Cross or a Condom

Children of Ulingan line up to receive their free weekly meal from non profit group Project Pearl, that seeks to help impoverished children in the aquatter charcoal community of Ulingan, a squatter community in the North Harbour of Manila, where families work as Ulingeros, or charcoal workers. Many of the workers in Ulingan are small children. Some are teenagers and a few were even as young as six or seven, unable to attend school because of poverty.

Manila, the capital of the Philippines, is one of the fastest growing cities on earth and evidence of population pressure is everywhere. Tens of millions of people in the Philippines live in poverty and the country also has one of the highest birth rates in Asia. In this devoutly Catholic country there are moves to introduce a reproductive health bill to provide free contraception. The Church, fearing a breakdown in family values, is fiercely resisting the move, and blames the widespread poverty on bad government rather than population growth.