The
blight on a nation’s soul
Sightings
Alice G. Guillermo
The street children of Manila are among the most oppressed lot in the world,
as the artist Joey S. Velasco well knows. His show Hapag: Faith Beyond the
Canvas opened on October 13 at Art Asia in SM Megamall. Its main painting
is Hapag ng Pag-asa, showing a Last Supper scene with Jesus surrounded not
by apostles but by street children, who seem to have assumed the role of
his contemporary apostles. To quote the artist, “Hapag is my tribute
to the countless street children who experience nightmares in daytime: a
socio-cultural depiction of Christ breaking and sharing bread in a slum
area.”
He recalls his student life in Don Bosco, where the Salesians taught that
Jesus “did not just come to save our souls, but to bring us all of
life’s blessings.” “This painting…is also a legacy
to my own children that they may be reminded of the values of charity and
compassion, that fullness of life is possible on earth through sharing and
by being life-giving.”
Indeed, the highly competent artist Velasco has a firsthand knowledge of
the street children and he has even published a book, They Have Jesus, documenting
their lives. He, in fact, photographed each of the children/apostles who
surround Jesus in the painting and sought them again after a year to gather
materials for his book. He himself warns that the book is not to be read
with a full stomach. More important, he knows and we do know that “there
are millions of children like them in the different corners of our society.”
Now, in his book, he extensively quotes an unknown social worker who delivers
a eulogy on the death of a street child: “It was a lesson about poor
people—and the lesson was that they were not actually poor. They are
rich in things money cannot buy.... On all sides, they were the heroes of
the streets, not the rich in the posh villages, but the child worker—those
who really endure hardship in their tender age, those who show courage,
those who were bold as well as resilient, to believe that they can survive.”
The social worker concludes: “It is not too much to hope, therefore,
that this unknown boy might continue to free the others from the clutches
of poverty and great misery. He might enshrine a nation’s love of
peace and remind us that in the sacrifice of the anonymous and unknown children
of the streets… there is faith and love for all of us.”
This is precisely the kind of Third World thinking propagated in countries
with large slum populations, especially in this Catholic country. Velasco’s
book is useful for its realistic detail—in fact, it is a depressing
book for all the human misery and sordidness that it exposes. He has visited
them in their habitations, as in a bridge at Fairview where a community
lives under the structure, hanging their laundry lines beside their shanties.
The children, and there are millions of them, beg and sleep in the streets
dressed in filthy rags, live under bridges, the frail structures of their
houses swept away by storms. They take turns in sleeping on the small limited
space which serves as a makeshift bed, and go to school occasionally, if
at all, because of extremely limited resources. They spend their long days
filtering what potentially usable thing they find in the garbage dump, picking
their meals from the garbage heap and reheating the noxious pot of rotting
meats. Many of them suffer from demolition orders, driving them from the
urban spaces they occupied.
Therefore, their schooling is interrupted now and then, until they resort
to living under bridges of busy highways.
There was a photograph in the newspaper once of a young boy dressed in his
white school uniform and carrying his bag. Sitting alone on a stone of what
remained of his house demolished when he was in school, he was a picture
of young bewilderment and hopelessness, facing the uncertainty of tomorrow.
With their parents unemployed or selling dishrags and bottled water in the
streets, there is hardly money to put body and soul together, and the children
are thus prone to disease and early death. Under these conditions, resorting
to crime is not far behind: first, the plastic bag of rugby, then they are
emboldened to robbery and murder, and are themselves killed or locked in
jail. When they grow to be adults, they are caught in the hopeless cycle
of wasted lives.
Perhaps, the conditions in the provinces are not that stark because the
gap between the rich and the poor is not very obvious. Nevertheless, the
children suffer greatly from numerous other things, from storms, volcanic
eruptions and other natural disasters which leave them homeless and without
provisions. They may also suffer from the antiterror war in the countryside
which the government has unleashed upon their populations, making them internal
migrants. Aeta families come down from the volcano to beg in the streets.
Finally, they suffer from continuing feudal conditions which deprive land
from the tillers.
Now, Velasco tells the street children of Manila, after treating them to
Jollibee burgers, you are heroes, be happy, for Jesus is with you! And seeing
the poor children weaving among the vehicles, the middle classes are supposed
to be filled with edification at their courageous struggle to survive. They
unroll the windows of their cars to slip in a little coin to their grimy
palms and feel that they have done their charitable duty for the day. If
these children are with Jesus, as wise men say, then that relieves the wealthy
of any feelings of guilt or responsibility, for otherwise, on taking initiatives
toward the material improvement of their lot, the children may develop bigger
expectations and thus no longer have the benefit of the holy presence.
