A Bottle of Coke

Laws for squatters (persons who settle on land that is not legally theirs) can be ironclad here. Often the owner of the land will lose considerable amounts of money because the "squatters" refuse to leave without a settlement, and, by law, they don't have to. There are fires, almost weekly, in Cebu, usually in squatter areas, because owners get fed up with the people not leaving and just burn them to the ground.

It can be very frustrating on both ends. For the owner of the property, and the "squatters" on the property.  180,842 families, or 12.8 percent of the population in my region of the Philippines (The Visayas) are technically squatters (2004 report). And even though the laws are frustrating for my end of the population, that is a huge number of persons who would otherwise be homeless, and the injustice of that, is much more frustrating. 

 squatter home with the boats and pier in background

Last month I visited one of the most devastated districts in Cebu. It's an area, by one of the piers, whose tenants earn their living by scavenging in and around the pier area. They were squatters, but had built homes and lived by the pier for many years, some for many generations. Their homes had been demolished to build a shipping warehouse, and they became, by definition, displaced peoples. This community of around 15 families, couldn't leave the area, which supplied the only livelihood they knew, so they moved into a pile of old shipping/building materials. Literally. Tarps and sheet metal had been placed on top of cement drums to form make-shift structures that I had trouble believing would hold up during a storm.

The team I went with to this area was a Catholic Ministry called SVD who UNICEF has partnered with to do a joint project in providing aid to some of the neediest families. The workers go into these communities weekly and help the families get birth certificates for their children, make sure the children are in school, and try to provide assistance to help the kids stay in school. They also pass out condoms. Because, as you can imagine, sex brings in money. Sometimes more money than scavenging, but not always.

Lights from shopping district seen behind

Someone in this particular community informed the worker that her neighbors will sometimes sell their bodies for a liter of coke. One liter of coke. Many of the girls who are participating in these activities are very young, barely teenagers. The position of SVD in this area is that they will not convince someone to disengage from income generating activities unless they have another job to offer them. In the face of such devastation, they believe, asking them to stop these activities will only shame them when they have no other means. So they offer jobs, whenever they can. But that isn't often. There aren't a lot of jobs for those without resources.

As we walked back towards the city lights in the dusk, two persons heard us and stepped out from behind a structure, hoping we were customers. When they saw who it was they were embarrassed, but the SVD workers didn't even react. They treated them with the same love and dignity they would have treated their family members with.

The definition of trafficking is this: the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use by force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving and receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.


By this definition, anyone who buys these persons, with full knowledge that they have no other means for providing for themselves or their family, is trafficking them.


How does someone get to a place where they believe that their body is only worth a liter of coke? How does someone ever become that desperate? And how do you teach, love, care for, convince, empower or show someone that they are worth more?

They are worth much more.