Last October I visited my friend Quacher - a vietnamese Australian living in Manila. One afternoon I left Makati City and took a taxi to Tondo. Tondo used to be the site of Manila's smelliest and largest rubbish dump known as Smoky Mountain. Smoky Mountain has been cleaned up considerably in the last couple of years. A housing project has been completed and the site is no longer used to dump rubbish.

On the day I visited kids flew kites from the top of dirt mounds and listened to this guy as he poked the ground with a wooden stick.

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final end of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy'd,
Or cast as rubbish to the void ...

Alfred Lord Tennyson