5/03/2012 05:29:00 AM
Zaenal Muttakin
(CNN) -- Felipa Fabon waits
outside a local fried chicken restaurant in Manila. Crouching near to feral
cats and rubbish bins, she isn't there to meet friends for dinner but to search
through the diner's trash bags.
"I'm sorting the garbage, looking
for 'pagpag'," she says.
In Tagalog "pagpag" means the
dust you shake off your clothing or carpet, but in Fabon's poverty- stricken
world, it means chicken pulled from the trash.
Pagpag is the product of a hidden food
system for the urban poor that exists on the leftovers of the city's middle
class.
Fabon is the merchant and pays the
trash dealer just over a dollar for tonight's supply of garbage and scraps.
In the dim haze of the street lights,
she holds up a half-eaten chicken breast.
"This one, this is meat," she
says. "Now what we do at home is clean it, put it in plastic, and then I
sell it in the morning. It's very easy to sell because it's very cheap. People
in my neighborhood want very cheap food."
"If it's mostly bones, it's 20
pesos ($0.05) per bag," she says.
After bagging up the chicken scraps she
heads home to Tondo, a neighborhood infamous in the Philippines as one of the
poorest slums in Manila.
At dawn, about six hours after Fabon
first got her trash delivery, she begins to divide up the pagpag.
Fabon sniffs the chicken, which she
says has a bad, sour smell. She's disappointed that she only has five bags to
sell this morning that will sell out in just minutes.
"Pagpag!" Fabon calls out, as
she walks through the slums carrying her small cart.
Morena Sumanda, a 27-year-old mother of
two, is the first customer.
Sumanda lives in a shanty that sits on
top of one of Manila's biggest garbage dumps. She doesn't have the 20 pesos to
pay Fabon until her husband comes home that evening. For him, 20 pesos is full
day's pay, says Sumanda.
Sumanda's toddler son, Nino, wails as
she first washes the chicken, heats the pot and adds vegetables to the pagpag,
which is mostly bones.
"Sometimes it comes from the
garbage," she says, as she hands a small, half-eaten chicken wing to her
son.
Sumanda, and others like her, have no
other choice but to eat pagpag, says Melissa Alipalo, a social development
specialist and a volunteer at the Philippine Community
Fund (PCF).
"It is a private humiliation of
the poor to have to eat off someone else's plate. But it's a survival mechanism
for the poorest of the poor," she says.
The NGO is based in Manila and has
built an elementary school in the heart of the Tondo slums.
PCF's school educates 450 of the most
poverty-stricken children in Tondo, with the aim of freeing families from
poverty. The school survives on donations and provides students with two meals
a day.
Maria Theresa Sarmiento, PCF's manager
of health and nutrition, says that when the school first opened she was
treating children with a range of illness and disease.
"Even though they cook the food,
the disease is still there," she says.
Sarmiento says that parents know pagpag
is not a good source of food for their children, but that they don't have any
choice.
"They're being pushed to do that
thing because they don't have enough money to buy the food that they should
prepare," she says.
For Sumanda this is all that she can
afford and it's better than nothing.
"By the mercy of God, this is
enough," she says.
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