CEBU CITY — Star lanterns, Nativity belens and Christmas trees are now lit up. Our grandkids Kristin, 8, and Kathie 5, plan to go “caroling”in their subdivision.
“When?” we ask. “After cousins Alexia, 9, and Tai Noelle, 6, fly in from San Francisco”, they reply. That will be later this month.” The “tambourine brigade” beat them to the draw.
Scrawny school dropouts bang flattened bottle caps, tacked to sticks, to accompany off-key carols. A few are Badjaos from Mindanao who scrape for a living from city streets. They sing — well, sort of — at doorways. Some do on rickety jeepneys they scamper into.
Their repertoire is limited. Some belt a few bars from Silent Night or Ang Pasko Ay Sumpapit. That’s the hijacked Tagalog version of the 1933 Visayan daygon Kasadya Ning Takna-a — whose Cebuano composer and lyricist were cheated blind.
Their unvarying finale is We Wish You a Merry Christmas. They then stretch open palms for handouts. If you drop an extra coin, they’ll chime: Thank you/Thank You/Ang baba-it ninyo.
These grimy “street troubadours” never heard of a former President who’ll listen to carols in a Veterans Memorial Hospital suite-as-prison-cell. Tell them about a midnight Chief Justice whose 19-0 decisions are “untarnished by a negative vote” against the jailed President. All you get is a blank stare.
These mean nothing to often food-short kids who should be in school. Here, 22 percent of people are undernourished. (Compare that to Malaysia ‘s two percent.) Poor nutrition stunts almost a half (47 percent) of kids in Negros Occidental and Northern Samar .
They’re dwarfed by better fed kids in Beijing, Seoul, or Hong Kong. Many of them frailer, and academically-slower than their Malayasian, Korean, or Singaporean counterparts. Why?
Poverty forces 33 out of every 100 to quit school before reaching Grade 6. “From grades 5 through the end of high school, boys drop out two to 2.5 times more than girls,” former Education head Juan Miguel Luz points out.
“Christmas is the only time I know of when men and women seem, by one consent, to open their shut-up hearts freely,” Charles Dickens wrote in 1843.
But the tambourine brigade never heard of Dickens. None read his tale of Christmases past, present, and yet to come. Most don’t read because they can’t. Surveys show most students begin to read -— and comprehend -— only by Grade 4.
The United Nations Children Fund confirms this stark Christmas season profile in a 2011 study Child Poverty in East Asia and the Pacific: Deprivations and Disparities. The report analyzes 2007 to 2010 data from the Philippines, and six other countries of this region.
Poverty that hobbles adults is vastly different from indigence that chokes off the sparkle in children. Look beyond traditional measuring gauges, like family income, Unicef suggests. A starker portrait of penury in 93 million youngsters in 53 countries then emerges.
Over 30 million kids agonize from at least one form of severe deprivation, e.g. basic health care, adequate food, safe drinking water or a sanitary toilet. More than 13 million were afflicted by two or more forms of extreme scarcity that interlock.
Child destitution was 130 percent higher in rural Philippines than in urban areas -— a feature shared by Thailand and Cambodia. The number of impoverished ethnic minority Filipino children, like lumads was nine times higher than those of dominant ethnic groups. “This is an issue in most countries surveyed.”
In 2000, out of every 100 kids, 56 were deprived of at least one essential service. There are 4.46 million Filipino families who scrape below poverty lines.
Aside from Conditional Cash Transfer Program, the Aquno administration’s 2011 budget earmarks 34 centavos out of every peso for the social sector.
“A child who is malnourished will be stunted for the rest of his life if he has inadequate growth,” a Unicef spokesperson said. “If he dropped out of school, he is extremely unlikely to go back into school again. He’d be the wrong age for his grade.”
“A failure of continuity in education just means kids dropping out. Despite the crisis, economies especially in East Asia are continuing to grow so there isn’t any need for reduction of government budget. The future well-being of society depends on the investment in children now.
Shortened lives and premature graves is the lot of tambourine kids, we noted several Christmases back. “Yet, they could have been doctors, priests, pilots, or teachers. In each of them, Mozart is murdered,” Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
“On Christmas, we give one another presents in His name,” the 1928 Nobel Laureate Sigrid Undset wrote. “Let us remember that He has given us the sun and the moon and the stars, the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans, and all that lives and moves upon them.
“He has given us all green things and everything that blossoms and bears fruit — and all that we quarrel about and all that we have misused. And to save us from our own foolishnesses, and from all our sins, He came down to Earth and gave Himself.”
