Roadside Madonna and Child

In this season where belens, or nativity crèches, sprout around our towns and cities, one such scene showing Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus in a manger has appeared in the city where I live. A young woman sits, day in and day out, rain or shine, on the corner of a sidewalk on Gorordo Avenue in Cebu City. She peddles her packets of candy, chicharon and other junk food to rushing passersby, while next to her sits a drooling infant strapped into a sagging stroller, flailing its arms and legs when it isn’t sleeping. The toxic fumes from vehicle exhausts and gritty dust from the road are everywhere. When it drizzles or rains hard, she ties an old umbrella over the baby carriage. Now and then, when the child, who looks a little over a year old, starts to cry, she takes it out of its seat and bares a breast for the baby to suckle it. I take this route down that street several times a week. I flinch each time I pass by that mother and child scene. Recently I decided to stop at that sidewalk. I’d gone prepared with a bottle of water, baby food, towelletes and disposable wipes to give to the mother.

I engaged her in conversation, asking if there was any way she could keep the child at home with someone, away from all the pollution and noise. No, there wasn’t, she said; her mother was already looking after three other unruly children. What about her husband, I asked. She said he drove a habal-habal. What else did she feed her baby? She sometimes gives a banana, she said, as well as water. How did she come to and go from that spot every day, and how far did she have to go to get home? She mumbled a reply, accepting the things I handed her.

I’ve never felt more helpless in my life. I’m not a wealthy philanthropist who can open shelters for children around the city. I’m just an ordinary citizen who cringes at the sad scenes one sees in the nooks and crannies of this supposedly “Queen City of the South” that boasts of beach resorts, fancy restaurants, air-conditioned malls and skyscrapers.

Seeing that scene made me wonder if there was a social welfare office that could help this unfortunate woman. Since the area she’s in falls under the jurisdiction of Kamputhaw in downtown Cebu, I went to the barangay office there. I was directed to the section called the Women’s Desk, where I met two earnest women who said they’d seen the woman and had talked to her. “Gibadlung na namo (we’ve already warned her),” they said. I wondered what there was to warn her about since she needed help instead of a threat.

I asked if there’s such a thing as a child care center in the city where working women can leave their children temporarily, and was told there’s one in Carreta — quite a way from Gorordo. They said they’d talk to the woman again, but I did not probe into what they could actually do for her, knowing about the inertia and the constraints faced by government agencies.

As elsewhere in this country during the holiday months, peddlers and beggars multiply on the streets, some knocking on car windows to beg or sell fruit. There are Cebuanos who claim disdainfully that “Mga Moros kana sila (those are Moros, or Muslims).” They view the indigents as undesirables from the South, apparently unaware that many of these people have fled from Marawi or Lanao, hoping to survive in a big city.

The disparity between the haves and have-nots in this country is nothing new. It stares us in the face every single day. A lucky few live comfortably well, others manage decently through hard work, while for most of the others, like the woman on Gorordo, the struggle to survive is a frustrating exercise that keeps repeating itself. A society that’s incapable of providing the basic necessities of life to those most in need is a country’s shame.As usual during the holiday season, rich folks display their charity by engaging in gift-giving gestures toward indigent groups, while businesses think they’re fulfilling their “corporate responsibility” by making public shows of their charitable work among the unfortunate souls around them. They ensure that photographers are around to record their good deeds.

Such folks seem devoid of guilt over their token acts of charity, which really don’t make a dent on the problem. And so it is that too many heedless people seem to consider that their main purpose in life is to indulge themselves and their relatives, while ignoring life’s realities and what’s going on in their communities.

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Isabel T. Escoda has been writing for the Inquirer since the 1980s.