Sunday, December 02, 2007 Mercado: Advent glow and gloom By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
DRIVING through this city, on the eve of Advent, one finds that light contrasts with shadows. Star lanterns and Christmas belens form luminous islands. But darkness blankets long stretches where overpriced unlighted Asean street lamps rust away.
Darting in and out of this glow and gloom is the “tambourine brigade”: scrawny kids, who cadge for a few pesos from passers-by. They bang flattened bottle caps, tacked to sticks, to accompany off-key carols.
These grimy “street troubadours” never heard of Magdalo mutineers. The names of Arturo Radaza and Thadeo Ouano bring a blank look. These Lapu-Lapu and Mandaue mayors splurged P95,000 for each of those blacked-out street lamps.
That tax money could have helped these ill-fed kids from dropping out of school.
Here, 22 percent of people are undernourished. Compare that to Malaysia’s two percent. Poor nutrition stunts almost a third. Our carolers are dwarfed by better fed children in Seoul or Hong Kong.
Poverty forces 33, out of every 100, to quit school before Grade 6.
“From grades 5 through the end of high school, boys drop out 2 to 2.5 times more than girls,” former education official Juan Miguel Luz points out. And those who hang on lag behind Malayasian, Korean or Singaporean students in international math and science tests.
Christmas nets them larger tips. The brigade knows that from experience. Indeed, as Charles Dickens wrote in 1843: “Christmas is the only time I know of when men and women seem, by one consent, to open their shut-up hearts freely.”
These kids never read Dicken’s tale of Christmases past, present and yet to come. They can’t read. Most students begin to read--–and comprehend--–only by Grade 4, surveys show.
If you’ve read this far, chances are your children and grandchildren stumbled across Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol.” He conveyed Dickens’ theme: See the poor, “not as another race of creatures, bound on other journeys, but as fellow passengers to the grave.”
About 14.5 million of our “fellow passengers to the grave” are locked into incomes of less than a dollar a day. That’s P42.8 pesos at current exchange rates.
Tiene cara de hambre, the young boy tells the Crucified in the film “Marcelino, Pan Y Vino.” “You have the face of hunger.”
Chronic hunger slices into life itself. Overall, .life expectancy for Filipinos is 70.2 years. But it is 81 for Japanese, the UN Human Development Report notes.
Provincial disparities are skewed too. Life expectancy for tambourine whackers in Cebu, Pampanga, Camarines Sur or La Union is a decade longer than for carolers in Antique, Apayao, and Samar.
Lack of basic items, like safe water, stacks the deck. In Cebu, 28 percent of people use open, easily-contaminated wells. In contrast, 96 percent of Batanguenos have piped safe water. Quality of medical facilities vary widely.
These gaps show what is possible, given good governance. But our “leaders” don’t see Lazarus at the gate. Neither do many of us.
If we’re to retain integrity, we must realize that tambourine kids could have been doctors, priests, pilots or teachers. But avarice and corruption, which we can help stop, sentences many to premature graves.
Thus, on Christmas, “when we give one another our presents in His name,” Sigrid Undset writes, “let us remember that He has given us the sun and the moon and the stars, the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans and all that lives and moves upon them.
"He has given us all green things and everything that blossoms and bears fruit---and all that we quarrel about and all that we have misused. And to save us from our own foolishnesses, and from all our sins, He came down to Earth and gave Himself.
(juan_mercado@pacific.net.ph)
nt size="1" face="Verdana">(December 2, 2007 issue) Write letter to the editor.Click here.
