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Sunday, October 02, 2005
Mercado: Catching up with Alexia
By Juan L. Mercado
“If we shall meet again, we shall laugh./ If not, why then, this was a parting well made”
--Shakespeare
San Francisco---When one revisits family or old friends, as the wife and I are now doing, laughter at these reunions is always laced with intimations of mortality. Even good things end. Will these partings be well made?
To visit children in Michigan, California and New York, the wife and I finally dusted off unused travel passes. Over the years, our son Francis, a Northwest Airlines pilot, sent them over.
We’.ve repeatedly put off these trips. Age squelches the travel itch. Rebound from jetlag now takes longer. One winces at 17-hour flights despite individual TV sets in chairs with built-in massage systems.
But now our joints creak. Before they finally crumble, we better go, the wife and I finally agree. .
Come in early autumn, say Francis and Tricia over Skype. Late summer days can be glorious. And leaves change their colors. “I’m flying in from New Delhi,” weighs in Marixie, our youngest daughter. She’s a United Nations officer. “We’ll go for autumn foliage in upstate New York.”
And from Malou in Palo Alto, comes the clincher: “Your granddaughter Alexia is asking, when are Lolo and Lola coming?”
“I wish I had your travel perks,” an acquaintance wistfully remarks. “Then, I’d fly to every airport on the list,” she added. “See, how wise God is,” we cracked.
“When I retire, I’ll do what you’re doing,” says the US immigration officer, eyeing our gray hair, slight stoop and bifocals. He was obviously a Filipino, who’d become a US national. Retirement has its ups and downs, we tell him.
“You get up when you want to, and lie down whenever you feel like it.”
Every trip jolts you with reminders on the changes sweeping the world of your children.
The priest presiding at the mass for martyrs at Palo Alto is obviously Hispanic.
The liturgy is in English. And the prayer invokes a Filipino: “St. Lorenzo Ruiz of Manila and companions.” Pope John Paul II canonized this Chinoy from Binondo for laying down his life in Japan.
Now mature professionals, children outdo each other in lavishing attention on you, from touchdown.
They meet you at the airport. They walk you through the new computerized check-in systems. These were just coming on stream when you visited last, they tell you.
In their houses, they give you the best bed, gas up car, serve up your favorite dishes. They set aside the fastest computer and cell phone for you---plus a listing of Broadway plays you may want to see.
As in the past, they don’t flinch when you swipe a book or two from their library. “Your children shall be like olive plants around your table,” the Psalmist says.
Our granddaughter Alexia is now four. She’s fluent in English and French. At the Chinese dimsum restaurant, she thanks the cashier in Mandarin: xie-xie. “Oh, you’re Asian,” squeals the delighted lady at the blonde kid with light-brown eyes. Her doctor-dad (originally from Sweden but trained at Stanford) has a number of Chinese patients. Alexia has Chinese lessons.
The wife and I are pleased. Of course, but there’s sadness too. We see Alexia in what we read, on the long flight over the Pacific, in “Equity and Development”--–the World Bank’s 2006 annual analysis of development issues.
The analysis speaks of “inequality traps-–where the cycle of underachievement continues.” The playing field is far from level for kids like Alexia in the US or 4-year old Claudia in a Philippine slum.
For kids in less-developed countries, infant mortality is four times higher for the poor than for the rich. Philippine infant deaths are triple that of Malaysia. Babies of indigents are at much greater nutritional risk.
“The main scourge here is ‘primary complex’ or tuberculosis,” says Sister Ruth, and community of six Mother Teresa nuns minister to abandoned children in Pasil, a Cebu City slum. Alexia gets all needed immunization shots. Claudia doesn’t even have a birth certificate.
Many never reach grade school. If they get to grow up, their schools are substantially worse than those attended by children of “gated enclaves” or abroad. Similar inequalities exist in access to credit, even in coverage of the law,” says the report.
These adverse effects are reproduced, time and time again---worse, across generations. Ill-fed wizened mothers give birth to dwarfed children, the Asian Development Bank notes.
Equality is one thing, the World Bank notes. But equity is another. Equity isn’t about equality in incomes, health, schooling or other assets, the report says.
“Rather, it is the quest for a situation…when personal effort, preferences and initiative---and not family background, caste, race, or gender---account for the differences between people's economic achievements.
“Three basic decisions underpin success of Nordic countries like Norway, Sweden or Denmark,” says Columbia University’ Earth Institute’s Jeffrey Sach. “First, they prioritized education. Second, they built a vigorous private sector. And they made sure no one was left behind.”
That’s the task for us in the Philippines: To make sure Claudia catches up with Alexia.
(juan_mercado@pacific.net.ph)
(October 2, 2005 issue)
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