A child working his way inside a trash bin to find useful articles to eke out a living.
Scavenging: Somebody's Trash is Life
I wished I would have been swift enough to capture this child's activity near a bank in our place at closer distance. A split second decision, however, made me stay inside my jeep to capture the event with my Nokia 6020 cellular phone. He might get distracted and behave differently, like approaching me then beg for alms. Collecting trash has become a part of his life, living on some other people's waste. This, actually, is not the first time I encountered such behavior but I was not fast enough to draw out my camera.
Coping Mechanisms
Ever since I learned that our city government had prohibited scavenging in the sanitary landfill which is the first local government operated facility in the country, I started (or rather observed an obvious increase) seeing people pushing carts along the highway. These carts are laded with an assortment of things: plastics, rusty metal, bottles, you name it, found along the way or bought at a cheap price from homes. Highway traffic sometimes slows down because some of them are unmindful that they have blocked a major portion of the road. Also, aside from the child portrayed herein, even grown-up men search for something edible or useful inside the trash bins of fastfood stores, market stalls, and other commercial establishments.
I deduced these are coping mechanisms of people who were displaced from their previous scavenging activities in the landfill. A few years back, I asked my students to conduct an interview among the people living in the landfill, and they found out that the scavengers could earn as much as PhP500(ca. $12.00) for a day's scavenging activity. They were allowed then to segregate as much they can from trucks that unload their city-wide garbage collections. But prohibition of scavenging led them to adopt a new strategy.
Lasting Solution
The scavenger's behavior showed that people when prohibited from doing things which they used to do, would not easily give it up however condescending, especially if they earn enough from it. They did not find another kind of job upon prohibition of their unsightly preoccupations. This is aside from the fact that they will most probably get sick in handling wastes unprotected. There was only a shift in location in the activities of the scavengers who were previously living near the dumpsites.
Thus, this situation shows that society's ills can only be fully addressed when all the facets of the problem have been addressed. Scavenging is just a symptom of the poverty caused by lack of opportunities, i.e., opportunities that will allow people to have a decent livelihood. A lasting solution must be thought out.