As the national hero Jose Rizal said, and we bow to him, the children are
the hope of the future. But what kind of future can be projected from this
increasing population of miserable children? Many of these children may
possess great potentials of talent in many fields, and their being poor
does not make them in the least intellectually deprived and incapable.
However, the early lack of food—such as when infants are fed coffee
rather than milk—can diminish their mental capacities and cripple
them for life. Eating from garbage heaps will inevitably rob them of their
dignity as human beings and make them feel no better than dogs. Poverty
likewise prevents them from having access to medicine to ensure basic sanitation
and health.
The lack of classrooms, of which there was recently a disagreement regarding
the viable number, far below the national requirement, deprives the young
from attending school and from developing themselves into capable adults,
except if they content themselves with being unskilled laborers or domestic
helpers taking on difficult, dangerous and dirty work in foreign lands.
If the public schools cannot accommodate the children of the masses, the
private schools have long since relinquished the task of educating children
of the majority who have less means, not to speak of the poor, but have
instead preferred to educate the wealthy, privileged children in the noble
Arts and Sciences, as well as the lessons of Faith and Love, so that finally,
after having spent astronomical sums for their education, they will be so
full of wisdom as to be able to sit at the right hand of God in the life
to come.
From a high point in human history, we have learned that every citizen in
a country has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What
beautiful ideals! These rights should be ensured by the very social structures
of a society which the government oversees as representing the people, its
citizens. But in our time, these rights have proven to be elusive for the
large majority. Perhaps the government does not know its citizens, or it
only has a choice of citizens. As Bush said, drawing from the Bible, “If
you are not for me, you are against me.”
Following this line, some citizens can be regarded as undesirable and be
excised from the body politic by physical elimination or by sheer neglect,
sweeping them under the rug. Such citizens can be those who have better,
perhaps oppositional, ideas to run a country. And others can be those who
are dirt-poor and therefore do not qualify as model citizens of the republic.
Sad to say, as far as we can remember, we have never experienced a caring
government, only corrupt, self-interested and murderous ones. In these stringent
times, we cannot expect equal protection from the State, nor just compensation
for meaningful work which is mocked by product endorsers, and no opportunities
for the youth except in call centers and in foreign hospitals to nurse foreigners.
The difficulty of living is screwing up our values and one clings to these
evanescent pickings if only to have three meals a day, and maybe just a
little more. So much for the right to Happiness.
In art, the image of the Madonna or the Virgin Mary has been indigenized
with time. While during the Spanish colonial period she had Caucasian features
and white skin, later artists began to envisage her as a Malay woman, a
Filipina. The artist to whom this change is first attributed is Galo B.
Ocampo, who painted the Brown Madonna, as a Filipina with indigenous features
and native costume of baro’t saya, carrying a little boy also recognizably
Filipino.
The background, likewise, is tropical, with bamboos and nipa huts, her halo
is of anahaw fronds. On the other hand, the figure of Jesus Christ has been
much more difficult to indigenize.
In Hapag, he has distinct Western features, or perhaps Middle Eastern, and
his foreignness is emphasized by his white veil covering his hair and his
likewise white long robe. Artists had indigenized the figure of Mary because
the Caucasian saints instill subconscious seeing habits or attitudes in
the viewer, as a native who venerates a foreign subject—an attitude
which is translated into a colonial dominant versus subjugated relationship.
The same holds true with the Christ figure: the viewers worship an obviously
foreign figure—and this seeing habit is ingrained in the viewer or
devotee to venerate or bow to foreign figures in various, even secular,
aspects of life—social, economic and political, thus perpetuating
an internalized colonialism.
The children look to a person distinct from themselves whom they regard
as their master and benefactor, thus losing their faith in their own kind
for leadership and distrusting their own native capacities.
Some of the measures urgently needed today are programs from the state or
from people’s organizations to create viable mass housing programs
to give slum-dwellers a human habitation. It is scandalous that there are
so many projects of high-end housing in foreign styles but only a few housing
for the poor. Likewise, taxes such as the e-vat have greatly reduced the
buying capacity of people and have led to poor nutrition and school dropouts,
whereas large sums are expended for ill-advised government campaigns.
Finally, if there must be Faith despite all, it should be an unshaken faith
in the ability of us Filipinos to create our future and that of our children,
to lead and participate together in achieving the good of all, in liberty
and equality devoid of self-interest, corruption, deception and elitism,
as well as to pursue our own interests and national good without the blandishments
of foreign powers.
And that in the future, our fellow Filipinos and leaders will be able to
provide food on the table for all—the real and bountiful hapag and
not a barmecide feast for the imagination, and with it, health care, education
for all equally, in a true atmosphere of caring and, finally, Love. We should
have this faith in the Filipino future; otherwise, mired in the miserable
present, we are irremediably doomed. more
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