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Monday, August 15, 2005
Editorial: Surrogates
LIKE clockwork, Ging-Ging wakes when the sun is still hours away. She makes fire to cook the family’s meal: milled corn, if the padre de familia was paid for carpentry work the previous day. If not, she goes out in the fog-wreathed darkness of Cagayan, and looks for whatever salag-on (banana, camote) can be found at this time of the year.
Ging-ging quickly feeds the sow, wakes up four small forms still huddled on the mat in their single-room hut, and somehow washes their faces and fixes their clothes.
While lagdo (dew) still makes the ground slick, Ging-ging gets the five of them trudging on the trail for Guadalupe Elementary School, two hours away.
Ging-Ging is only 13.
Favorite subject
Teacher Corazon Fuentes remembers a day in July when she noticed Ging-ging and siblings huddled miserably around their brother Arnold during lunch break. The grade 1 pupil was crying. (Full names of minors withheld.)
At Fuentes’ prompting, Ging-ging said her brother wanted to go home. They left that morning, with the hearth still cold. There was no fire to make, as there was nothing in the coffers to scrape, nothing to pick outside.
During this most barren of months, Ging-Ging and siblings often go to school with nothing to eat, once or twice a week. When they have no baon (lunch food), the siblings go home at noon. Sometimes, their father finds work and gets an advance to buy corn grits for supper.
But on this particular day, Ging-ging was torn between pity for her siblings and the growling in her own belly, and the desire to take the afternoon exam in science, her favorite subject. The grade 6 pupil knew that going home now meant they could not go back in the afternoon.
By not finishing her lunch and asking from another teacher, Fuentes scraped enough for Ging-ging and her siblings. The grade 6 pupil took her test that afternoon.
Extraordinary
The teachers agree that the 13-year-old’s interest in her studies is uncommon among the school’s 222 pupils.
What is not unusual is the relentlessness of hunger prowling around the children’s lives. Seventy-four percent of the boys in grade 1 are underweight this year.
Grade 4 teacher Claire Martinez only understands too well that her student ‘Ger comes early so he can dip in the bottle of salt she keeps in their classroom. Some students start eating their baon as soon as they arrive, risking nothing for lunch because they have had no breakfast. Students consider it a good day when there is a sliver of dried fish or some sugar to sprinkle on a meal of corn.
Fruits don’t fully ripen in nearby trees, with pupils already munching on still green santol early in the morning. Martinez no longer chides them about the sourness.
For learning on an empty stomach is a struggle for many, the teacher observes. When their food is gone, ‘Ger and other boys become inattentive and rowdy. Martinez says that in the 2003 National Elementary Assessment Test (Neat), Guadalupe Elementary School placed last in Alegria.
Foreshadow
Hunger is not the only prowler in Guadalupe, a deceptively verdant Eden where lanzones and mango are seasonal crops pushing the men to seek itinerant work and the women, employment as helpers in Cebu and other cities.
Adelene is slight and shy. But this child of 11 lives alone with her siblings, aged eight and three. Adelene’s father is a deep-sea fisherman; her mother cares for someone else’s children in Cebu City.
Orphaned of their father, Helen, 15, is also surrogate father and mother to three younger siblings. She is a little better off though because she has some money for their needs, sent by her mother working as a helper in Lapu-Lapu City.
Ging-ging dreams of escaping Guadalupe. Twirling a strand of hair, she hesitates before telling Sun.Star Cebu she wants to go to high school, “aron ma-uswag ‘mi (so my family’s lot can improve).”
Her godmother in Pardo has promised to take her in as a working student. The vow only covers high school, but Ging-ging says she might be lucky and reach college.
When she has a good job, the 13-year-old will help her siblings finish their studies, too. She hesitates, before adding that she will give her parents a better house.
Long after school is silent, her parents stop by a nearby store to buy kerosene for the lamp. Her father found work that day in Kawasan.
In the falling twilight, Ging-ging’s mother lights up a stick of cigarette. The flame illuminates a face that hints how Ging-Ging will look in a few more years.
Told that her fourth eldest child likes science and dreams of high school, the woman says they are very lucky to have her. A high school graduate, she puffs, can already find work in a department store.
(August 15, 2005 issue)
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