Sunstar Essay: Remembering Ellah

Saturday, October 29, 2011

PRETTY ducklings’ was the caption of a photo in Sun.Star Cebu in an issue this week. The front page on its bottom glittered in yellow as four child dancers swung to the itik-itik skip-hop-and-slide dance during the Suroy-Suroy sa Sugbo welcome for visitors in Ginatilan. Small girls happy in yellow dresses.

You’d look and look, the sight is very pleasant. The child is always an attractive sense in our life. See her or him, charming on a stage or in the street during a parade, see the swing and sway, the beat in the air—they are all like good news at the start of a good day.

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But how do you feel when the face of small girl Ellah Joy Pique occurs to you weeks after the incident? She was kidnapped and killed.

She is gone and the ones who caused her death should pay. That’s the feeling of mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, siblings, relatives and neighbors, the world with children.

Yesterday at the mall, a friend and I came across a small girl of perhaps five years old set for a Halloween Party. My friend, who is a Cebu tourist from NY, asked the mother for a chance to take photos, and the lovely kid posed quickly, the camera clicking away from stance to stance.

A child has charm.

But there was a time when the child was just part of the parents’ collection of property or chattel. In ancient Babylonia (which was the first metropolis the world knew), there was a set of laws in codes under the leadership of Hammurabi, the first Babylonian king years before Christ.

In the codes of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC), the law gave the father all the right to rule over his child who must honor and respect the man absolutely (no matter how it hurts), not any less.

The father could discipline the child even way beyond what we’d consider in our day as inhuman, like cut the son’s tongue, or fingers, for punishment.

The father could also sell his child as payment of debts, thus even as collateral! This is not to talk of the lack of rights (in our eyes) of the girls who, in China long ago, would be sold out to rich strangers who needed slaves, in order for the families to survive on the sale.

But the first signs of fairness came in the fact that the child would be ruled over as a slave within only three years in the son’s life, according to Code 117 of Hammurabi.

Kidnapping of children in the Philippines may be for money in rich children’s ransoms, and recently for foreign pedophile groups who kidnap children from the provinces and take them to hideouts where they become child prostitutes.

Then the matter of child’s rights became an issue in some places across the globe, starting with New York City in the 1800s.

This is the story of an Ellah who would have been another Ellen.

Thoughts on the child’s rights which came after the story of an abused small girl broke out in media, eventually in court. The idea of a law or laws protecting the child came about.

Mary Ellen Wilson from birth had several parents, her biological father having died and the mother unable to support her. Then the woman “boarded” the child, that is, gave her to another couple where the boy or girl would serve in change for a place to stay and food to eat.

Then Mary Ellen went from parent to parent. They abused her and physically tortured her, according to neighbors and this, the world got to know.

Then neighbors and fighters for rights were inspired to wage a kind of war for Mary Ellen who was found locked away in a tenement building at two years old. Thus, the New York state, and the country as a whole, formed a child protection system.

A movie was made of Mary Ellen’s life entitled “Out of the Darkness.” Nourished kindly, she then grew up with the family of a religious mission worker and fighter for the child’s rights, Etta Wheeler, whose mother adopted Mary Ellen. Then on the mother’s death, Mary Ellen’s married sister took over. The child grew into a woman and got married at 24. One of her two daughters she named Etta.

Mary Ellen died at the age of 92. To a child, she changed the world, somewhat.

(ecuizon@gmail.com)