Tondo and Mayor Isko Moreno

There is a fetid smell that pervades the air. I couldn’t tell if it was from a nearby dumpsite or a dead body. Giant trucks fill the roads. Children – some half naked, some with fake tattoos – are roaming the narrow streets. I wonder how many children have been killed by these trucks and other speeding cars.

Tondo, in Manila’s belly, is a netherworld of sorts; home to the country’s poorest. It is Bronx. It is Orangi Town. It is Slumdog Millionaire’s Dharavi. Some of its barangays are filled with tattooed gangsters and other desperate dwellers trapped in a vicious cruel cycle for survival. It’s a haven for both big-time criminals and thugs doing petty crimes.

Some call it a god-forsaken place. “You’ll never get out of there, alive.”

But there are some who eke out an honest living to get out of poverty and some of them, like one Francisco Domagoso, get lucky.

Domagoso once worked as a scavenger in Tondo and a cab driver to send himself to school. “Batang Tondo ako!” he likes to say.

We all know who he is. Domagoso is Isko Moreno, the matinee idol-turned-politician who is now Manileños’ pride and everyone’s “Yorme.”

The mayor walks in and time stops. The crowd parts like the Red Sea to welcome the man who is perhaps Metro Manila’s most popular city mayor nowadays.

I met him for the first time last week right in the heart of Tondo. When he speaks, everyone listens. In an instant, I began to understand why he has become so popular.

Mayor Isko makes sense. He doesn’t go up the stage to dish out endless jokes, stories of machismo or tales of how great his manhood is. He doesn’t entertain the masses with empty promises of this and that.

On the day I heard him speak, before a crowd of Tondo dwellers and then some, he talked about obeying the law and how simply doing that can make Manila great again.

It was refreshing to listen to him, especially when you hear so many clowns in power shamelessly talking about nonsense nowadays.

Orchestra

“What we want is to create an orchestra composed of different musical instruments and musicians, singing and playing one music in harmony, to be conducted by one – which is not me – but the law. Without the law, chaos will arise,” Mayor Isko says.

There is just too much anarchy and tyranny around us, says the man of the hour.

How very true.

Does he want to be president one day? I’m sure he does. Who among them don’t want that? He is, after all, a politician who is driven by dreams and ambitions. That’s not necessarily bad, especially if you want to really serve the country. Perhaps, it was those dreams and ambitions that got him out of poverty and out of Tondo in the first place.

Litmus test

And that for me will be his litmus test – to get the rest of the people of Tondo out of their vicious cycle of poverty.

We all know why Tondo, population 700,000, remains the way it is. It’s one big universe of “masa” voters. Manila has a population of 1.8 million and nearly half of that is from this poverty-stricken district. Rid Tondo of poverty, get everyone out of their desperate situations and the politician loses his voters. It’s no wonder that to this day, mayors and lawmakers have come and gone, yet Tondo is still the poor sprawling shantytown that it has always been.

It is Ground Zero of politicians’ broken campaign promises. It is the center of Duterte’s drug war. It is where NGOs and parachuting journalists make poverty porn. It is the guinea pig for foreign aid.

Indeed, even as more people try to help Tondo, the more it stays the same.

This is where Yorme can really make a difference. He should fix Tondo with real solutions and not palliatives – painting the shanties pink or blue just so they look pleasing to the eyes as what other city mayors have done in the slum areas in their cities won’t do.

Providing jobs, in-city relocation, addressing water and sanitation problems and sending the children to school can help get Tondo out of its cycle of poverty.

Andres Cristobal Cruz’s famous 1986 novel “Ang Tundo Man May Langit Din,” is just one testament that nothing much has changed in Tondo. While the novel is a story about love and romance among the people of Tondo, it showed vignettes of how poor and desperate the place is. Imagine, the book was published 33 years ago and yet Tondo is still the same.

I am not expecting to see heaven descend on Tondo, but it would be good to see it get out of its hellish situation. When that happens, Yorme would have done something really good for Manila’s most impoverished district, once upon a time, his very own home.

Iris Gonzales’ email address is [email protected].

Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at eyesgonzales.com