LIPA CITY, Batangas—Rony refuses to go home. He stands idly by his bunch of child vagrants huddled over cara y cruz. He has never joined their usual gamble, says no when asked if he would wager if he had the money.
But this time he watches intently, hopeful with each tossing of the coin because whether or not he will eat dinner depends on his friend’s winning the stakes.
If only he had the envelopes to hand on public jeepneys, he wouldn’t have zilch for the day and perhaps this late, would have been sharing what little fare he could buy with his family. His mother, he says, must already be looking for him; he didn’t ask for consent before he left to beg here.
It almost killed his parents last time he went away and came back a week later. Rony had promised not to spend the night on the streets again, but, empty-handed, he had no choice. This is just another night away, and little Rony has grown hardened.
‘Work’ for school
RONY BIAY, 14, Grade 4 in Wawa Elementary School in the outskirts of Batangas City, is thrust into mendicancy to pay for his education and help put food on their table. He says between “work” and school, the former has to give way, yet, many times, the urgency of his family’s needs and his want for baon forces him to every so often miss his class.
He makes it a point to inform his teacher ahead of time whenever he cannot attend class. There are times the teacher gets fed up with Rony’s refrain but always, at the end of the day, would find it in her heart to condone and understand her student’s familial difficulty.
“By going to school, I can help ease the plight of my family,” he says, even if it necessitates walking from home to school every day, if not hitch a jeepney ride.
At school, he is always laughed at and bullied by his classmates because of his family’s subsistence on alms. His brother, now a freshman in secondary school, also gets education on this ticket.
This Badjao boy finds mendicancy noble so that, “even when I’m eating diamonds, I’d not stop begging because I grew up doing this.” Meanwhile, his brother, figuring mendicancy beneath his dignity, would rather climb ships to sell pearl.
Rony says he and his brother will be home free once they graduate, reliving his happiest day to date when his brother graduated from primary school and his family shared salad and maja for handa. But that day can only be remembered as what his parents can only afford to serve is galunggong, if nothing to live each day.
With pearl worth a sizable P1,500 apiece, it’s a question why his father, who also vends the adornment to tourists in Anilao, Batangas, can’t give his family the life. But Rony says it is hard cash and, sometimes, “if we really need money,” has to be sold on a piecemeal payment.
“My father brought home a one-off P5,000 and that’s the best we’ve had,” Rony says, his smile glistening. “It was providential because it came just when I needed money for a school project. I was even able to ‘donate’ to school a walis and a box of floor wax.”
To complement the chickenfeed from pearl, his mother peddles surplus shirts she buys from the money she earns from solicitation. “Once, off to work, she tripped into a creek. I thought it was of no avail to pity her. To vow to help earn for our needs and school was, instead, all the balm for me,” Rony says.
Hope from donations
RONY’S family also depends on the “remittances” of his brother-in-law, who hawks trinkets embossed with fake gold, and buys and sells cellphone scraps.
The income has never been enough. Aside from lacking the wherewithal to send him daily to school, Rony’s family is saddled by a lump on his throat which, his doctor says, would aggravate into cancer if disregarded.
It seems to Rony that he’s too young to be burdened by such trivial concerns, which he shrugs off with a pixie sort of smile, and that he is helping his family on his own volition. His eyes moisten at how his father feels sorry when he can’t provide for them.
Inasmuch as Rony practically inhabits the street, he frequents the church, proudly saying he’s a “Born Again.”
“Every now and then I ask God to shower us blessings and still thank Him when He does not immediately respond,” he says. Recently, on his birthday, he went to a mosque back in Mindanao and was happy though he had no handa. There, he met a woman who gave him canned goods and a bag of rice.
“Sometimes people from the DSWD [Department of Social Welfare and Development] visit our house to give us food.” But Badjaos like Rony are not inclined to give their benefactors the benefit of the doubt. Ostensibly, the DSWD’s purpose is charity, they say. But its real motive is to send them back to their war-torn ancestral home.
While Badjaos on the street think they are hounded by the DSWD, Rony still manages to make light of their situation. “My sister was snatched by the DSWD from the streets and her sanction was [something as severe as bringing home] a kilo of rice and two cans of sardines!” he recalls.
Mercy apprehension
MELANIE MALALUAN, a city social welfare and development officer here, says the local government can’t earmark for vagrants like Rony because they are nomads and, therefore, not citizens of Lipa City. Instead, they implement an anti-mendicancy program under which they deploy volunteers in coordination with the Batangas City Public Order and Safety and the DSWD to apprehend beggars who have settled here and bring them back to their place of origin.
“We want Lipa to be mendicant-free and so we exact such strict measures as putting workers and volunteers in place to monitor and preempt the proliferation of these transients in the city,” Malaluan says.
“It is very timely because it’s Christmas season.”
Malaluan said they cannot totally eradicate the deep-seated plight because of poverty.
“[The problem is when] these children are coerced by their parents or by syndicates to earn,” she said, citing eyewitness accounts that these children are ferried like commodities onto the nether regions of the city.
Brutal manhandling
BUT Rony winds up learning that there are more to fear than the DSWD. The road is never safe for children, whose means of living entails sidestepping vehicles on a breakneck speed.
One of his Badjao friends fell from a jeep and incurred an injury; his arm bone sticking out under the skin and has yet to heal. Scouring the streets in groups, they could have been run over by an errant vehicle.
The jeepney drivers are another story to tell. One beat up Rony’s companion when he clambered up the driver’s jeep. But the Badjaos did not take it sitting down, hurling stones at the driver until the police muscled in. “Many others weather severe beatings; one of my friends was hit with a pipe,” Rony adds.
But the drivers cannot be totally faulted. Rony concedes that his friends have become delinquents. They do not just beg for money on the jeeps but also pilfer from the passengers. Malaluan says the drivers are not abusive and, in fact, act appropriately, saying that to condone these delinquencies is to do these children disservice. “We cannot blame the drivers because they’re doing it for the safety of their passengers, as well as of these children,” she says.
But Rony categorically says he has not participated in his friends’ delinquencies, saying he has never abused the goodwill of the drivers who let them solicit on their jeeps, even paying for his fare going home whenever he earns “sizably.”
A sizable earning for Rony is P200 at best. He usually goes home with P100-odd in his pocket. He gives P90 to his mother, “saving P10 for myself—I’d buy Coke and P2 worth of bread or sometimes, chicherias.”
Tonight all Rony has is P30, courtesy of his friend who seems to have won the wager. Even as he thinks of school and bringing something for his family, his own requisites check him. “I’d eat silog for dinner in the ‘restaurant.’ It’s a measly P17—the rice is only a handful but it’s fine.”
The restaurant sometimes serves them food for free and even allows them to sleep in its billiard hall. There, where every last lot in life lulls a whole posse of feral children to sleep, this Badjao boy who overcompensates for his age thinks about school, his family and what the next day holds for him every night he refuses to go home.
Vernon Gabrielle Velasco / Special to the BusinessMirror
Image credits: Vernon Gabrielle Velasco