Awe-inspiring

IT’S THE sort of story that makes you laugh and cry at the same time. It’s the one about Cris “Kesz” Valdez, a 13-year-old Filipino who won this year’s International Children’s Peace Prize for his work as head of an organization that tends to the needs of street children. The award, which carries the not very small fortune of 100,000 euros, was handed out by Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu, who told Kesz, “You are a voice of the voiceless and a true inspiration.”

The praise is richly earned. What makes the award doubly impressive is that it was given to someone who knows whereof he speaks. Kesz was a street child himself. He might not look it now, well-scrubbed and all smiles, standing at the threshold of life in more ways than one, but he was so. He was a street kid once, with all the grime, deprivation and brutishness that life brought. Such as it might be called life.

An unwanted child, Kesz was one of nine children of an impoverished couple. He started scavenging when he was two years old, and would often run away from home and sleep on cemetery slabs to avoid beatings from his caritela-driving father. Before long, he was into begging and stealing. He was four years old when Harnin Manalaysay, head of a Christian youth charity, found him sleeping on a sidewalk covered with flies. Manalaysay took him in and taught him. But Kesz still went home and scavenged to help his family.

When he was five, while playing with fellow scavengers, Kesz fell into a pile of burning tires and was badly burnt. His mother brought him to Manalaysay, who had him treated and sent to the charity’s shelter for kids to recuperate. Kesz’s mother then told Manalaysay he could have him, they did not want him back. Manalaysay became Kesz’s legal guardian, and raised him, along with the other kids, as his own.

When Kesz turned seven, he was asked by his guardian what he wanted for his birthday. He answered, “I want the other kids to have what I have—slippers, toys, candies.”

That is what he has been doing since then. Manalaysay put up a charity for him, which raises funds from private donors to give food, clothes and other basic items to street kids, apart from teaching them through kareton classrooms. The charity has helped 10,000 such kids in Cavite.

Even when told in this bald way, the story is deeply moving. And offers a host of insights into our lives.

Not least of them is the utter wastefulness of the phenomenon of street children. Christmas being just around the corner—or having already arrived, the season, to go by the Christmas songs emanating from radio, officially starting after All Saints Day—they will be all over the place again, begging, hustling (particularly those who splash soapy water on windshields, petty-thieving. One is tempted to say they will be back in our consciousness by their sheer numbers, but that is the bigger tragedy of it: They won’t. Despite the multitude of them there, they will remain unseen, the invisible tribe of nameless, faceless, formless creatures hovering in the fringes of our awareness, in the margins of our lives.

Kesz gives face and form to them, not unlike a magnificent sculpture hewn from rock. He reminds us that they are flesh and blood, they are human beings, they are real people with longings not unlike ours, with a capacity for anguish and laughter not unlike us, however they have gotten numb to pain and death, however their wants are more elemental and desperate than ours. Not all of them will be as generous as Kesz, given half the chance, or given “some good-hearted people showing me love and care,” as Kesz himself puts it in explaining why he does what he does. But all of them will have a crack at doing something, at being something, if given so. They have the potential for it. A potential that right now, because of the crushing weight of poverty, because of the mindlessness of an order that assigns an unusable proportion of life’s abundance to a few and nothing to them, they will never realize.

If that isn’t wasteful, I don’t know what is.

Kesz moreover drives home yet another truth, which is that at its best, charity does not spring from pity, it springs from compassion; at its heart is not beneficence, it is simply doing what is right.

This is the second time we’ve had a Filipino proclaimed a hero by an international body in the last three years. And phenomenally, this is the second time we’ve had that hero, deemed so because of what he has done for the poorest of the poor, come from the ranks of the poorest of the poor. The first was Efren Peñaflorida who was the CNN Hero of the Year for 2009. Peñaflorida was the originator of the kareton classroom, which Kesz’s charity has also adopted.

Like Kesz, Efren was born to poor parents and lived in a shanty near a dumpsite. Like Kesz, Efren lived in utter want, routinely bullied in school because of his penurious trappings. Like Kesz, Efren did not use that as an excuse to hustle his way through life, or swim through the trash, as Manny Villar put it colorfully in his ad, thinking only of self, that is the only way to survive, the world can go to pot. Like Kesz, Efren instead decided to pay back a world he never owed and leave it far brighter, far kinder, far grander than he found it.

Efren and Kesz are heroes, in ways that redefine heroes and heroism. At an age when other kids have known only the comfort of home, they have known the harshness of life. At an age when other kids hunger only for toys and the other wonders of this magical world, they have hungered to get by and found in its occasional breaks the most magical thing in the world. At an age where other kids learn to be spoiled and selfish and entitled, they have learned to learn and to grow and to give.

That is awe-inspiring.