‘Faces not forgotten’

STORIES ON All Souls Day trash and cleanup clog the papers and newscasts today. Scandal follows. Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. brazen out the US Court of Appeals’ $363.6-million judgment for back-room deals to recover the Marcos loot.

Today, Tom Palmeri will be buried in breathtaking backwater Camiguin Island.

Tom who?

For over 40 years, Palmeri and his wife Diane, a nurse, fed thousands of malnourished kids, treated wounds, got crutches for the lame, hospitalized the severely ill. They enrolled hundreds in school.

On Mount Hibok-Hibok’s slopes, Palmeri set up a free grade school for children. The school also serves 25 deaf children and is accredited by the Department of Education. They remind many of Paraguay’s “reductions,” run by Jesuits, to educate the poorest.

A Jesuit scholastic in 1960, Palmeri studied at Berchman’s College (now reverted to the University of the Philippines in Cebu). He taught at Ateneo de Naga and de Manila. Those years seared in him images of ill-fed children: “When we took out our lunches [on Cebu’s beaches], we’d be surrounded by children, most in gray rags. They never asked for anything, but stared with eyes that grew larger with every bite we ate. The problem was not that we had too much. The problem was those faces belonged to children who never had enough… Their faces never left me. They have been with me ever since.”

Before priestly ordination back in the United States, Palmeri left the Society of Jesus. In Saigon, he and his wife established a 100-crib live-in nutrition center for severely malnourished children.

Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro invited Palmeri to teach philosophy. The couple brought their oldest boy, then three years old, plus two adopted Vietnamese babies. One had no arms due to the warfare chemical thalidomide but is a computer expert today.

Instead, the plight of kids led them to establish, on Camiguin Island, the nonprofit “Family to Family” organization. Volunteer medical missions pitched in. The Palmeris scrounged for medical and educational assistance. Xavier University and Ateneo de Davao cited them for self-effacing work, ending today for Tom in a Camiguin graveyard.

“There is far less infant abandonment here,” Palmeri wrote in “Faces Not Forgotten” (1982). “However, malnutrition is more severe. The children on the beach who stare with hungry eyes are not the worst cases. They’re still up and about.

“The ones that are really sick are kept at home. And you never see them unless you search them out.” Isn’t there a line somewhere about leaving the 99 to seek out the one sheep that strayed?

The same question arose after Palmeri wrote about Amlesia, 8, who had been badly burned by a kerosene lamp that toppled. “We found her two months later, with a badly infected burn. We hospitalized her at first, then began changing the dressing each day.” Isn’t that a replay of the Samaritan, who treated a man left for dead by bandits, then arranged with an innkeeper for his care?

Palmeri did not say. Instead, he recalled that when he and his wife arrived in Cagayan de Oro, they told social workers that they would provide foster care for Filipino babies until they were adopted:

“We took in two: a boy who weighed nine pounds after four-and-a-half months in a hospital nursery. The second was a month-old girl, with a bilateral harelip and cleft palate, who weighed less than she did at birth.

“We realized many others were [worse] off. So, we took in three more, treating them as our own. Together with our own six, that made for 11 children in the house. Any more than that would in turn destroy the kind of care that we wanted to provide.”

Then they helped Joseph, 7. Thyroid deficiency had dwarfed him to the same size as his 2-year-old sister. He was also mentally retarded. “If treated within the first month of life, he could have been normal. We immediately began providing him with thyroid tablets daily…”

Later came Heidi, 10, She weighed only 35 pounds and had miliary TB. “We put her on three drugs, including daily injections of streptomycin… We’re never able to save one like that,” the head of pediatrics said.

“As the magnitude of what we stumbled upon dawned, we realized that we would have to organize ourselves more effectively.” Palmeri wrote. Thus did Family to Family come into being.

“Instead of random handouts, our feeding program provided two nutritious meals—donated high-protein corn soya milk, plus vegetables and fruit. We purged all children for parasites. And for their mothers, there were lectures on nutrition and hygiene.”

Thousands of helped kids later, Palmeri wrote: “I wish I could say we solved some fundamental problem, but I honestly cannot… At times,  we see a minor breakthrough in some limited area. Local families seem more disposed to adopt abandoned babies. If our presence helped, we are pleased.

“But the larger problem of malnutrition and neglect, due to ignorance and poverty, seems to grow daily. Part  is due to the in-migration of people who expect to find jobs here. And they don’t.”

“Much of it is also due to population growth in general and to a (stressed) economy.  Whatever the reason, it seems as if we are engaged in a struggle in which there is little hope of ever seeing any light at the end of the tunnel.

“[On my return] to the Philippines, I wondered if the hungry faces that had haunted me for so long from such a distance would still be there. I found they were, more of them than I had ever dreamed.

“But somehow, with loss of distance, they’ve lost their power to disturb. They are no longer there, they are here. And so am I.”

(E-mail: juan_mercado77@yahoo.com)