Rant

Last week the whole Philippines shut down. Everyone was in the cemetery. While no one was looking, a little girl who had lost hope hanged herself.   

November 1 through November 2 is Day of the Dead in the Philippines. During this time, it’s tradition to go to the cemeteries and pay homage to your dead relatives. Families pitch tents or set picnic tables over the graves of their dearly departed and celebrate with a great deal of food and chit chat.

This year’s Day of the Dead took a different turn for the family of 11-year old Mariannet Amper who had committed suicide on November 2 after she had lost hope that her family would ever rise from poverty. She tied a nylon rope around her neck and hanged herself at their home in Davao City in Southern Philippines. 

Her father is a construction worker who has no steady projects, her mother a laundrywoman who earns poverty wages. They barely have money for food and school expenses.

When she died, her family found under her pillow a letter she wrote for a local TV show that grants wishes. She wanted a school bag, a bicycle and jobs for her parents.  They also found a diary where she wrote her pain and anxiety about living with poverty. In an entry dated October 5, she wrote in Filipino: “It seemed as if we were absent from school for a month now. We stopped counting how many absences I had. Christmas is getting near, I didn’t notice.”  

When her story was being reported over the radio, the government was holding an anti-poverty workshop at the Manila Hotel.  Asked by media for a reaction on Mariannet’s death, a government official remarked that the case was “isolated.’

That dim-witted government official is actually right. It was an isolated case. Hers is a case of a life isolated from comforts, from social services, from assistance, from hopefulness. She lived a life of begging for leftover rice from neighbors, of missing school repeatedly, of coping with the recurring sickness of her father. She lived a life of filth in a miserable shack without electricity and clean water.     

Today’s leading newspaper reported Mariannet’s short, sad life; what she did and say the day before she took her own life. Two sidebar stories accompanied the report. One screamed “11 Million Filipinos among 1 Billion living on less than $1 a day.” The other says “We are all to blame for her death.”  

Her story was nagging at me since I heard it while riding a cab on my way to work. The next day, I read excerpts from her diary in the newspaper and I burst into tears. I was upset that it had come to this that a child would kill herself because poverty had killed her spirit. There was no way out for her. It was the only option left. Then I read the sidebar story about how we are all to blame for what happened to this little girl. I wanted to pick a fight.

“Not only the government, but somehow we are all to blame for the fate of an 11-year old girl in Davao, who took her own life because she was poor,” the article began, “this is the moral lesson conveyed by some of the country’s religious leaders.”

I wrote a letter to the editor seething with rage. It is offensive that the country’s leading newspaper had published such a despicable view side by side with the story on an unfortunate life and death of a child. They should have solicited other people’s reactions and statements, too, instead of settling for a knee-jerk, warmed over, tasteless statement that doesn’t really put things in perspective.

It is irresponsible, tasteless even to suggest that we are all to blame for what happened, I ranted. “I am neither overcome with guilt or shame nor stricken with remorse. I am not guilty of driving a young child to her death, so do not lay blame on me. Do not take me on a guilt trip.

“If there is a moral lesson here, it is a lesson for a president and her economic planners who like to hype about economic growth rates and ignore the fact that the incidence of hunger has been increasing. The latest survey from local pollster Social Weather Stations show that the incidence of hunger in the Philippines has reached a new high. In the fourth quarter of 2006, at least 19 percent of families in the country, roughly 3.3 million households, experienced involuntary hunger at least once in the last three months. Fifty-two percent of those polled also described themselves as poor.

“Add to this the fact that the occurrence of desperate people climbing billboard structures or holding their children hostage because they couldn’t find a job is becoming more frequent and that current data shows that 10.8 percent of the country's population survive on just $1 a day, and another 41.2 percent make do with less than $2 daily.

”I am not guilty of stealing from the national coffers or squandering precious resources that should have gone to social services spending thus causing widespread hunger, desperation and utter helplessness.

“I am not guilty because it is not my personal failure that Mariannet lived in poverty and died because of it so do not manipulate me to feel somehow responsible for her death.”

I am not guilty. I am really, really angry.#

lani villanueva