Fr Iacono expects to use volunteer labour to build it but needs help to raise roughly the same amount again to purchase the necessary materials. Around 170 families live in crushing poverty on the infamous Smokey Mountain in makeshift huts built out of what materials they can salvage and afford to keep from the dump trucks that come each day. They are just the poorest of Cebu s urban poor, the roughly 600,000 squatters and slum dwellers who left impoverished rural areas for the city with hopes of securing a better life. In 2001 the children can still die of malnutrition, and there are many infectious diseases, says Fr Iacono from the St Pius Church presbytery in Enmore where he is parish priest. The only water there is in stagnant pools.
People have to walk for sometimes four kms every day just to get water.
And when the garbage trucks come they fight over the garbage. Iacono has just returned from a month s stay in Cebu with an album full of photos. I do miss them, he says. I find them such a fascinating people their smiles, their simplicity, their faith, their way of life. He points to a picture of a child crouching on the mountainside of refuse, cloaked by the hot, toxic fumes that rise off it constantly.