Haven for Manila's unwanted kids

To the untrained eye, 202 Aldrin Walk looks like the home of any other Manila couple with young children. There are baby clothes on the washing line, plastic toys in the garden and from somewhere inside the sound of an infant demanding attention.

Only when you press the bell is the air of cosy, tropical urbanity broken. Toddlers come rushing from everywhere. One youngster shoves pudgy hands through the bars of the gate and shouts 'Hello, good afternoon'. Kenneth, even by healthy baby standards, is rather fat.

'He's on steroids,' said Ernie Fable, occupier of number 202. It is a statement of such frankness that I find myself unable to think of anything to say in response. Yet it is nothing to what Shirley, Ernie's wife, is about to reveal.

Five minutes later we are sitting in the Fables' kitchen. Mrs Fable produces a photograph album and, without ceremony, plops a picture on to the table.

At first glance it appears to show a huge, pink party balloon, so over-inflated and stretched it appears one more puff of air would burst it. But the balloon has two legs. It has arms, a mouth and eyes. Or what appear to be eyes. There are no irises, just egg-shell white sockets. On the head, for I have now realised that this is a child, is a suppurating wound which, if I am judging the proportions correctly, is as big as an adult hand.

'This is Mernesto,' Mrs Fable said. 'He died a few months ago. But he taught us to love the unlovable.' If the intention was to shock, Mrs Fable had succeeded. Not only was I shaken by what I saw, a baby on the verge of an unpleasant death from hydrocephalus, but I was also shaken by the strength of my own revulsion. Mrs Fable handed me more photographs, of healthy children, and I compound my own sense of guilt by placing them on the table on top of the photograph of Mernesto so I do not have to look at him any more.