Christmas inside a squatters’ colony
The government, in its earnest efforts to hide the pains and perhaps escape from the embarrassment of truth, has officially called the squatters as informal settlers. They have ordered, by administrative fiat, that squatter areas be named urban poor settlements. The name sounds more prim and proper, and removes the stigma of having human beings who are called squatters in their own land of birth. This is really the malady of pretentious government bureaucrats who, like the scribes and Pharisees at the time of Jesus, would always pretend to be the icon of propriety and piety, so as to gain the respect, even the adulation of the unwashed and unforgiven sinners.
This is the same government, although with a different president, who started calling our maids and domestic helpers, as household service workers, perhaps to hide the mark of servitude and virtual slavery that our hundreds of thousands of maids are suffering from, for so many decades now all over the world. These, too, include the harsh and painful burdens that our OFWs have to carry, doing dirty, difficult, dangerous, deceptive, and degrading jobs, from America to Zambia. But no matter what high-sounding names are given to the millions of suffering Filipinos, their deprivation, their poverty, and the social injustices inflicted upon them, can never be assuaged by the magic of terminology or semantics.
And so, this week, as in the five Christmases ago, I have chosen to live once more in a squatters' area. This time, I have chosen this one in the very heart of this metropolis that proudly calls itself the “Queen City of the South.” I see the south, but I have not seen the queen. I have been sick and tired living in condos and luxurious hotels, traveling all over Asia and in the whole world, as a roving lecturer of comparative labor laws. My lectures and conferences in Europe and the Americas have removed me from the center of life's socio-economic realities. Thus, this annual ritual of immersing with the people, so as to remind myself always as to who I am and where I came from. Here, in B. Rodriguez.
It is in this place that I see with my own eyes a family of seven human beings, sharing a dinner worth less than one hundred pesos. How could that be, it would seem impossible with today's rising cost of living. But God has invented garbage cans and trash bins, and these are where the children of God, unwashed and unfed, would daily do the scavenging of leftovers thrown away by fast-food chains and briefly re-cook them to kill the germs and the microbes. And to free the conscience of the parents, in case the children are infected with cholera, dysentery or simple LBM, the Sotto hospital is nearby.
In Fuente are some hotels, where moneyed though ugly foreigners and their quickie lovers, female or male (it doesn't matter anymore ), would have a quick bite of the best tenderloin, medium rare, and drink vodka or champagne, then have a quick sex, and then Casino till kingdom come in the wee hours of the new day. It is Christmas, and the poor persevere in the belief that a Messiah is going to be born again, not in a five-star hotel but in a lowly manger. And so, blessed are the squatters, who survive from crumbs of the wealthy, and from the remittances of absentee mothers, who enslave themselves in Saudi. All those pains and degradations just to make sure that the loved ones in B. Rodriguez have a noche buena, not from the garbage can of the rich and the powerful, (at least for Christmas ) but from the tears, sweats, and blood of the poor.
With so much social cancer, how then, in Jesus' name, can we ever have a merry Christmas?
- Latest
