Discombobulated

Visiting a slum for the first time? Here’s the general vibe…

Imagine you’re jet-lagged, suffering from sun-stroke and coming out of general anaesthetic, all at the same time. Then you drink a bottle of reisling in the midday sun, just before stepping onto the Rotor at Luna Park. Just as it fires up, someone tells you you’re adopted. And all the while you’re breathing through a sock filled with chicken and corn soup. Yep, walking into a slum is other-worldly, to say the least.

Baseco from Pedder’s upper room

Baseco is roughly one square kilometre of rubbishy rubble, a muddy septic swamp where 100 000 people live. It is a catacomb of passageways and corridors between ramshackle dwellings, like cubby-houses made out of rotting ply-board, tarpaulins, hessian bags, string, bicycle tyres and handkerchiefs, put together with the tools from a child’s toy box.

“Better bring your gumboots, son, better bring your really good ones…”

While we wend our way through narrow alleys on carefully positioned rocks and stepping stones to keep our feet (and sometimes the bottom half of our bodies) out of the sludge, we also watch our faces as all the awnings and low roofs are at eye level, and made out of beams with rusty nails and dirty corrugated iron. There is a beach where instead of sand it is rubbish.

Pedder on “Flying Toilet Bag Beach”.
Don’t ask. You don’t want to know.

It is intense. Noise, movement, roosters, dogs, people everywhere. And while it is primitive and earthy, every second home seems to have some sort of amazing sound system belting out Celine Dion or some indefinable Filipino pop sensation or Christian anthem. We meet all sorts of people…

Two kids jumped off the roof onto my back. I didn’t stand a chance.

Little kids who appear out of dark holes and ask to have their photo taken with you. And their teeth are amazing. Or missing.

Little kids in pristine white uniforms on their way to school.

A pretty twenty-one year old, wearing an Angry Birds t-shirt. She is pregnant… with her fifth child.

All day, every day, for thousands of families.

A family sitting in their stoop peeling garlic. It will take them twelve hours to do a 15kg bag, for 50 peso profit (=$1.25 income for the day). This is possibly the most common industry we see around the slum.

Some “gangsta” teens wearing immaculately white basketball outfits.

Babies, babies, everywhere. Thank you Pope Benedict XVI! Let’s have 10!

A lot of women. With babies.

A guy wearing boxer shorts and thongs, chipping away with a hammer and chisel at a chunk of concrete the size of a coffee table, to get out the reo-bars, for resale.

Women’s bible study, hosted in microwave oven.

A women’s Bible Study, sharing and crying and laughing together, and thanking God for all the blessings they have in their lives (I know, right?).

A pretty young woman with shiny hair and fashionable clothes, holding a baby. She is a person you would easily meet at a summer barbeque in Sydney, talk about work and church and kids and… except she is squatting on a pile of rubbish, using a metal hook to dig for plastic bags to wash and resell.

Meth Lab central in distance. I got a long way away before pulling the camera out, because of talk around attack dogs. And M7s.

Some guys running a meth lab. Our host, tough talking and tattooed Mark Pedder, says he won’t walk here at night because they have attack dogs and M7 machine guns. And every few months, the SWAT teams come in and kill a bunch of guys, to keep them in line. Great.

Shootin’ hoops for 1/4 cent.

A bunch of boys playing basketball, and then while you’re standing there laughing and taking photos, one of them strolls off court, drops his strides, squats down and does what he clearly needs to do.

Mere losing at “Hide ‘n’ Seek” to a five year old.

Women hanging out in each other’s homes, with kids and adults just popping by to say hello.

It is a different world.

It’s good to be here, but it’s not easy.