Saturday, October 04, 2008 Roperos: Making ends meet By Godofredo M. Roperos Politics Also
“WHAT does making ends meet?” This was a question a third grade schoolgirl in the barangay we had evacuated to during World War II asked me. She was the daughter of a great grandson of a man I knew during the war. He became our neighbor when we hid there.
The man, Diding, has long been dead. He was a tuba gatherer and was already a young father when I was just eleven years old and a grade five pupil. I learned tuba gathering from him.
Siamong was a village in the outskirts of our town, and we hid there in the middle years of the war, when things had settled under the Japanese who set up a garrison in our town.
Our house was near the central elementary school and my parents had decided that it was risky going back and living near the garrison. So we lived in Siamong. There I learned to raise roosters for the cockpit, ride carabaos and horses, climb coconut trees and swim in flooded river.
Siamong was where I got the idea of my short story called “The Burial,” which was published in the Literary Apprentice, the literary journal of the UP Writers Club where I became a member and later president.
“The Burial” was based on the death of neighbor while in labor for her fifth child. My mother went to their house to help out, while I stayed in the yard with the woman’s other children.
This piece is about having many children, and the problem of feeding them. When the woman was buried, her husband asked himself who would take care of the four surviving kids.
This reminded me of the third grader’s question about making ends meet. She said her teacher talked about the importance of controlling the number of children in a family.
The teacher did not say what should be done but said government need to control the birth of more children. But that was against our belief as Catholics. This was where the teacher said that fathers just have to make both ends meet.
With the debate on the reproductive health bill raging in Congress and among the concerned leaders of the national society, what the teacher may have wanted to tell her class is that with a continuing daily increase in the number of children born to millions of mothers in this nation, there is no other way for the fathers to do but to learn, and continue on learning how to make both ends meet.
Failure to do so would make the cries of hungry children reverberate throughout the archipelago.
