Estremera: That's just the way it is

Saturday, February 18, 2012

IN LAPINIG, children have to walk five kilometers to the next sitio, Malikongkong, where the primary school is. Being a primary school, it only offers multi-grade classes up to fourth grade.

Jason is all set to ask for the hand of the girl he wants to marry, I was told. The clueless romantic among us may go, aaaawwwwww…

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I’m not. The news is instead met with a loud, “What?”

Jason, after all, was just a young dark boy when I first met him in my first visits to the mountain villages of Marilog District in 2009. His father is the sitio leader in Balawal in Barangay Marilog, a faraway village traversed by horsetrails. He’s not much older now. Just 15. Fifteen and getting married. And in those places, babies will follow, in regular intervals.

Roberto lives in sitio Lapinig, the neighboring sitio of Balawal. At 13, he is in third grade. In two years he will be 15. Will he make it past elementary school? We doubt. Most likely he too will be married before he turns 20. That is how it is.

In Lapinig, children have to walk five kilometers to the next sitio, Malikongkong, where the primary school is. Being a primary school, it only offers multi-grade classes up to fourth grade.

It is no wonder that most people in the hinterlands of Marilog only reach fourth grade. Intermediate school or fifth to sixth grade is up there nearer the highway.

Given the long walk up the slippery slopes, parents are not inclined to send their seven-year-old children to school. The walk is just too hard for the young. Only the grim and determined, mostly girls, make the grade on time.

Alona, Roberto’s cousin is 9 and is in third grade. Her small feet splayed from all that walking. With money being very difficult to come by, slippers are a luxury, and so the pairs they get are used only inside the classroom. While walking up and down the slopes, their slippers are held in their hands for safekeeping.

Alona’s aunt, her mother’s sister has five children, the second to the youngest having been born with cataracts on both eyes. At just 27, a passel of children tag along with her. She’s lucky to have just five at her age. With marrying age as early as 14, a mother can already have a dozen children before 30. And it’s not unusual there.

The idea of “daghan (many)” when it comes to children in those parts an shock any lowlander, because many starts at five, what to us will already been too many.

In a village farther away in Maragusan called Langgawisan, the houses look better. Wood and concrete houses with iron sheets as roof are common. Houses have latrines, and there are not as many children.

This predominantly Mandaya village can be reached via a one-hour skylab ride and three to four hours walk up and down hills and dales. This is father than most villages in Marilog. But poverty is not as stark.

“Daghan na siyang anak (He has many children),” Datu Eliseo Marundan said of Junjun, his nephew who was assigned to be my guide back to the mountain road. Daghan for him was “four”. To the Matigsalugs of Marilog four would have been the number of children of a family that is still starting up. In that faraway village reachable only by an hour on skylab and three to four hours walk, they also have a national high school. A very small one.

It’s unfair to compare, the self-righteous among us may say. But the comparison is but to show how it should be and what a little more education can do. Where children have to walk long and hard to get primary schooling, the prospect of settling down and starting their own family even at a very young age is fanned by both culture and absence of alternatives. For them, there is nothing wrong in marrying young, nor is there anything wrong in being dirt poor. That’s just how it is and how it will always be. But we know it shouldn’t. There are basic services that everyone should have, and knowing that these children are in our city makes the reality more bitter to accept.

For what is Maragusan as compared to Davao City? But that is how it is and, from how it looks, will be for a long time.

saestremera@yahoo.com. Follow me at http://saestremera.wordpress.com/