Sunday, January 20, 2008 Mercado: Lighted tapers, shriveled kids By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
THEY'RE all here now: pilgrims, tourists, politicians, even pickpockets, for the centuries-old Santo Niño fiesta, plus the add-on Sinulog that explodes in music, light and color.
“This is not a Mardi Gras,” the Organizing Committee stressed. This distances a basically religious festival from carnivals like Rio de Janeiro’s pre-Ash Wednesday bash.
Bikinis are verboten. In a flowing gown, 21-year old Sian Elizabeth Maynard was picked Miss Cebu 2008. “Oh to be 70 again,” 84-year old Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes sighed as young girls tripped by.
The main rites Sunday recall how Magellan gave the Niño to Sugbu’s rulers then, predecessors of Mayor Tomas Osmeña and Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia who are bickering which is better off financially: city or province?
That quarrel won’t dent affection for the Niño. Over the centuries, the Child draws crowds. Some are curious, others are passers-by. Many come for a culture bash. And scores pray for help. No organizing committee can jerry-rig such gut reaction.
And myths abound. Some nights, an old tale goes, the Child walks the streets: comforting, blessing, curing. Dawn, the Niño’s cloak is studded with the weed: amor seco (Spanish for “dry love”). Some botanists shrug. Andropogan aciculatus merely proves deforested Cebu is semi arid.
This is an enterprise where everybody pitches in. Where are the scientists?
It’s not lack of material. University of San Carlos published ethno-historical studies on the Niño in “Philippine Quarterly of Culture & Society” (Vol 34 No. 3).
What happened to “the image of a lady carved in wood, holding her child” which Antonio Pigafetta recorded was given to Raja Humabon’s wife, after baptism,” asks anthropologist Astrid Sala Boza. Using “contrafactual methodology,” she questions this is the icon in Cebu’s Our Lady of Guadalupe basilica.
In “Contested Site of the Finding,” Dr. Sala-Boza’s research challenges claims that today’s San Nicolas (Cebu El Viejo) was where the Niño’s image was found. Her exceptionally penetrating study of “chiefly power in Sugbu as protostate” is a rich lode for history professors and teachers.
Popular devotion “continues to animate the life of the people,” the Third Pastoral Assembly said earlier. “But there is, in fact a marked dichotomy between faith and life, between worship and activity.”
An official who attends Sunday Mass, buys on Monday, 683 lamps, overpriced at P89,315 each for the Asean Summit. And some, who lighted tapers, ushered in Cebu’s “hot car miracle”: from only two in 2006, registrations multiplied--–“like loaves and fishes”---to 3,906 last year.
The litmus test for devotion to the Niño is how Filipino children fare here. The British medical journal “The Lancet” released this week a study of the Philippines and 19 other countries. It reports:
“Undernutrition is to blame for 3.5 million deaths among children aged under five each year---more than a third of child deaths worldwide…Most fatalities “occur in 20 countries, where targeted aid programs could swiftly address the problem.”
Majority of deaths are “inflicted indirectly by stunting and poor resistance to disease. And two of the biggest culprits are lack of vitamin A and zinc during the mother's pregnancy and the child's first two years of life.”
Thus, Rep. Raul del Mar funds a project to fortify pan del sal for school children. And the city belatedly asked Nutrition Center’s Florentino Solon for help in program design.
Striking a child in anger may be pardoned, George Bernard Shaw once said. “But a blow, against a child in cold blood,” as in the continued tolerance of malnutrition, is an obscenity. Not everyone who chants “Pit Senyor” gets entry into the kingdom.
