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Monday, March 13, 2006
Woman’s world
ALMA (real names not used) spoons noodles into the one-year-old squirming on her lap while berating his three-year-old sister for playing with the soup.
Not far from them, Pastora rinses plates and utensils in a plastic basin. Her grandchild totters to her. When he collapses on her lap, Pastora absentmindedly plants a kiss on the untidy curls her soapy hand pats in place.
Behind Pastora, a married daughter boils water for pancit canton. The woman’s teenage daughter clears the table and carries back and forth bowls of soup.
This domestic scene takes place at one of the sidewalks at the Lapu-Lapu City market at ten in the evening.
It is a Wednesday, March 8, also celebrated as International Women’s Day.
For Pastora, her daughters, and grandchildren, it is just another night in a succession of nights serving hot noodles at their sidewalk spot.
For the women who should matter, March, heralded as the Women’s Month, is just a date in the calendar. Gender equality is a concept unheard of in the daily grind to feed dependents, keep creditors at bay, roll whatever’s left to earn for the next day.
Poverty barometer
With many families unable to afford liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) due to unabated price increases since May 2005, the Center for Women’s Studies (CWS) pointed out that a tank of LPG is the most relevant indicator of the effects of the present crisis on women.
According to a front-page feature in the March 9 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the CWS inferences were drawn from a survey conducted among 200 mothers in Metro Manila last January.
The economic crisis has meant an increase of the prices of basic commodities and services by an average of 7.6 percent in February. According to CWS executive director Mary Jane Guan, this price increase is the “highest in eight months.”
The same Inquirer feature also quoted Guan as stressing the reduction of the peso’s purchasing power from “79.2 centavos in January 2005 to 74.2 centavos in January.”
If women feel the brunt of the crisis, it may be because they compose roughly 50 percent of the population, according to Sidlak Gender Resource Center’s coordinator Professor Rhodora Bucoy.
Many studies also show that many women shoulder single-handedly the responsibility of sustaining families in crisis, from taking care of children, stretching limited resources, to ensuring the family’s daily survival.
Picked by Sun.Star Cebu as one of Cebu’s 23 most influential people, Tessie Fernandez, executive director of Lihok Pilipina Foundation Inc., said stakeholders must continue “sounding the horn until poverty... is overcome.”
Elastic women
Breakfast and lunch is sometimes only pan de sal for Pastora and her daughters when they wake up at midday after selling hot noodles from evening till dawn.
They have no choice though but to rely on an LPG-fed stove to be able to promptly serve hot noodles to late-shift workers. Wood and kerosene cost less but there is no time for the laborious stoking of a clay stove burner.
There is certainly no space to store charcoal. Before six in the morning, the women have to clean up to keep the goodwill of the owners of the store whose sidewalk they use only after the store closes for the day.
An LPG tank costs P580. A tank barely lasts a month because a cauldron is always kept simmering during the peak hours before midnight when hungry customers, mostly males, impatiently demand for their steaming bowls.
Noodles with egg and “special” flavor (a spoonful of minced green onions) cost P20. With a packet of noodles now costing P6.45 and a medium-sized egg, P5.50, Pastora says her family earns only enough, after deducting expenses, to buy tomorrow’s consumption and supply of noodles, dry ice and softdrinks.
Like other informal entrepreneurs, Pastora does not consider in her computation the family’s labor and risks. Her daughters have to bring their children with them when they help nightly at their sidewalk stall. The babies and toddlers later sleep on carton-lined makeshift beds.
Pastora’s face is unreadable when she watches a male customer look down her grandaughter’s shirt when the teenager bends to put down a bowl of soup.
When a woman carrying a sleeping child stops by and solicits with an empty can, her face hardens. Pastora jerks a finger at the next stall. She throws out the murky water in the basin, forcing the woman to move on. In the hard lot of a woman, the first rule is to take care of one’s own.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (March 13, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here.
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