Monday, November 12, 2007 Editorial: We are connected
A DILAPIDATED sofa grabs most of the sidewalk space outside the line of Internet cafes, eateries and small stores a few blocks away from a university in Talamban. The sofa’s leatherette cover is in pink, lightened by months of exposure to the elements to a shade just below screaming bubblegum. Bits of foam and the grimy entrails of its upholstery ooze out of ragged tears.
What it lacks in aesthetics, though, the sofa more than makes up in hospitality. Its lumpy contours give rest to tired commuters, bystanders, mongrels dreaming in the day. But on most mornings, when a sun not fully risen is too feeble yet to banish the chill of lingering dawn, this piece of living room flotsam usually has a sleeping figure sprawled on it.
Early morning pedestrians gaze down at those marionette limbs and look away. The skin is a hard sight to meet when one still has breakfast in mind. There’s a little mercy in being often spared the face. Though it is a different sleeper on most mornings, the face is invariably hidden, burrowed in the sofa’s grimy lumps. Is the sleeper seeking warmth or dreaming escape?
For the children and youths living on the streets, life offers few comforts better than a sofa abandoned on the sidewalk.
A name and a face
Mariannet Amper’s burial contrasted with her short life. Last Saturday, hundreds turned up when the 12-year-old was laid to rest in the cemetery a few hundred meters away from her Ma-a, Davao City home where she hanged herself last Nov. 2, All Souls Day.
A diary and unsent letter found after her death revealed that the schoolgirl took her own life, driven by desperation over her family’s poverty. The letter contained Mariannet’s wish list for a bicycle, a school bag and jobs for her parents. The burial crowd and street protests reported by the media may be even dwarfed by the hundreds posting their reactions in blogs, online discussion groups and other social networking sites.
In the pathos of her struggle and suicide, Mariannet gave a name and a face to desperation. She moved people, achieving what the onerous march of statistics and anti-poverty screeches could not.
On the day media reported her suicide, the papers also published the study of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which disclosed that some 11 million Filipinos are among the 1 billion people across the globe living on less than $1 a day, a threshold defined as extreme poverty by the United Nations. Taken together, Mariannet’s death and the IFPRI study belie the truth behind Health Secretary Francisco Duque III’s initial dismissal of the sixth grader’s suicide as “an isolated case.”
Whose responsibility
Stark political contradictions have driven government critics and militants to declare Mariannet’s “martyrdom”.
Indeed, though Mariannet went to public school, she and her family did not avail of the free kilo of rice given under the Department of Education’s Food-for-School Program. Her often jobless father has not benefited from the one million jobs President Gloria Arroyo promised to create. The Amper family live in Davao City, one of seven local governments recently awarded by Arroyo as Consistent Regional Outstanding Winners in Nutrition.
The P100 her father was unable to give Mariannet for a school project a day before she hanged herself turns obscene the P120 million in cold cash that the Kabalikat ng Malayang Pilipino, the President’s party, has admitted to recently giving pro-administration congressmen.
Indeed, the government’s inefficiency, corruption and injustice oppress the Ampers and the rest of the 11 million Filipinos languishing in extreme poverty. But Mariannet would have also died in vain if the rest of us absolve ourselves, too, from all responsibility for her death.
The poor among our midst endure despite our ability to divert our eyes away from them. The student that drops out for want of money for Internet research and encoding. Underweight public school children in need of companies or groups to donate a mere P30 per student per month to cover thrice-a-week supplementary feedings.
Last week, while rains reduced Talamban’s streets to a muddy brew, traffic stalled because of a scarecrow on wheels. A boy, his skinny frame curved to a letter C, struggled to push his bicycle, attached to a sidecar that bore found junk and two smaller children. The boy’s head poked out of the center of an umbrella cloth frame, metal spokes removed to become an improvised raincoat.
Private cars honked impatiently at this slow-moving traffic obstacle. Four centuries ago, the poet John Donne, upon hearing the tolling of bells, wrote: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
