We only have to drive through the inner settlements of Agdao to know there is nothing there for the youth, just basketball courts. The health centers, however, are quite busy, especially when it's the day for baby care, immunization, and weighing.
The babies are there in their bonnets and cute little booties carried by mothers of different ages -- a lot of them very young.
But what can we expect of the young when they're left to their own defenses? We've been young once and played hosts to the raging hormones within. It was a difficult time then, but school and extra-curricular activities kept us busy thus it was easy to tamp these down. And there were our parents keeping time as well, making sure you're home safe at a certain hour.
Today, however, we have thousands of the young, out of school and in communities that do not have any support system for them -- no livelihood trainings, community service work, no leadership and development trainings, nothing. Just their peers, with equally raging hormones, and their neighbors all playing tong-its, while politicians drum up their scholarship programs for the poor and deserving.
We have nothing against the poor and deserving, but we know that the ones who do not fit into the "requirements and qualifications" of a poor and deserving scholar are the ones who most need help. They are the ones who can barely make it good in class but would still want to get a few years of education to be employed as a grocery packer; they are the ones who'd easily find company in their peers, and hang out with them in youthful rebellion because no one is taking them in as grocery packers; they are the ones who get into trouble; they are the ones who love to experiment on their bodies, they are the ones who reproduce so early and so fast.
But not one politician has yet tried to look at their plight, check what's most appropriate for them to still be productive members of their communities despite their having dropped out of school. Maybe because wrestling out a program for this growing population of ill-educated masses is just too difficult it might take more than three years to craft, and thus will not make good copy when election time comes. Maybe because kissing babies make much cuter photos, and the waving of chubby arms of smiling kids look more photogenic than some grungy, angry youth who loves sticking out dirty fingers just because.
But the grungy, angry youths are the one who need our help, and yet the most that the Sangguniang Kabataan and the local officials can come up for them are basketball leagues during the summer vacation -- leagues that do not even have much space and time for the girls. And so the youth stretch out their muscles while the girls swoon onto their laps and they all go back to the communities with their hormones still raging on because there's no school work to keep them busy, no livelihood enhancement activity to keep them productive, no self-enhancement endeavor to up their self-worth. Just their peers and their feeling of helplessness amid a neighborhood that is busy playing tong-its.
