The lesser gifts

Inquirer Opinion / Columns

Commentary : The lesser gifts

By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Posted date: December 20, 2009

CAN we appreciate the great gift of Christmas if we fail to appreciate the hundreds of more ordinary gifts surrounding us every day?

Every child knows his or her name, for example, but there are many old men and women who no longer know their names or what they have done in life, or don’t remember whom they married, or their children’s faces. They would give the world to know themselves once again. An old Jesuit friend told me that when he wakes each morning, he thanks God for another day of life and another day of knowing who he is.

Water is something I, like most people, took for granted, until I went once with a reporter of Christian Aid to visit women along the R-10 road in Tondo. They had just managed to have metered water brought into their community. It cost only a third of what water once cost there. The reporter asked the women if the water had changed their lives. What a foolish question, I thought. How could water change a life? Then the women started talking.

“I can afford to shower every day now,” a woman said. “I feel clean for the first time in years.”

“Our house no longer smells. We take care of the toilet,” another woman told us.

Other comments came one after the other: “Now we can really wash the children and the vegetables.” “We can clean the house. Everything smells nice.” “We can clean the drain in front of the house.”

Finally a woman pointed to several drums of water that were stored near the water outlet. “We’re ready in case of fire. I can sleep at night,” she said.

Two years ago we had finished the “Panunuluyan of the Urban Poor” Mass with Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales and it was time for the people, especially the children, to eat. A 7- or 8-year-old girl, dressed as one of Santa’s helpers, brought her styrofoam lunch box over to the cathedral steps where I was sitting and squatted down to eat. She carefully opened the box and when she saw what was inside, she pulled back with her hands in the air, as if she had seen something priceless. She looked around to share her excitement.

“Wow!” she said out loud.

I went closer. In the box were two large golden brown pieces of Jollibee fried chicken.

It was probably the first time she ever had two pieces of chicken for herself. At Jollibee, two pieces of chicken cost P128, this is just about what the average urban poor family of five spends for its food in a day. Most poor children never have enough to eat.

In 1980, I visited the Zoto families who were moved from Tondo to the Dagat-Dagatan relocation site in Navotas. The people had struggled for 10 years to get good in-city relocation. I found one of our older leaders sitting in the 96-sq m lot the government had given her. I asked her how she liked her new home. Her old face was beaming. “I feel like I’m in paradise,” she told me.

On another level of experience altogether was the young woman with her parents I saw on the Oprah show some weeks ago. The young woman’s legs were fused at birth that they formed what was described on the program as a “mermaid’s tail.” The young woman can never have children or walk or even sit up without support, yet she is feisty and always smiling. She has finished college and is deciding what profession she will enter. She has no doubt she will succeed. She said she knows she can never have children, but she will adopt a child. She was wonderful on the show. But just as wonderful were the mother and father, who, while their girl talked, looked at her with enormous pride, love and gratitude. Meister Eckhart, a Medieval German mystic, used to say, “At least be grateful,” as if gratitude, like that of this father and mother, was the key to life’s riches.

There is an experience many priests have had, which brings us close to the Christmas mystery. They are asked to give communion to someone, adult or child, who is obviously and seriously troubled mentally. We believe some level of understanding is needed to receive communion, but who is to decide what that level is? Most priests I know give communion to the persons, believing that God who made them knows how to reach them in their shadows. Isn’t it at Christmas that God comes to this fallen race with all its blindness and darkened understanding? A less hopeful, less loving God would not come.

When we are grateful for knowing our names and having a small piece of land, two pieces of chicken, metered water and a special child we love, we are almost ready for Christmas.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His email address is upa@pldtdsl.net.

©Copyright 2001-2009 INQUIRER.net, An Inquirer Company

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20091220-243183/The-lesser-gifts

A Matter of Courage

A Matter of Courage
by Denis Murphy

Development of the urban poor of our big cities requires them to have the courage of warriors. It is usually the women who provide it.

In a Tondo barangay, poor women are threatened with violence simply because they want to bring legal water services into their community. The women want the legal water (Maynilad or Manila Water) because it is four to seven times cheaper than the water they buy now, which is often controlled by mafia types. Women are threatened over the water issue even in a barangay that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo visited and where she supported the people's efforts to get Maynilad by committing P7 million of the local congressman's development funds.

The threats can be alarming. In one barangay, a young woman community organizer received the following message: "Ginugulo nyo kami dito sa lugar namin baka imbes na tubig ay dugo ang umagos dito. Tigilan nyo na kami!" (Stop messing with our community or blood will be shed instead of water).

The threats are often from the kagawads and barangay hangers-on, the women say. They know these men and their families. It is a very emotional situation that easily leads to violence. In the area the president visited, 500 women are now dropping out of the water scheme she supported, because they have been threatened with violence if they continue.

Despite the threats, 40 women in the North Harbor gathered P15,000 and brought Maynilad water into the area, which will save each of them P500-P900 pesos a month. Families who buy water from these women will pay only a little more than the 40 women who invested in the mother meter. They, too, will have big savings. In these days of economic hardship, P500 or more a month is a godsend: perhaps the difference between a healthy child and a malnourished one.

