Death of an angel

There is one current news story that is grabbing the country’s attention like nothing else.  This is different from the usual government corruption and extrajudicial killings stories many of us may have gotten used to already.  I am talking about the suicide of an 11-year old girl in Davao City because of her family’s grinding poverty.

            This is not the first time this happened, actually.  Most suicides in this blighted country were brought about by the victim’s poverty.  But I think this is the first time that a kid was driven to this kind of desperation.  An 11-year old, for chrissakes!

            All Marianette Amper wanted was to go to school, a new bicycle and jobs for both her parents.  Kids in other countries do not have to be worried about these things; these are part of their birthright.  While Manette’s last tragedy was death by her own hands, her first was being born in this country of inept and corrupt governments.

             I can not claim to know the kind of desperation that pushed this angel to commit suicide.  What I can claim though is seeing this kind of situation everyday.  I see malnourished kids begging in our streets.  I see schoolchildren staring uncomprehending at the chalkboard because they have had no breakfast before school.  I see kids clambering up garbage trucks for whatever things they can sell to junk shops.  I see kids sniffing glue to stave off hunger.  I see kids being peddled to perverts (usually old, white men) so their family can eat for a day.

            Malacañang tries hard to play cute in dealing with this story.  It uncharacteristically took the blame for Manette’s poverty.  But, characteristically, it said that it is already addressing poverty in this country.  I don’t know.  gma has been president for seven years already but there are more Filipinos who live on less than an American dollar a day this year than last year.  It was 9 million in 2006; it is 11 million in 2007.  And just when we think that government corruption could not possibly be bigger, it has become more brazen.  ZTE, Northrail, cash “gifts”—you name it, they’ve done it. 

            I agree with Manette.  If I am an eleven-year old kid in an abjectly poor family and gloria is my country’s president, I am better off dead.