Ella Araza, 10, sits on a tiny plastic box in her Manila slum, trying to finish her homework before the afternoon sun raises temperatures to unbearable levels.
The Philippines closed more than 47,000 schools nationwide starting Monday, as the temperature in Manila reached a record high of 38.8C over the weekend.
More than 7,000 schools were still closed on Thursday, including Ella elementary school in the capital.
Many schools in the tropical country have no air conditioning and students must sweat in poorly ventilated classrooms, but conditions in Baseco, the infamous Manila docklands slum, are even more desperate.
“The heat makes her lazy. Sometimes she doesn’t do her homework online,” explains Cindella Manabat, 29, Ella’s mother, to AFP from this shantytown which houses 65,000 inhabitants over half a square kilometer.
In their tiny one-room home, Ella checks her mother’s cell phone to decipher the day’s lesson, which her teacher posts online.
The apartment, which has no running water, must remain dark because Ella’s younger brother, Prince, suffers from cerebral palsy and could suffer an epileptic seizure.
A few doors away, sixth-grader Jalian Mangampo and his younger brother Sherwin lie on the single bed they share and try to finish their school work on their cellphones.
Two more weeks of extreme heat
Online lessons aren’t cheap: Siblings must deposit 5 pesos (11 cents) into a neighbor’s wifi vending machine to get three hours of Internet access.
Their widowed mother, trader Richel Mangampo, 43, took out a high-interest loan to buy them a cell phone for 8,500 pesos ($202). A stranger had previously given the siblings another phone.
“The heat is terrible because the ceiling is very low,” the mother said, pointing to the corrugated iron roof that she partially covered with a piece of plywood to insulate against the heat. “We have to go out from time to time to be able to breathe.”
But she does not allow her children to stay outside for too long, because the scorching sun is not the only danger at Baseco: “Young people armed with broken bottles fight each other after getting high while sniffing glue” , she says.
The state weather service warned that extreme heat would persist for at least the next two weeks, meaning students could be stuck at home until the end of the school year on May 31.
Rash
Ms. Mangampo explains that she gives her children two baths a day, one in the morning and the other before bed, “it is so hot that they have difficulty falling asleep.”
Ms Manabat says her daughter Ella often complains because the family has only one electric fan which has to be shared at night.
The mother and her three children, including a one-year-old baby, sleep on the bed while her boyfriend, an interior designer, sleeps in his boxers on the floor. The front door remains open for ventilation.
” She [la fille] sometimes gets heat rash,” says the mother, adding that the irritation distracted Ella from her schoolwork.
But Ms. Mangampo, whose children also have rashes, avoids taking them to the doctor because it costs too much.
“We swim in the sea on Sundays. The boils disappear in no time,” she says, referring to nearby Manila Bay, declared a “no-swimming zone” by the government a few years ago due to extreme pollution.