THE SAD reality of the beautiful scenic Philippines and its kind and friendly people is that too many live in man-made poverty.
If you are well off, thank your parents for saving you from poverty. Thank them for your education and count your blessings everyday and help others with your blessing. It is education that saves children from poverty, hunger and a lost life.
The gross injustice and inequality that causes such poverty alienates 20 million Filipinos who live in slums on the edge of hunger.
If you have survived and overcome poverty and made it to a happier life, you will understand the story of Nick.
Nick is a 16-year-old boy and his parents are among those poor throwaway people. They survive day to day in any way they can.
None of Nick’s family – parents and elder siblings – finished elementary school and so they cannot be employed.
As many as 7.9 million Filipino children and youth from the ages of five years old to 24 did not go to school in 2022 to 2023, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority. They have little ability to read and write.
Nick’s parents never had a regular job and worked sometimes part-time in construction for a few days. His mother washed clothes for neighbors and earned a pittance. What they earned was never enough to feed them all.
They lived in a tiny hut where they all had to sleep close together on mats laid on the concrete floor and ate one meal a day. Sometimes, they eat “pag-pag,” recooked restaurant left-overs of half-eaten dinners of the rich.
This poverty is the result of some corrupt politicians. It is at the heart of the social injustice ignored by many in a so-called Catholic country.
The Philippines is a relatively rich country yet twenty million Filipinos suffer hunger while another 10 million come close to it. A nation of kind good people where 0.1 percent own 46 percent of the total wealth of the nation.
The Christianity as Jesus of Nazareth wanted and worked for was a society, a kingdom, here and now, where equality and justice for all predominates. Corruption, inequality and injustice go mostly unchallenged by the Church except by the brave and courageous human rights and justice advocates, some brave bishops and priests among them, but too few.
Lay Christian advocates for social justice speak out against corruption and are red-tagged as subversives and rebels like Jesus himself was. It is hunger that dominates the lives and thoughts of the 20 million poor, day and night. How to find money to buy food is a 24-hour pre-occupation. (To be continued)/PN
