The life of the poor is not a pleasant life of simplicity in contemporary Philippines. It is an unvarying struggle, a constant fight, an unvarying pasture of contending chances, opposing tasks, commitments, and necessities, a continuous attempt to accomplish the unworkable. For many at the underside of our social ladder, a legally recognised, honest life can at times look as if to be an obvious hopelessness.
A lot of poor children in urban Philippines often find themselves fighting to stay alive each day. These children often go without food, water, health care, and education. Time and again, they also face each day with no hope. Some astonishingly dreadful things - like glue-sniffing boys ambling down the streets of Iloilo City, with impunity - never change (they conduct their self-destruction without fear of being challenged by passersby or social workers) - basically because people are ignorant that it is their own indifference to, and tolerance and acceptance of this and other ignominy, mistreatment, decay, dreadful conditions, and dysfunction that allows tremendously noticeable tragedies like this to persist for many years and take their appalling toll. Many young, poor, slothful, uneducated glue-sniffing victims are not only abandoned, but whose public self-abuse is readily accepted and tolerated in this city. Young glue-sniffers are in many places in Iloilo City, out in the open at night.
A lot of poor Filipinos go through a sticky patch these days. For instance, they have to keep buying mobile phones worth Php 500 or less as they’re what they can come up with the money for, and then having the phones go kaput on them, because there’s not a Php 500 phone in the Philippines that’s worth a blameworthiness.
They just hope their terrible toothache or stomachache or headache makes well. They can’t even find the money for a paracetamol or ibuprofen. And to a greater extent poor people live at the side of the streets. It seems paradoxical to me, developments are in evidence.
They get unsafe China toys for their children, the government officials imprudent and negligent about this problem even this has caused colossal loss to the national economy. Their house does not have enough room for each one who lives with them. Things are seldom what we seem, they are more of canned sardines. They most often feel the glued soles tear off their shoes when they run about the park. Their child’s school has 30-year-old textbooks and no air conditioning, the donors of the books think the books are what they ought to have even supposing they can provide better ones. They are not out of their depth to donate rubbish books.
They think Php 100 a day is a really good transaction. They put their faith in people who don’t give a damn about them. They stop the truck to take a lamp or old bits and pieces from a stranger’s rubbish. They don’t mind even if, while making lunch for their child, a cockroach or mouse skitters over the food.
Poor and illiterate people are misused during election campaign. They are all given freebie meals and pocket money. Elections are the only time when they get the recognition.
They keep on believing that a degree from a state university can actually make a difference even though the professors are not up to it and even though their prospectus doesn’t fit to their aptitude or even probable work at some point. Some people are annoyed at them just for walking about in the shopping mall. The police force busts into the house right next to theirs. These problems spawn more severe corollaries that make this society more squalid, intellectually, morally, and religiously.
The way they talk has turned out to be a basis by most people as to know a bit about them. Evidently, possibly because being poor has become a label, and prevalent. Aren’t we making a peat bog to make this country a gigantic quagmire of paucity or adding exasperation to this curse?
They work as hard, too, as any person, wherever, in the periphery of dishonesty, discrimination, and disproportion, however. They shocked us as we learn they are not really brainless and they are not actually indolent. They have to pass the time in a casualty with a sick child dead to the world on their knee for six hours. See? This society is unfeeling, I don't know. The poorest sections of our society are not empowered because we are rapacious, especially our politicians and businesspeople.
They are always judged. Their cough doesn’t go away. Their eczema stays as if it was permanent. Their goitre, visible as distension at the front of the neck, seems to be a curse put on them. Many die with it. They have few choices. They grin with missing teeth. For many, it is hard to stop their being poor. I think so. This society is so thoughtless. They, though, are disposed to give a gift certificate worth Php 500 to a well-off friend but detest to give even a peso coin to a tramp.
By reason of poverty caused by this society’s avarice and thoughtlessness, a lot of children cannot go to schools, even to a school with 30-year old books. They only watch others go to schools and can simply wish to seek knowledge. It is on account of a lot of hindrances and difficulties - desperate conditions that they face in life. Having been forced to kill their aspirations, dreams and other wishes, they are pressed to earn a living for themselves and for their families. So then this country has lot of child workers. These children work due to the psychological, social, and materialistic pressure. Isn’t the nation’s future namely children shorn of pleasures of life? Well, ignorance has reduced their abilities of thinking right or differentiating between right and wrong, as well as their life-chances, to their non-access to education.
This problem on poverty calls for swift action from our government, from people who have the power to change things by far, and from the churches that think religious belief is a justification for this negligence. Due to having a large family already, combined with financial and/or medical privation, poor people should espouse the use of artificial contraception for the purpose of preventing more children. It is a national problem that needs to be taken in hand by all of us.
For one, as poverty is getting worst, poor people won’t be stopped to steal from people - relatives, associates, neighbours, unfamiliar persons. Others are tempted towards prostitution, a nightmare of squalor and ill-treatment for all concerned or are trafficked under false pretenses, such as jobs, then are forced into prostitution in brothels. Others are talked into to carry illegal drugs into other countries even though it means death penalty when proven at fault. Others twist their arm towards suicide.
And when we, as a society, are found time and time again not to be up to snuff to elevate those at the very base, let us not castigate or punish them for trying to continue to exist as best they can, as they rob, burgle, kill, take advantage of others, pimp, shoplift, swindle others out of thousands of pesos, steal things out of pockets or bags in a crowd, and agree to carry illegal drugs into another country./ Panay News Sunday
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