“It used to drive us crazy, the trash and sewage, the bad smells and children getting sick with dengue fever,” says Gloria Solomon. With her husband and four children, 50-year-old Solomon lives in a tiny, eight sq metre shanty in an informal settlement in Manila. Their home backs on to a small stream, Estero de Paco, a tributary of the city’s Pasig River.
Thanks to a year of intensive restoration of this canalised waterway, the view from Solomon’s home is no longer that of a detritus-filled open sewer, but of an attractive, grass-banked environment where a system of plants and micro-organisms helps to clean the water. “We’re much happier,” she says. “It’s nice to see the estero getting cleaner. Families are now doing business selling snacks by the waterside.”
