The life of the children of street traders and trishaw drivers
By Inge Colijn
In January 2020 I spent a week in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. I was struck by the many young children I saw being cared for by grandparents, parents and siblings. The children were looked after while their family tended to the business of selling fruit, vegetables and household items, or waited with a trishaw for passengers.
Being myself from the old Dutch generation of Rust, Reinheid en Regelmaat (Rest, Cleanliness and Regularity) as the mantra, I wondered about the way these kids grow up in the street. There is a constant cacophony, dirt is everywhere and the people are very poor.
Reading about Tondo Manila, I found the following description: The Tondo is the largest slum of the country’s capital. It has a high poverty incidence due to lack of regular and decent jobs while social services like health and education are inaccessible.
In addition to the lack of income and social services, there is also a lack of accommodation. This often results in people sleeping outside, or taking turns in using places to sleep. Advertisements for bed space are not uncommon.
In 2014, Al Jazeera aired a documentary about Tondo, showing the rough side of life for the people living there. Outsiders are fascinated by the life in Barangay Aroma. This is the part of Manila, its smallest district, where garbage is collected and sorted. It is a reminder of that notorious Manila landfill, Smokey Mountain, which closed in the 1990s.
Most of the garbage sorting is done at night, as this is when people collect the trash from the city and transport it to Barangay Aroma. I visited Barangay Aroma early morning. At that time, it is relatively quiet.
Looking back at the photos I took in Barangay Aroma, as well as those I took in other poor areas of Metro Manila, the children in them seemed pretty happy despite the dirt and poverty. It made me realise once more that children accept the environment they are born into as normal.
In late 1995 in the North of Sri Lanka, in Kilinochchi, the headquarters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, I saw children going to school. Girls in white dresses with long braided pigtails and boys in white shorts and shirts with wet combed hair. They happily chatted together and rode their bikes as if there were no lack of anything, and as if the bombing they were subject to didn’t take place every night. They approached life with all the resilience they had at their disposal.
Growing up in the street is tough. If children are lucky enough to be well cared for by grandparents, parents, siblings, or even neighbours, and if they feel loved and protected, they can still be happy. And the hardships they face in childhood will prepare them for the tough road ahead.
Inge Colijn took up photography as a teenager. Later, as a student of Cultural Anthropology she took a course in Ethnographic Photography. While working for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Inge always carried a camera with her in the field, but photography was more of an afterthought to her main job. After retiring from UNHCR Inge enrolled in photography workshops and got excited about street photography. She is part of a group of street photographers who regularly travel together and these photos of Manila were taken during a trip to the Philippines in January 2020.
Photos by Inge were shown at Women Street Photographers exhibitions in Brussels and Kuala Lumpur. Inge was a finalist in the 2021 Life Framer competition Street-Life, curated by Bruce Gilden.Two of her photos were included in the book Tales of the Unwritten, published in connection with the Exhibit Around exhibition at the 2021 Trieste Photo Days. Recently Inge was a finalist in the (Disfa) Street Photography Awards Vol. 2.