Street children

As a child, there is one searing image of Manila that’ll be etched in my mind. It’s the ever present throng of wandering impoverished children in the city’s streets. They were there when I was young and there are there in larger numbers now.

From vending cigarettes and flower leis, many of them have turned to prostitution, drug pushing and petty crimes to survive. In recent years, the problem has been complicated by the migration of tribal folk from some violence-plagued regions in southern Mindanao island, which is wracked by a Muslim separatist insurrection, to
Metropolitan Manila. Foreign pedophiles who prey on the children are a continuing menace, although they had been driven underground because of a government crackdown with the help of countries where many originate.

In their latest estimate, Philippine officials say there could be as much as 220,000 street children in the entire Philippines, half of them in the metropolis. They lead awful lives, sleeping openly in the cold, begging or selling their bodies to earn a pittance and support their parents. Their appearance tells much of the hell they are in.

The government has a program to put children out of the streets into foster homes or public shelters but even people who run them would say that there isn’t enough money to rescue even a small percentage. And with Asia’s continuing financial crisis, a long history of poverty in the Philippines and a conservative Catholic church that doggedly guards against government promotion of artificial means of birth control, the number of street children would still predictably swell.

Of the 220,000, welfare officials say about 70 percent of the street children have homes but work on streets peddling goods, doing odd jobs, or begging to supplement family income; 25 percent have homes but only contact their families occasionally; while 5 percent are abandoned and are living in the streets. Children in the last category are the most vulnerable to abuse.

I have felt sorry seeing adults waste their lives in idleness in Philippine shantytowns but it’s doubly frustrating seeing children being wasted at so an early age. Seeing their faces as they tap in your car window, you will almost discern the sordid story of their lives without them uttering a word.

It’s interesting to see how the government and the church perennially get into a fight over how to solve the country’s rapid population growth, currently at 2.3 percent a year, which would subsequently limit the flow of children into streets. When former President Fidel Ramos, the country’s first Protestant leader, openly advocated artificial birth control, the church waged a protest by harnessing its flocks into large public demonstrations that threatened to undermine Ramos’s administration.

Threatened, the administration slowed down its campaign. Ramos’s successor and current President Joseph Estrada, initially opposed family planning. He said that as an eighth child he would not have been born had his parents practiced birth control. But he has since begun advocating birth control, saying the Philippines must limit its rapid population growth to raise living standards for its people, a third of whom live in poverty.

Estrada’s administration, however, also have to cautiously wage their campaign into a tone that would not openly anger church leaders. The church, which only allows natural but often ineffective means of birth control, contends that the government is to blame for widespread poverty and the spread of street children, having failed to improve the economy to a level that would keep children happily in their homes.

In a recent visit to Manila, I was waiting for a taxi in a street in Malate, a part of the city’s former but comebacking red-light district, when a downpour forced me to stepped back to ward off the rain. The rain was so heavy it sounded like a deafening roar from where I was. It was then that I heard a baby, obviously, less than a year old, trying to crawl out of the embrace of her mother, who was asleep in the pavement and half covered with a carton. The baby apparently was awakened by the sudden thunderstorm.

Nearby, many groups of dolled up, teen-aged prostitutes, run for cover from a plaza in front of a church, where they wait for customers and foreign tourists.

I was thinking of the baby girl, whether she could even survive the elements to a life in hell waiting nearby.