We would never beg

Social Welfare Secretary Judy Taguiwalo has asked the public not to give alms to beggars and instead organize activities where gifts can be distributed to the children.

It’s good advice but we have to ask, too, why the problem seems to be growing each year, and not just during Christmas.

There are the more explicit forms of begging, the hands stretched out asking for alms, with some modification among the Aetas this year, holding up signs in English explaining why they need money.

We forget that all year round, we have to deal with begging that overlaps extortion.  Watch your car boys, for example, and squeegee boys (the ones offering to wash your windshield). You end up giving because you don’t want your car vandalized. Once I saw a squeegee boy inserting a rock under the front wheel of a car whose driver did not allow them to clean his windshield.

Then you have the street Christmas carolers going up to private cars, which some of the Agtas do now.  Others jump into jeeps, which is a modification of an all-year-round activity where they play drums.

The standard explanation and justification for the begging is “poverty,” but I’ve been to many countries poorer than ours, and there they don’t have the kind of begging we have—out in the streets, deep into the night and, worst of all, deploying or using children, even infants, to tug on our heart strings.

Syndicates

I’m a senior citizen and I have childhood memories of beggars and my mother, one of the kindest persons on earth, who would insist we don’t give alms because the beggars were controlled by syndicates. She would refuse even the vendors, especially the child sampaguita vendors, who she said were also part of the syndicates.

As early as 1978, almost 40 years ago, Ferdinand E. Marcos issued Presidential Decree No. 1563 or the Mendicancy Law, which mainly sought to protect minors from being exploited. Under the law, a child beggar aged eight or below would be considered a neglected child and taken into the custody of the Department of Social Services and Development (now the Department of Social Welfare and Development). Children aged between nine and 15 are classified as “youthful offenders” and may also be taken into the custody of the social services department.

Also under the law, mendicants are punished with a fine of P500 or imprisonment not exceeding two years. Habitual mendicants (those who have been caught more than once) are liable to a fine of P1,000 and imprisonment of up to four years.

Parents of exploited minors are also held liable to a possible fine not exceeding P500 and an imprisonment of two to six months.

What’s interesting about this old law is that someone “who abets mendicancy by giving alms directly to mendicants, exploited infants and minors on public roads, sidewalks, parks and bridges shall be punished by a fine not exceeding P20.”

The fines may seem small, but remember the law was signed in 1978.

PD 1563 is a surprisingly comprehensive law which talks of an integrated package of services, classified as preventive, habilitative, interceptive, remedial and rehabilitative. The definitions are long and wordy and there’s a lot of overlap, but the general goal is enabling the mendicants to engage in “a gainful occupation.”

Yet almost 40 years after the law, the begging continues, albeit sometimes taking on more creative forms.

I want to return to the argument that poverty causes the begging, which I think can be a cop-out because we then sit back and wait for poverty to disappear, which is not likely to happen in the very near future.

National minorities

Mendicancy among the national minorities should offer us insights into the problem. Why, for example, are there particular groups who are more likely to beg in the urban centers? The Badjao probably have the largest number, and the argument is that they come from war-torn Zamboanga. But many Badjao stay on in their home villages and do not beg. Also, there are other national minority groups affected by civil strife and they don’t beg either.

Many years ago, there were large groups of “Igorot” mendicants, Igorot being the generic term used for national minorities from the Cordillera.  I remember people at that time would talk about how the Igorot had been displaced from their ancestral homes by dams. Through the years there’s been a noticeable decline in the number of Igorot, replaced by a growing number of Aetas—also called Agtas, Negritos, Dumagats—from different parts of the country.

I interviewed a group that camped out in Quezon City, and they insist they are self-organized, with local leaders, rather than being tied to syndicates. They come into the cities as a group, and have rules on how the alms and other giveaways are to be divided up among themselves.

Similar arrangements seem to exist for some lumad or Mindanao indigenous peoples who flock to Davao, sometimes under the patronage of city officials.

Which takes us to a cultural element: We almost seem to encourage mendicancy, both Islam and Christianity encouraging alms-giving as a form of charity.  For politicians, it is a chance for providing patronage, to be “paid back” during elections.

Yet national minorities themselves question the mendicancy. UP Diliman has hosted national minorities for two years now, the groups coming in to stay on campus to interact with students and faculty. Inevitably, we ask them about the mendicants, and they are always firm: “We would never beg.”

With this last group, I was sending them off on their last day when I saw one of the teenagers with a basketball.  I heard some of our athletes were planning to gather used balls for distribution. So I asked if he had gotten a ball from the athletes.

“No, no,” one of the teenagers answered in Filipino, “we bought this.”

Our SOS (Save Our Schools) group in UP Diliman still intends to fund raise and campaign for donations of sports equipment, books, science lab equipment to send to our national minorities, but I share their pride in saying: “We will never beg.”

It’s a lesson for all Filipinos.  We will never beg should not be just a pledge around street mendicancy. Let’s think, too, of what that phrase should mean for a nation.

mtan@inquirer.com.ph