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Sunday, December 12, 2004
Tabada: Seeking family
By Mayette Q. Tabada
Matamata
ACCORDING to social work parlance, misery wears three faces.
There are the surrendered, children whose parents don’t want to keep them, for poverty, resentment or other reasons. After six months, the parents sign a deed of voluntary commitment. Legally, the child is free and available for adoption. In human terms, the parents are free from committing further to a child they were responsible for bringing to this world.
The abandoned are like pieces of baggage left for other people to find and do with as they see fit. Infants left in hospital bassinets may have a name, a birth certificate, a past—they travel light for not having anyone’s commitment.
Foundlings make awful surprises, specially if rodents or even ants get to the infants first before they are discovered in their makeshift homes: grocery bags and shoe boxes. Of the three, foundlings are the true orphans: stripped of family, name, history. If social workers are unable to trace her past, the doctor examines the infant and constructs a shell of identity based on length of limb, softness of fontanel, condition of gums.
Michael should be type 2. He was left at the Escario bridge by a mother who must have found a two-year-old too much of a luxury to support, along with a draining shabu habit.
Except that when we first met, misery was far from being his middle name. Michael was going on nine but, from the start, he rewrote our expectations.
Orphans are needy but their wants run too deep for vast supplies of milk, diapers, toys, sweets and other material goods to exhaust. To be sure, help such as these can go a long way in providing for the nutrition and comfort of children in orphanages and shelters.
Thirty-six children can easily run through a sack of rice in four or five days.
Twenty-four infants, feeding on demand, can drink clean a 900-gram can of hypoallergenic milk, recommended by pediatricians for those with low birth weight and whose mothers skipped prenatal check-ups. Unfortunately, costly milk is difficult to justify with government auditors who believe that cheap formulas should be good enough for those abandoned by society’s dregs.
In this season of giving, all those who can, should share. Every bit helps. As one staff member of a children’s shelter observed, December traditionally brings in the donations sustaining the needs of an entire center for the following year.
But donated goods only skim the surface of what the children want. Observing the etiquette of refraining from asking questions, we were pierced instead by Michael who vented questions with a fury. Hearing that the holidays might free us for camping down south, Michael asked: do you take your boys when you travel? If you leave them behind, do you go back to them? At home, do you sleep together in a room? Do you look for your children when you lose sight of them?
A few hours in an orphanage can be different things all at once. It is useful for turning over packages, bundled good intentions.
It’s useless for getting over pity. But Michael, the survivor, is matter-of-fact about such visits. Before we leave him again, he makes me write down a list of his favorite cartoon characters. He frequently corrects, ordering me to jump Samurai X ahead of the Justice League.
At nine, Michael knows that only real families can afford the luxury of dangling conversations, meandering chats. The list he gives me is a thread, a tenuous one to be sure but one that I can follow back home.
(gguu@lycos.com/0917-3226131)
(December 12, 2004 issue)
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