Despair

In the tough neighborhoods of Tondo, Manila, it’s easy to give in to despair. You feel the poverty closing in around you, as suffocating as the walls of a single room that serves as living, sleeping, dining and cooking quarters for a family of six or more.

Teens, with their raging hormones, can be particularly vulnerable to despondency. I can understand the angst; I grew up in Tondo and Sta. Cruz, several streets away from Tayuman street, home to University of the Philippines-Manila freshman Kristel Tejada.

Near Tayuman is Quiricada street, in those days notorious as the hangout of drug dealers and junkies. Several guys I knew from the Sta. Cruz-Tondo neighborhood died in their youth – some, like Kristel, by their own hand, and others from accidental drug overdose. Teenage girls went to midwives or to a gynecologist’s home in northern Tondo for abortions.

During summer the heat makes the fetid stench rise from the sewers. In the rainy season the floods clog household drains and the toilets don’t flush. When your mornings are greeted by the sight of a clogged toilet, you’ll dare to dream and swear you’ll leave the neighborhood, never to return.

At a certain age, there are people who stop dreaming and give up. At 16, however, Kristel Tejada could still afford to dream. Surely her academic performance encouraged her: a grade school salutatorian and a scholar at the Manila Cathedral School, a private school along Tayuman, she was reportedly just one of four MCS graduates to pass the nation’s toughest university entrance examination.

Passing the UP entrance exam can make an impoverished teenager believe that anything is possible, that a bright future lies ahead, away from the squalid neighborhood. It’s like winning the lottery. It means great savings for the family.

You can tell a UP graduate’s age by how much he or she paid as tuition and for the “ikot” jeepney ride around the Diliman campus in Quezon City. In my time the fare was 25 cents and the tuition, including all fees, amounted to about P380 per semester for 21 units; with laboratory, it came to about P420. State subsidy depended on a student’s academic performance: only the top students, the “university scholars,” merited full exemption from tuition.

I lost track of when they started implementing a socialized tuition scheme, wherein rich students were required to pay more. Probably when the parking lots of the UP campuses began overflowing with students’ luxury cars. But the socialized scheme also raised tuition for the poor. Kristel’s IOU at UP-Manila from the first semester of this academic year, including miscellaneous fees, amounted to about P10,000.

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Having more rich kids enjoying state-subsidized education was no fault of the UP system, but a symptom of the overall deterioration of the country’s public education system.

Decades ago our best teachers started going overseas for better pay, putting a strain even on some private schools that couldn’t compete with the bigger ones to attract competent teaching staff. State resources could not keep up with the booming population. Public schools became so overcrowded classes started being held in three shifts daily, adding to the burdens of poorly paid teachers. The typical public elementary and high school lacked everything, from textbooks to classrooms, teachers, desks, and even clean toilets with running water.

Tuition in the exclusive private schools that offered quality education was simply beyond the reach of millions of Filipinos. Children with the financial means had an edge from their early years, starting school at age three with kiddie school or playschool, and on to kindergarten, before entering first grade.

The educational divide between rich and poor widened with rapid advances in information and communication technology. Kids with the means played with computers, or toy computers, as soon as they could walk; many poor students encountered their first computer only in high school.

Not surprisingly, those who get the best education have the best chances of entering UP. And so, even back in my student days, the Diliman parking lots were crowded with students’ cars, several of them chauffeur-driven luxury vehicles.

In a way this made the university a great equalizer, as education should be: children of the nation’s rich and powerful competed in class with the gifted children of farmers, laundrywomen and drivers. Imee Marcos strolled around campus in white tees and denim jeans when her father was president; so did Jack Enrile when his father was Marcos’ defense chief and martial law enforcer. UP is one of the milieus in the country where a famous surname is no guarantee of advancement or recognition.

This environment, and the UP standard of education, should be accessible to more Filipinos, especially those who need state subsidy. But UP resources, like those of the rest of the public education system, are acutely limited. As UP-Manila officials have pointed out, only 30 percent of their budget actually goes to their institution; 70 percent goes to the Philippine General Hospital, which serves as the training ground for students of the UP College of Medicine. PGH is itself in dire need of funding.

The UP system is precisely supposed to be for students of limited means like Kristel Tejada, and it’s too bad that the system failed her. But it’s not fair to burden anyone with guilt for someone’s suicide. No school administrator wants to see a student die.

What can be done, as Kristel is mourned, is to exert more effort so quality education will be available to the majority of Filipinos. And even if this is a motherhood statement, yes, more should be done to ease poverty, and not just through dole-outs. Quality education should not be a luxury beyond the reach of millions of Filipinos.

In the rough neighborhoods of Manila, when 16-year-olds wonder if they will ever be able to get out, they should believe, in their heart of hearts, that the answer is yes. And that one good way out is education.

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A MATTER OF CHOICE: The enlisted man who lingered outside the home of UP teacher Tina Bawagan after her release from detention during martial law was not among those who tortured her, as I wrote. When invited into the house, the guy joined Tina for ice cream.

“He was one of my jail guards with whom I would have dinner once in a while,” Tina emailed me. “He was the one who told me that they always had a choice and could not be forced to engage in torture. I enjoyed his company a lot.”