. There was something a little downtrodden about him, a sadness in his eyes that was either missing in Edwin or well disguised.

Edwin lived on a section of narrow pavement between an old van and the wall of a shop. What few belongings he had were kept in a plastic basket. His father spent the day operating a bicycle and sidecar, trying to make enough money to keep them alive. His mother had left them years before and though they had lived rough ever since, Edwin’s father was determined his son would not be condemned to a life on the streets. He was still a young man, very tall and proud looking, but was suffering from TB. With no medication it was all he could do to get through the day. He loved his son and wanted to be with him, but he knew that a shelter would mean the chance of a better life.

I was staggered by their living conditions; the pavement was about two feet wide and there were at least thirty families living along the length of it. Butch explained that there were two types of people on the street: what he called ‘street families’, like Edwin and his dad; and orphans or abandoned children like Jayson. Everywhere we walked, we were surrounded by girls and boys of all ages. From teenagers to toddlers, they were wandering about with no one to take care of them. I saw a little girl, who could have been no more than five, sitting on her own against a concrete pillar while cars and buses rushed past her. Another kid, a shaven-headed toddler, would try to hold hands with everyone.

It was harrowing and incredibly emotional. Jayson told me that he had left his family because his mother favoured his elder brother and there was no place for him. His father worked in one of the buildings on the street where Jayson slept, but he hadn’t seen him for more than a year. He doubted he would see him again. He was determined to go into a shelter, get an education and study criminology. Butch said he was quick-minded, an accomplished thief and would actually make a good policeman.

Jayson took me to the place where he went at night: a meat vendor’s stall in front of a beauty salon. He slept on the table where the vendor chopped meat, and told me that for a while the guy had looked out for him. But then he moved on and a new guy took his place. The lady who ran the beauty salon was the previous guy’s aunt, however, and she persuaded the new guy to let him go on using the table.

I think quite a lot of the shopkeepers did that - an unspoken kind of guardianship over some of the children. Even so, they had no permanent roof above their heads, they washed in filthy drainage water and they cooked their food on camp stoves among piles of rubbish.

But it was not hopeless. Butch was living proof that the plans implemented with UNICEF were working - he was a link between the world of the street kid and a normal life. I was in awe of him. Every day he would be out there among children who were scavenging the stalls for rotten vegetables - he spent time with them, shared with them until they began to trust him. One of his success stories was a kid called Emilio, who had recently been released from prison after killing another kid in a fight over drugs - as a minor he had not served a full sentence. He could have fallen back into a life of crime and violence, but Butch took him under his wing and showed him he really did have a choice. Butch and UNICEF gave Emilio and others like him another chance - he was free of drugs, he had a job and with it, thankfully, some hope at last.

AFTER A DAY ON THE STREETS of Manila, getting on a motorbike and blowing away the cobwebs was just what I needed. Tomorrow was Saturday and we’d lined up a day riding Harley-Davidsons with some boys from the Mad Dog Motorcycle Club. The club’s president, Big John, had invited us over to the clubhouse tonight for a couple of beers.

The clubhouse was known as the Handlebar. It was given away by the lines of Harleys parked outside and the sign, of course, bearing a set of ape-hanger bars. To be honest, I was a bit nervous about riding with them - a bike club like this in a city like Manila . . . and I would be riding one of their precious Harleys . . . The last thing I wanted to do was trash it.

This outfit was not unlike the Hell’s Angels. Motorcycle clubs, or ‘MCs’ as they are known to the police, have something of a reputation. I knew that this one had had some problems in the past (something to do with a previous president having been assassinated) so it was with a little trepidation that we rolled up.