In the beginning, only a few women displayed the courage needed, but courage is catching and the example of a few can create a brave community.

Just when the 40 women had the water problem licked, the Metro Manila Development Authority and the Department of Public Works and Highways came along to tell them they will be evicted, though no relocation will be provided. It took courage to struggle for water; they must now gather up the same courage to resist the eviction.

Such evictions were condemned as illegal by Chairperson Leila de Lima of the Commission on Human Rights. In a CHR Resolution of November 6, 2008 she ordered the MMDA, local governments and national government agencies to stop conducting evictions and demolitions of structures used for dwelling purposes unless the families are relocated according to law.

The Pope's Justice and Peace Commission offers what should be a starting point in our thinking on the urban poor, squatting and eviction: "Any person or family that, without any direct fault on his or her part, does not have suitable housing is the victim of an injustice" (1988). The poor are in the slums as a result of injustice. Evicting them and leaving them homeless compounds the injustice.

The women met the 100-plus-man demolition team of MMDA and waved the CHR order in front of them. The demolition chief talked to them for a short while, then the demolition began. Now the women will go to the mayor. At every step they are warned that they can be hurt or they can "wind up with nothing." Fear is deep in the people. In Navotas, people who have been evicted but are living alongside the demolition area, say every time they see a blue MMDA vehicle they hold onto their children in fear.

It is not just about water or other items. Resistance is the poor's way to assert that they are free persons who want to live in dignity and security. We are not charity cases or useless people. We are not here to be manipulated or humiliated. We work hard and we have the same hopes as all men and women, they say.

Poor men and women find courage deep in their hearts to do all they can about the ills that threaten their world. Can we say as much about the rest of society?

http://www.thepoc.net/index.php/Parokya-Sa-Web/Tinig-ng-Maralita/A-Matter-of-Courage.html

By the side of the road in Tondo

Commentary : By the side of the road in Tondo

Philippine Daily Inquirer

Posted date: December 22, 2008

WE sat with 12 women leaders of the urban poor at the edge of the homes that line the R-10 road in Tondo. Across the road stood the North Harbor piers. The women discussed the meetings they had had with the Maynilad water company about securing regular water in their area. It was hard to hear them over the roar of the big container van trucks that came within a few feet of us. It had rained a little while before, so the air was fresh, but not for long with all the trucks. Young boys and girls still half naked from playing in the rain squeezed through the group to get to Aling Marieta’s sari-sari store to buy candy or food items for Mama.

The women began with water, but later talked of hunger in the area, politics and family planning. When they talked of family planning Aling Marieta gave her opinion that the best method was to vasectomize the men. All the women agreed, even those who said they were pro-life. To the women it seemed eminently fair.

The families now pay on average P30 a day for the water they buy from private persons, or P900 a month. For this money they get 200 liters a day, which is below the minimum of 250 liters recommended by the World Health Organization for lower-income families. If the women can’t afford the amount of water recommended, they can’t clean the children or dishes and can’t take good care of their sanitation. Diseases result, but then there is no money for medicine.

If they had the Maynilad water, they would pay about P4 instead of P30 for the 200 liters they now buy, or a savings of about P780 a month. With this money they can increase their family food budgets by 25 percent a day on average; they can send all their children to school; they can afford medicine, storybooks, copybooks and new clothes and they can buy all the water they need.

The big obstacles are the fees charged by Maynilad: for a mother meter that would provide water for 30 or so families the fee is at least P20,000; for individual meters the fee is P7,000. The people are willing to pay, but little by little out of the money they save on water. They cannot easily manage a big down payment.

Cannot Maynilad and the people sit down and work out a solution to this fee problem? It seems a public utility backed by the government has some obligation to provide affordable water to the poor. Lawyers say there is a social welfare concept inherent in such an enterprise. In the worst of Metro Manila’s slums—the so-called danger areas—almost no family has legal and inexpensive Manila Water or Maynilad.

Legal electric connections could provide similar savings for the poor. An effort by the government to make sure the poor have affordable light and water would be a wonderful anti-poverty measure (families could save about P1,500 per month). There is little room for corruption in such a program.

Hunger, the women said, is increasing in the area. Most families now combine breakfast and lunch. They talked of the “pagpag” chicken business which flourishes there. Scavengers get the garbage of Jollibee, sort out the chicken remains, wash them and package them into: bones with a little chicken still on them, which sell for P20 a kilo, and bones with a good amount of meat which cost P40.

The women seemed to enjoy sitting together in the late afternoon and appeared rather lighthearted when they talked of politics and family planning. It was hard to know if they were really serious. When they came to politics, they mentioned support for only one candidate: Joseph Estrada. “Erap pa rin,” they repeated. They discussed vasectomy with devilish delight.

We all felt better after having talked with the women. They are poor, but they are buoyant, thoughtful when they have to be and caring of one another and their families. The families can thrive if the children could get a good education and they had a decent place to live and enough food. What a waste if they can’t.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His e-mail address is upa@pldtdsl.net

©Copyright 2001-2008 INQUIRER.net, An Inquirer Company