THERE’S a new urban phenomenon quietly creeping around the fringes of cities. In tight resettlement areas, uniform box houses are home to thousands of people seeking new hope from an old life filled with uncertainty or nightmarish experiences—eviction, demolition and relocation when fire or storms razed their old homes.
A five-year program, called Pnoy Fund or the Informal Settler Families Fund, under the term of former President Benigno S. Aquino III, has allocated an annual P10-billion funding for the resettling of homes away from danger zones. The five-year program (from 2011 to 2016) allotted P9 billion for People’s Plan and the other P28 billion for conventional housing buildings managed by the National Housing Authority. But having a new home to call their own comes with a hefty price to their livelihood, security and health needs.
“These families were taken from danger zones and moved to death zones,” said Jonathan Chua, a project officer of the Presidential Commission for the Urban Poor (PCUP).
The story of Jordan Park, one of the 18 relocation projects financed by the Pnoy Fund, illustrates the hell spoken of by the residents.
Jordan Park is in Barangay Real Cacarong, Pandi, Bulacan, from where one has to pay for a special trip via tricycle to the town center for a fee of about P200. This alone has created many social problems for the new settlers.
“When we were first brought to scan where we would be
relocated, they showed us an empty space much closer to the
center,” said Evelyn Lonzaga, president of the Jordan Park Homes Association (HOA).
Lonzaga was relocated from Mother Ignacia in Quezon City, a stone’s throw away from the giant ABS-CBN network station. Lonzaga said it was with a heavy heart that she left the place where she lived since she was 6 years old. But aside from sentimental reasons, the place provided ease of travel and convenient access to groceries, markets and place of work. But they had to go because they were “eyesores” in the “prime” location.
Rather than join the bloody protest to prevent demolition of their homes, Lonzaga realized there was no way to win and, instead, hinged her hopes on the thought that she would have a place to call her own with basic services promised to be in place in their new address.
Residents were rather surprised when the trucks with their belongings brought them instead to the rather isolated Jordan Park. But it was just the beginning of their trials and a series of broken promises.
Electric connections were not in place. They endured life groping about at night in darkness. Water was rationed in a cement fixer where impurities floated. Lonzaga lamented that even in their cramped shanties in Quezon City, they had clean water. She brought all her appliances with her, but could not use them in her new home. Water in homes came in the form of leaking roofs, Lonzaga added.
Collectively, residents talked of their hardships having to line up for a few pails of water from a single deep-well pipe under the searing heat of the sun, or to make the long queue until midnight to avoid the heat.
Doors were made of flimsy materials and in their first months, rape and theft occurred, as the doors could just be bashed in with a hammer and the locks had the same key. Some toilets were clogged with hardened cement debris.
Chua said in one of the seven relocation sites in Pandi, a 12-year-old girl was raped and killed, and her body found only four days after.
He said these problems ran across the other relocation sites.
Health concerns also posed a major problem. In an exposure trip organized by the Philippine Press Institute, participants
saw for themselves life in a
resettlement area.
Only two days before their visit, Thelma Santos, HOA secretary, said they had just buried an infant who died of pneumonia before they reached the hospital. Stories of residents dying of stroke or heart attacks were also told by the residents. Rather pragmatically, Santos, who lives by herself, told the team she already knows what will happen to her should her blood pressure shoot up.
“I’ll just die,” she said.
Another resident, Arnel Marcielas, who is wheelchair-bound, worries how he would deal with emergency situations.
Then, there was the problem of social acceptance. Pandi is an old and small community where the neighbors knew one another. They remain suspicious of the newcomers and regarded them as “trash,” as they were thrown away from where they came from. Jordan Park residents bewailed that whenever there is robbery or a cow is lost, they are blamed. During the election season, a former vice mayor was killed and the town suspected the hitman was one of the Jordan residents.
“They threw stones at our houses,” residents said.
Because the place was far from their old jobs, many husbands would opt to come home only on weekends, disrupting family life, sometimes leading to illicit affairs.
But knowing that they themselves will have to deal with their miseries, a community spirit started to grow among them, and life in their new space slowly started to thrive.
When the team visited, they saw a happy sight. When the sun started to go down, the coolness brought the women, the fathers, the kids and just about everyone to the streets where they chatted and greeted one another. The streets—empty of any vehicle—served like a plaza for socializing. Kids dashed about in bicycles; the concrete streets became a wide playground. Young girls strolled around holding hands. A mother came pushing a cart of street food, and a man rang a bell to attract buyers for his local ice cream.