Their fathers visited the Philippines to buy sex: now a generation of children want to track them down.
Brigette Sicat will not be going to school today. She sits, knees to chest, in a faded Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt, on the double mattress that makes up half her home. At night, she curls up here with her grandmother and two cousins, beneath the leaky sheets of corrugated iron that pass for a roof. Today, the monsoon rain is constant and the floor has turned to mud.
Brigette, 10, and her 11-year-old cousin, Arianne, aren’t in school because they have a stomach bug. There is no toilet and no running water, and no means of cooking other than over an open fire. Even when she is well, Brigette is often too hungry to tackle the 10-minute walk to school. Brigette’s mother is a sex worker. And Brigette knows that somewhere, far away, in a barely imaginable but often-thought-of place called England, she has a father. She knows only his given name: Matthew.
Asked what she would say to him, was she able to send him a message, Brigette is at first stumped for words. Then she bursts out in Tagalog: “Who are you? Where are you? Do you ever think about me?” Her grandmother, Juana, her fingers swollen with arthritis and suffering from a lack of medication for her diabetes, sits by her side.
Juana, Arianne, Brigette and Arianne’s brother, Aris, survive on 200 pesos (£3) a day, contributed by Arianne and Aris’s father. (He drives a Jeepney – a public transport vehicle originally converted from Jeeps abandoned by the US military.) Juana, 61, tells me she thinks she may not live much longer. But she wants the girls to finish school, to keep them from working in the bars.
These are the slums of Angeles City in the Philippines, and the children here represent a United Nations of parentage. Their faces tell that story – fair skin, black skin, Korean features, caucasian. That’s because their fathers, like Brigette’s, are sex tourists.
You can see these slums on Google Earth – a tumble of rusty corrugated iron and rubbish dumps stretching from the streets down to the river. When you visit, it is the smell, like soured milk, that hits you first. Closer to the dump, it is more pungent. Here you will find the poorest of the poor – including the women too old for the sex trade – earning what they can from combing through the fetid piles, looking for plastic and metals they can sell. There is the noise of motorbikes and rain and cocks crowing. The men hold cockfights nearby, the birds fighting to the death. It is illegal, but so is prostitution.
The men who live here are construction workers building the hotels that support the sex tourism industry, or drivers, or security guards. The children run at their heels or in the gutters or play a game involving throwing flip-flops at an old tin can. The mothers are often themselves the children of sex workers and foreigners without a name; these young children are a third generation abandoned by their fathers.
Angeles City, 85km north-west of Manila, is hardly the only place in Asia with a sex tourism trade, but it is one of its centers. There are perky Facebook groups and dedicated websites that cater to the men who come here: Angeles City, they say, is a place where “you can’t help but get laid”.
The specialty of the town is the “girlfriend experience”, or GFE; you pay a woman to be your “girlfriend” for a day, a night, a week or a month. This can include going on holidays to one of the beautiful resorts out of sight of Filipino poverty, or just staying at a client’s hotel, meeting his every desire.
This is how Brigette’s mother, Aiza, met Matthew, a regular visitor to the city’s sex bars. He visited at least twice a year and often saw Aiza. When, after a few visits during which he had been her “regular”, she told him she was pregnant, he said he had already paid for the sex: it was her fault if she got pregnant.