Roperos: Home for seniors

Thursday, December 29, 2011

GIVING due respect and attention to senior citizens is the recent accepted cultural trend. This is a social feature in many materially advanced countries. Other nations are drawn to assume similar humane attitude for their senior citizens.

There have been many instances in the past when senior citizens have become problems to their kin. It has been a recognized cultural virtue for us Filipinos to hold our elders in very high respect to the point that the family considers it a deep shame if the old folks are left untended. This is even more so today, with the government making it a legal obligation.

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The trend in recent years is to set up various social projects that extend all forms of assistance and benefits to senior citizens. I am sure that all municipalities and cities of the country have their respective office that manages senior citizens affairs. Some of these offices extend periodic financial assistance to the seniors in the community on top of other material benefits they are allowed by law to enjoy.

A few days ago, I read in this daily the report that the recently appointed head of Cebu City’s Office of Senior Citizens Affairs (OSCA) will include in his plans the setting up of a home for senior citizens. It is the first time I heard of a program that would extend housing facilities to senior citizens, perhaps those whose families can ill-afford to extend a decent and healthful life to the old ones.

This plan is certainly sound and innovative, a first that I know of, in our part of the country. But can it be realized? Note that the proponent is someone who is also new to the care of senior citizens. In fact, from the tone of his statements, one can find a tinge of tentativeness. But I am definitely hopeful that such a plan would materialize simply because it would set an example for the rest.

I know that in the United States, operating and managing a home for the aged is not purely a public concern but is also a private enterprise run for profit as a private and personal enterprise. Many of their care-givers are Filipinos. And they get good pay. The reason these homes thrive is because, unlike Filipinos, Americans do not nourish as much compassion for their aged kin as we do, and hence pay others to care for them.

Under this consideration, I am not sure whether opening a public home for our seniors would not run against the grain of our uniquely sentimental culture and deeply loving nature towards our blood kin, especially towards the ones whom we have lived with all our waking and sleeping lives.

I, for one, would not like to leave a mother or father, or a sibling, in a home run by strangers.