Jane Walker picks her way barefoot through stinking black mud at Manila's Smokey Mountain dumpsite, an apparition among the garbage collectors she wants to rescue from their wretched poverty."Why are you not in our school today?" she asks a malnourished child with a gaunt frame and bloodshot eyes.
"I told you I would be looking for my students, you should come even if you are late," she gently scolds the child, before giving him a tight embrace. "I want you to come back to school and join us tomorrow," she says.
A former executive with a British publishing house, the 43-year-old has been a fixture at Smokey Mountain for more than a decade, searching for children to feed and send to school in what was initially a quest for personal salvation.
Walker, from Britain, first arrived in Manila as a tourist in 1996, expecting a Southeast Asian tropical paradise.
Instead, she stumbled into an overpopulated and chaotic city, where children were left to beg on the streets and homeless families lived in cardboard boxes in cemeteries.
Covering a sprawling bayside area near Manila's Tondo district, Smokey Mountain was an embarrassing symbol of the crushing poverty and social inequalities that still exist in the Philippines.
Much of the site has now been transformed into low-cost tenement housing for the poor. But clusters of families still squat on its fringes, and a large portion remains a permanent open dump for thousands of tonnes of daily refuse.
Three years after Walker's first visit, another dump in Manila's northern Payatas district - ironically called the "Promised Land" - triggered an avalanche that buried alive an estimated 200 garbage pickers.
"I saw the children, there was a void where a smile should have been, emptiness in their eyes," Walker said.
With the images she saw haunting her, Walker returned to Britain and set up the Philippine Christian Foundation.
Walker eventually quit her publishing job and took on three others to save more money.
Her foundation converted an old government warehouse near Smokey Mountain into a school offering basic elementary education to children of garbage pickers as well as vocational training for their parents.
Volunteers are not in short supply and Walker's vision has spread to the point that the foundation now employs dozens of teachers and health workers. It has also been attracting a lot of attention from potential donors.
"She is an angel around here," says senior teacher Filemon Jubta, who left a government- run school to help out.
He said about 500 children are enrolled in the school. Books and supplies are free, but they have to make do with spartan accommodation.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
