Tuesday, April 15, 2008 Malilong: Closer to home By Frank Malilong The Other Side
TWO Christmases ago, my grandson and I bought five piggy banks, one for each family member who was still in the country (like other Filipino families, ours has the share of overseas workers). Our plan was to save enough money to buy gifts for each other the following Christmas.
What we have not been able to prepare for was the return of the entire gang last December. We had a fair idea of how much our hoard was and we knew that it was not enough to buy the gifts that we thought were appropriate for everyone so we decided to leave the piggy banks untouched.
Early this year, when I learned that my grandson had a crush, I told him that we should save more so that we can buy him and his bride a nice car. I can still picture the look of someone who had been betrayed in the 10-year-old’s eyes.
Last week while my two housemates were on vacation, I decided to visit our deposits. I was horrified to find them weighing so much less than last December. Instinctively, I looked at the sealed apertures at the bottom of each one of them and found all of them broken. We’ve been robbed.
I summoned the only two other people who had access to our bedroom, one a distant relative on my father’s and the other, my mother’s. I warned them that unless they told me the truth, I would report the case to the National Bureau of Investigation or the police.
That same afternoon, my father’s relative fled to Sogod. But she returned the following morning, accompanied by her mother. After some prodding, she confessed. I told her to leave the house immediately.
The amount was not much even by our standards but I felt violated against and was outraged. The robbery was done right in our own bedroom and by someone we trusted. She said she didn’t do it only once but many times. All the while that she was serving us as if nothing happened, she had already stolen from us.
I had been nursing this anger for days until this morning when, while cleaning our study, I chanced upon a column in an old issue of a Manila newspaper decrying our loss of the capacity to be outraged by the systematic pillaging of the country’s resources by the very people we have entrusted to protect them.
Then I remembered the friends who told me “pareha ra na silang tanan kawatan” when the topic of corruption came up and how I yielded to that notion by not saying anything.
What right has someone, who thinks that it is all right to steal people’s money because everybody else is doing it, to get mad when the crime strikes closer to home?
