Some 50 boys and girls — mostly minors and orphans by choice and children largely abandoned by their parents – and all known drug users, are back at Sangandaan Public Cemetery in Caloocan City after being displaced by the All Saints’ Day crowd.
The street children, the youngest at nine, were unceremoniously "thrown out" of their places at the cemetery and out into the streets even days before.
But they said there was nothing to it. They have become used to the ritual. They said they will still come home to it after the people who visited their dead have gone home.
Their presence at the cemetery has long been a well-known secret but most people, including those in government, have apparently given up on them.
Even the police have stopped taking them and locking them up in jail, a barangay watchman in the area, who declined to be named told The STAR. "The police said they no longer file cases because their efforts are only wasted."
The authorities, he said, have a point there. "We arrest them, turn them over to the Department of Social Welfare and Development. And later they’re back," he said, quoting one police officer stationed in the area. "If the police have stopped doing what they must, what can you expect from us?"
On Nov. 1, while doing the rounds at the cemetery, The STAR found a knot of disheveled, grimy, emaciated boys barely in their teens, swarming around one of the older ones dispensing their individual dose of rugby, a common solvent.
The others were already sprawled on the pavement, some sitting and staring groggily mumbling to themselves while the others slinked away behind a makeshift stall.
‘Pushers’ buy a bottle for P35 from a local hardware and earn double selling the solvent at P5 per dose.
All these were happening unhampered and openly less than a hundred feet from a tent where the barangay police officers were stationed.
At 9 a.m. that same day, a 24-year-old woman from this group died in agony on the sidewalk just outside the cemetery walls, from complications caused by years of drug abuse.