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Sunday, January 19, 2003
Obenieta: In praise of small palms
By Myke U. Obenieta
Sun.star essay
As long as they got babies bawling out in their arms, paupers need not bleat out the blues to break your heart. All they have to do, to get the loose tokens of your tender mercies, is shove their children’s palms straight to your face.
It takes a child’s hand to do wonders, yes. As it was when Badjao children took the breath away of devotees and tourists killing time while waiting in droves for the docking at Pier Uno of the Sto. Niño fluvial parade early morning yesterday. Goading the little ones to leap from their boats and pull off such hand-to-mouth stunt of collecting all the coins hurled to the sea, someone in the crowd could have wished: If only the fallen world were redeemed just as breezily, retrieved in one fell swoop like a five-peso coin in the clutch of these sunburnt kids.
All it takes to get smug, in a world wobbling on the jagged edge of innocence, is to belittle a child’s hand. Consider how the planet looks snug on the palm of the Sto. Niño, instead of it in the clasp of big boys like George Bush who might as well have fancied the world was no bigger than a toy ball, or the bombs that fall over Baghdad and Kabul.
After the adults cut corners on the way to wisdom, tripping on the light of their wanton notions, is it still a puzzle why the world can easily be whittled down to fit a hellhole?
Is it small wonder why someone like “Daddy Divine” still dreams of getting the upper hand in the hills of Barangay Buhisan? Consider how he lorded over some women and children—as young as four years old, so alleged the reports—whom he compels to gather rocks, limestone and gravel to prop up the caves and tunnels he prepares “to shelter mankind for the day when the heavens rain fire and brimstone.” That, by the way, is something that Edgar Jurado, one of the children under Daddy Divine’s beck and call, never lived long to witness after his pickaxe hit a hard rock and bounced back smack in his chest.
Then again, God doesn’t have to behave like a brat to bring doom to children whom He hailed as “blessed” in the Beatitudes. Aside from Bush, Daddy Divine and the rest of them who has never outgrown the childish penchant at playing god, there’s a whole global malaise spawning a monster, devouring the innocents.
If the world is getting smaller every day, it might just as well for the children who must bear its burden.
Millions of them around the world are working in forced and bonded labor, stressed the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), whose Executive Director Carol Bellamy lamented: “Child labor reinforces a cruel cycle of deprivation. On one hand, it is symptomatic of widespread and deeply entrenched global poverty. On the other hand, because it usually keeps children out of school, in poor health, and subject to psychological and physical abuses, it reinforces this poverty by keeping yet another generation from fulfilling anything close to its potential.
In a report called “A Future Without Child Labor,” approximately 246 million children between five and 17 years old—one out of every six children in the world—are sweating it out instead of attending school.”
Of these, at least 180 million kids, ages five to 17, are groaning under the worst forms of slavery: prostitution, trafficking, and hazardous work. The UN said the largest number (127 million) of working children aged 14 and under can be found in the Asia-Pacific region.
Here in the Philippines, so concludes the result of the latest survey of the National Statistics Office, four million Filipino children aged five to 17 are engaged in economic activity. The survey adds that about 60 percent of these kids are exposed to dangers, such as physical, biological, parasitic, viral, and chemical hazards.
Particularly poignant and deserving of our interventions,” thus US Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, speaking in a conference in Switzerland last year, shed light on the plight of children forced not only into slavery but also into combat.
Adult Wars, Child Soldiers,” so goes the title of Unicef study based on interviews with young warriors from Asia, including Filipino child combatants under the aegis of the New Peoples’ Army and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
According to the report, “as many as one-quarter of the world’s 300,000 child soldiers are serving in the Philippines and other parts of the Asia-Pacific region. Combatants recruited as young as seven are often forced to commit murder and rape, the UN added. Stressing it violates international law and should be considered “an illegal and morally reprehensible practice that has no place in civilized societies,” Bellamy stressed, “We want government and non-state parties to stop and desist.”
If it’s any comfort, the little saint is still smiling in spite of the world on His little palm. If that’s only a child’s notion, all the louder the world needs to hear—above the sound of teeth gnashing—this plea: Pit Señor, kaloy-i kami!
(January 19, 2003 issue)
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