Philippines: A dump, a garden, and an urban food hive

It wasn’t easy turning a 1,000-square-foot plot of wasteland into an oasis, the women explain.

By Elizabeth Stevens
Oxfam America
February 21, 2024

Excerpt:

Step through a door on a narrow street in Quezon City, the Philippines, and you enter the Garden of Hope.

It is lovely. Raised beds are arrayed across the sloping land, and the view of the hills and neighborhoods below gives a sense of wide-open space, not something you expect to find in the crowded slums of the country’s largest city. Healthy-looking fruits, vegetables, and herbs are growing here, including eggplants, peppers, sweet potatoes, radishes, bitter gourd, okra, herbs, greens, jute, flowers, bananas, and guava, and there’s not a weed in sight. The beds have colorful borders that turn out to be soda bottles—painted, upended, and lined up carefully, looking prettier in their afterlife than they ever did on supermarket shelves.

The gardeners—members of a women’s self-help group supported by Oxfam and partners—are pleased to tell their story. Which begins with a garbage dump.

Quezon City is home to a landfill that covers around 50 acres of land. Families once built shelters on its slopes and eked out a living rescuing anything of value they could find, but after catastrophic slides and fires, the dump was closed and capped by 2017. Fast forward to 2023. What was once a pile of trash is now a pile of trash with city neighborhoods on top, including paved streets and roadside shops—and the Garden of Hope.

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