MANILA, Philippines - Going barefoot to work, I-Witness host Howie Severino got an inkling of what it is like to be in the shoes, so to speak, of people who can’t even afford slippers. Dodging spit, crap, and the hard soles of fellow commuters, Howie would soon realize that going barefoot in the city was the easy part of doing the documentary.
Howie then traveled to one of the poorest rural areas in the country, the Bondoc peninsula in Quezon, where slippers are a luxury to many.
Howie stayed with a corn-farming family living on a mountain top strewn with sharp coral-like rocks. There he accompanied the family’s barefoot children as they hiked down the mountain, enduring assorted hazards just so they could sell a hundred pesos worth of suman to people in the poblacion.
The fourth and final episode of I-Witness anniversary month of special documentaries on deprivation, Saplot examines another aspect about how the other half lives.
GMA 7’s I-Witness airs Mondays after Saksi.