They built at the elbow where the bridge meets the land, driving bamboo poles into the water as a frame -- adding whatever they could find to buttress the 13 separate structures from the water's destructive flow.
The river freely gave up its throwaway bounty. All they had to buy were nails.
"At first I thought it was a strange place to live," said Evelyn Recto. "But there was nowhere else."
Though lovingly built, their soon-to-be-demolished home has scraps of vinyl as flooring. Wooden matting is strung overhead to shield the family from chunks of concrete rattled loose from the bridge's underbelly by the big trucks lumbering across the span.
A painting of the Last Supper and a photo of a dashing Philippine actor hawking cellphones cover holes in the wall. A lone bulb strung to a post provides the only light. It's connected to a home nearby, a bootleg service for which the family pays 75 cents a day.
At the far end of the hovel, over the running water below, a hole in the flooring presumably serves as the family toilet. At all times, there is an overwhelming stench of industrial rot, raw sewage and human excrement.
Still, a tightknit family holds its own here.
On a wooden console are written in English the first names of the eight family members. Evelyn said she uses the letters to teach the children to read. None but Ana attend school. And now she is too sick to go.
The children, 2 to 17, laugh and play, as though unaware of the cruel hand that was dealt to them.
"I want to provide better for my family," Mauricio said. "Sometimes I blame myself. I can't blame anybody else for this life."
He and others here make $2 a day lugging mammoth chests of frozen fish at a local market. The women and children spend their days on the river's edge, fishing for plastic bags and recyclables.
The bridge families don't trust politicians. They come to the shantytowns looking for votes. When in office, they try to close down the communities of poor people with nowhere else left to go, family members say.
"They give us a handshake and nothing else," Mauricio said.
Now, the families have been given a vague promise of a better life. On Monday, city officials arrived to take a census and dole out macaroni and corned beef soup to the hungry families.
Today, they said, trucks will come to clear away the remaining wood that makes up their homes, and cart it off to the open land for reuse.
As he waited, Mauricio Recto rued leaving this cursed but beloved home. "There are those whose lives are worse than ours, just by a little bit," he said.
"At least we have a roof. But that will be gone tomorrow."
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john.glionna@latimes.com
