‘Les Missed in Metro Manile’

“Compassion hurts.  When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.”  — Andrew Boyd

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You don’t have to go to London or New York to catch a glimpse of our very own version of “Les Misérables” the Pinoy reality. There is a daily run right here in Metro Manila and the entire show is so well done that it beats any reality TV show. Les Missed as I like to call it has done away with stage and props and follows the indie film philosophy of not featuring good looking or beautiful highly paid professional actors and actresses.  Instead “Les Missed in Manila” features real life characters living out their daily misery for public viewing!

Last week, my wife Karen and I watched these Les Missed; a mother and child that were the complete opposite of Madonna and child images. The ones we met were stretched out on an Ermita sidewalk lying on a few pieces of newspaper that barely covered the sand and dust on the pavement under a shady tree. From a distance the entire scenery seemed like a monochrome image that provided no contrast between the “dirty mother and child” and their dirty surrounding. She was clearly trying her best to give her baby milk while using her arm and body to cushion the clueless child from it’s harsh environment. We stopped and gave her some money and were rewarded by a deep smile of appreciation from a person who seems to have all but given up on the notion of human kindness.

From block to block, we came face to face or passed by human beings living in conditions that many pet owners would be thrown in jail for if they placed their dogs there. If it drizzled they simply moved, they were the genuine urban NPA: No Permanent Address, No Roof, No Walls, No Nothing, just carton boxes or newspaper made into sleeping “mats.”

We had set out to go for a walk like we regularly do, but once again we discovered that no matter where we walked around Metro Manila we would undoubtedly come across at least one homeless person or more, living in push carts, under trees, in trees, and in the summer, the coolest place of all; the sidewalks. I’ve seen them under and around the Magallanes interchange, we saw dozens upon dozens around Manila, even street children sleeping on sidewalks near malls and stores in Mandaluyong. Once darkness covers them, it makes no difference where they sleep and who they sleep with. Sleep is their one true luxury that allows them to escape being Les Misérables.

They are undoubtedly the poorest of the poor because they don’t even have the necessary money to rent space or place in squatter colonies! But with no real possessions whatsoever, they are not qualified to be “the poorest of the poor” who are given a few thousand pesos a month under the government’s CCT or Conditional Cash Transfer. It is a gut-wrenching slap of conscience to meet people who have become co-equals of stray dogs. Sadly among Metro Manila’s rich, dogs get more humane treatment than humans. 

Yes “Les Misérables” – the Pinoy version is an interactive performance that allows you to mingle with the cast, talk with them, be on their “live set” and actually have a walk in part that is totally unscripted. Les Missed literally takes your breath away once you catch the scent of sweat, grime, canals and sewers, piss and excrement that’s all part of the authentic presentation. To balance it off you catch a whiff of the cheap perfume splashed on by barely dressed angels of the night shouting out to potential partakers of the flesh while winking at you, the audience.

Here in the streets of Metro Manila you can be part of the real life Les Misérables, here you will find the sleazy and sickly characters, the prostitutes for a thousand different reasons, the not so innocent children eating out of garbage cans, tugging at women’s clothes almost singing “give me money – feed me something” as they stare at you with eyes as dark as the soot and dust, not from a coal fired age or gas lamps that light your way but from the cars and jeepneys that kill insects and humans alike.

The interesting thing is that you don’t get to watch “Les Misérables” – the Philippine version until the sun begins to set. The daylight is simply too bright for the extremely malnourished beggars and street urchins and exposes them to the contempt of authorities who do not want their city’s image tarnished by these non-voting vagrants who add nothing to their coffers except grief and embarrassment. Daylight also subjects them to the instant suspicion of the working professionals who look upon the real-life “Les Misérables” as dirty, smelly, lazy, eyesores with crime on their mind.

Yes, abject poverty makes you guilty of desperation and criminal intent.

Yes, they are authentically contemptible to the struggling working class who walk past them during each day of “performance” because Les Misérables belong to the caste of untouchables. Yes people, we always had a caste system in the Philippines but our “Christianity” prevented us from putting it out in the open so we simply cloaked it with terms of endearment such as “Ate,” “Kuya” or “Manang.”

Because they have nothing, they can have no place. Because they have no place they get no help from government, and because they are transients and vagrants they are deemed and treated as a nuisance.

But they are human beings created in the image and likeness of God. Whether they are “taong grasa,” street people, or evacuees, they are created in the image and likeness of God. Don’t turn away. Don’t ignore. Don’t avoid. Whether you give a piece of bread, a coin, an old shirt, you would be “giving to the least of these.”

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