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MANILA: In teeming Manila, where poverty runs deep and millions lack adequate shelter, some of the living have found refuge among the dead.
Laileah Cuetara’s shanty sits atop a pair of raised tombs inside the Philippine capital’s Manila North Cemetery, a sprawling 54-hectare public graveyard that is home to about 6,000 informal settlers and at least a million deceased Filipinos.
The tiny wood structure where she lives with her partner and two children is filled from side to side with a foam mattress, shelves, a television and picture frames. In the doorway, a statue of an angel stands on an infant’s crypt that doubles as a table.
The 36-year-old makes around 3,000 pesos ($51) a month selling sweets, drinks and biscuits to cemetery visitors.
Over All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, when millions of Filipinos visit the graves of departed loved ones, she and her partner receive up to 1,700 pesos for each of the 30 tombs they clean and tend to throughout the year.
But the money they earn is far too little to move, she said ahead of the November 1-2 holidays.
“With the high prices of basic goods nowadays, it’s very difficult to improve our living conditions,” said Cuetara, who moved into the cemetery in 2008 after a family conflict forced her from her home in the Manila suburbs.
A former Filipino congressman this year estimated 3 million people lacked adequate housing in Metro Manila, while a 2023 United Nations report predicted as many as 22 million across the archipelago nation could face that predicament by 2040.
For 51-year-old Priscilla Buan, who was born inside the graveyard and has raised her children among the tombs, nothing is more terrifying than the demolition orders that follow occasional complaints from visitors.
“Whenever we hear about demolition orders, we remove our belongings ... We hide (the appliances) in a different mausoleum so they won’t be seen,” the third-generation dweller said, saying demolitions happen at least once a year.

Buan and her family of four sleep atop two crypts in a mausoleum. The remaining area has been repurposed into a living room complete with a sofa, cabinet and appliances. She sells snacks and small goods from the tomb’s grilled window.
“Even if I wanted to, we don’t have money to buy a house,” Buan said.
But there has been a “concerning” increase in the number of cemetery dwellers, said Vicente Eliver of the Kapatiran-Kaunlaran Foundation, which has been providing livelihood and educational programs to the graveyard residents since 2010.
Only the grave caretakers and their families once lived there, Eliver said.
“But their children got married, had kids and grandkids who also decided to live inside the cemetery,” he said.
Most of those living inside the cemetery say they have permission to occupy mausoleums or build shanties on top of graves in exchange for keeping them clean.
They tap into existing power lines for electricity and pay 3 pesos per gallon of water from nearby wells.
But the cemetery director, Daniel Tan, said the informal arrangement was not meant to be a long-term one.
“This is a cemetery, it’s for the dead and not for the living, so people are really not allowed to live here,” he said.
“We allow (the caretakers) because of the mausoleums that they have to maintain. We just regulate them,” said Tan, adding the city was attempting to find permanent homes elsewhere but offering no specifics.
Cuetara, who showed a permission letter from the owner of the tomb where she resides, said living inside the cemetery was no one’s first choice.
Her 11-year-old son has faced bullying at school over the family’s address, while her six-year-old daughter is forever drawing houses that adorn the inside of their makeshift dwelling.
“I also want to live outside (the cemetery) ... who doesn’t?” Cuetara said.
“All of us here dream of having a house outside, but ... it’s hard, very hard.”

LONDON: King Charles III is stripping his disgraced brother Prince Andrew of his remaining titles and evicting him from his royal residence after weeks of pressure to act over Andrew’s relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Buckingham Palace said Thursday that the king has “initiated a formal process to remove the Style, Titles and Honours of Prince Andrew.”
Andrew will be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and not as a prince, and he will move from his Royal Lodge residence into “private accommodation.”

Pressure had been growing on the palace to oust the prince from Royal Lodge after he surrendered his use of the title Duke of York earlier this month over his friendship with Epstein and allegations by one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre.
But the king went even further, stripping him of the title of prince that he has had since birth as a child of a monarch, the late Queen Elizabeth II.
“These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him,” the palace said. “Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.”
Andrew faced a new round of public opprobrium after emails emerged earlier this month showing he had remained in contact with Epstein longer than he previously admitted.
That news was followed by publication of a posthumous memoir by Epstein accuser Giuffre, who alleged she had sex with Andrew when she was 17. “Nobody’s Girl” detailed three alleged sexual encounters with Andrew, who she said acted as if he believed “having sex with me was his birthright.”
Andrew, 65, has long denied Giuffre’s claims, but stepped down from royal duties after a disastrous November 2019 BBC interview in which he attempted to rebut her allegations.
Andrew paid millions in an out-of-court settlement in 2022 after Giuffre filed a civil suit against him in New York. While he didn’t admit wrongdoing, he acknowledged Giuffre’s suffering as a victim of sex trafficking.
Giuffre died by suicide in April at the age of 41.