Grim faces of misery in two photos

The FREEMAN photo-journalist Ferdinand Edralin deserves kudos for his two vividly poignant pictures of street gamins who are victims of penurious misery, and the editorial staff for featuring them with such imaginative ingenuity.

Those photos starkly send the message, while fluently telling a story in silent language. Indeed, pictures speak volumes, and in truth. In fact, when duly validated, courts take cognizance of them. Photographs are also entertaining, informative, educational, memory keepsakes, and convey their indelible imagery.

Edralin’s pictorials depict his artistry so keenly as stories in themselves needing no caption or write-up. The commonality of their theme, that is, the sordidness and misery of utter poverty especially among street children, and their family elders, as a very painful condemnation of our society.

Take his first photo of two frail kids – a boy and a girl – each clutching a plastic bag of rugby solvent while watching a money game of cards – perhaps “tong-its” or whatever – which is itself an early lesson in vice. From their outward appearance, they are obviously hungry, unschooled, barely clad, under-nourished, and virtually homeless and/or abandoned tykes.

Edralin’s second photo also depict four older boys scampering, and one defiantly raising one hand, with the other hand holding his lifeline of plastic of rugby to his nose, as if likewise daring the whole world to nab him for all he cares… No need of scathing editorials to describe their plight, or perhaps to denounce their vice, or probably to take up the cudgels for them, so that government and society would come to their succor, or damn them to which they don’t give a hoot.

Some three decades ago, there were roaming rugby-sniffers toting plastic bags as their lifeline of survival. And now, their growing numbers multiply many times over, unchecked and untended, as if daring the authorities and the community to do their worst against them.

In a way, abandoned and homeless children in Cebu City are more fortunate that there’s Margot Osmeña whose motherly commitment has taken to heart in loving, educating, and rehabilitating some street children. But Lady Margot can not take care of them all. She just cannot be the mother of every urban street urchin that’s much, much more impossible than the mythical herculean task. Other benevolent facilities, like the Don Bosco Boys Home in Cotcot, Liloan, Cebu, now ably run by Fr. Jhun Paradiang, are not enough to accommodate all the abjectly-fated roaming waifs hereabouts.

Far from being irreverent, is it God’s will to encompass the miserable homeless kids when He ordained man to go forth to the world and multiply? And, does the pro-life advocacy of the religious hierarchy in proscribing artificial birth control or family planning be that stringent, that is, to mean pro-life as a life of mere pro-existence or pro-survival, as in the case of abandoned minors?

Given the grim reality of the 70% or so Filipinos hardly surviving on one irregular meal a day in stark contrast to the national leadership’s over-touted stats on the economic fundamentals, thus only conflates the grinding misery. No wonder, very hungry street children have to shunt the pangs of hungry stomach by rugby sniffing “highs” as a poor man’s shabu or ecstasy substitute.

Meantime, while squandering billions down the drain in mega corruption and dirty politics, the national leadership does not have honest-to-goodness, or no-nonsense policy and programs to stem the runaway over-population.

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