A few days before Christmas, I was walking home and chanced upon a lady and her son foraging people's trash for empty mineral water bottles and other things they could sell to the junk shop. Other people's trash was what they sold to earn money for their meals for that day...A few kilometers away were several malls buzzing with people rushing through their Christmas shopping, but here was a mother and her child who's overarching concern was surviving the day.
Yesterday while riding the jeepney to visit my brother, an old man, maybe in his late 70s, sat opposite me. He was sleeping so I could freely look at him. Wrinkles lined his face. His wrinkled, sun scorched hand firmly held on to some plastic children's toys wrapped in thin colored plastic. Was he off to visit a precious grandchild? How long did it take him to save to buy two pieces of toys that may have cost around twenty pesos ($.50)? Was he taking such a long trip of several rides and it was wearing him down?
A young lady told me she has never recieved a Christmas card. She's 18...
I've known what it's like to be poor: to eat rice porridge the whole summer, to live in a house made of boards (like plywood) and hoping it would withstand the storm, to listen to my youngest brother tell me he sold paper bags on the streets so he would have money for his school needs.
And yet we were only poor for some seasons...I don't know the grinding poverty of the mother and her child scavenging the streets for their next meal nor never receiving a Christmas card. These are the painful portraits of the poverty of my people - the tens of millions of Filipinos living below the poverty line.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment