Ambition

MANG NESTOR used to scavenge in Smoky Mountain before the mountain of trash there was razed down. Driven to live in Bagong Silang, he tried to make ends meet doing this and that, but found it the hardest thing in the world with two kids. Though his wife helped by cooking and hawking food, his family was in constant want. His dream of being able to send his kids to school to help them escape his lot in life remained just that, a dream.

They lived austerely. During his kids’ birthdays, he worked longer hours to try to get them some noodles, but not always successfully. He could not comprehend how people could throw away food so easily, masasarap pa naman, in fastfood and restaurants. It was such utter waste.

What he particularly minded was that there was no toilet where he lived. To relieve yourself, he said, you had to hike for 20 minutes to the nearest public toilet and line up for your turn. A pretty trying experience when you’ve got to go, and which the more desperate solved by settling for the tabi-tabi. A brutish life, with no relief in sight.

But relief did come in the form of a newly opened Gawad Kalinga village in Bagong Silang. Mang Nestor’s was one of 30 families that got awarded a home in that village, a tiny house by the standards of the rich and middle class but a veritable palace in the eyes of the beneficiaries. It had of course the most wondrous thing in the world: a toilet. Or a CR, as Mang Nestor, like other Filipinos, referred to it. Nowhere did the term “comfort room” take on the most literal meanings.

This was one of the things shown in the Hope Ball in Las Vegas where I was last weekend, a fund-raising activity by Fil-Ams that managed to raise enough funds to build homes for 150 more families. A couple of things ran through my mind when I saw this, quite apart of course from the epic contribution GK has been making to solving poverty in the Philippines over the last several years.

The first was to get a glimpse of the ugliness and monstrosity of corruption again. Or to get a new appreciation for President Benigno Aquino III’s “’Pag walang corrupt, walang mahirap.” Corruption is not abstract, it is concrete—and cruel. Corruption is far more wasteful than throwing away barely touched food in Jollibee and Mang Inasal while the street children sniff rugby to forget their hunger pangs. The other side of things like the AFP spending P800 million to procure bond paper, a city hospital overpricing Mongol pencils 5,000 times, and a governor diverting P25 million to his kid’s wedding is a horde of Mang Nestors who have to hustle their way through life to treat a daughter to some pancit during her birthday or trek a mile or so to relieve themselves of their stomach’s contents and their soul’s cares.

Corruption isn’t just monies being lost God knows where, it is food being taken away from the mouths of the hungry, it is roofs being taken away from the desolate, it is comfort being taken away from the anguished and bereaved. Corruption crushes. Corruption kills. The corrupt and the desperate are to each other as cause and effect. Truly, where there are no pillagers, there are no paupers. Truly,’pag walang corrupt, walang mahirap.

The second thing that flashed through my mind was the grandness of spirit shown by the movement Gawad Kalinga—yes, it is a veritable movement now—and the hope it is giving us. GK’s professed goal is to eradicate poverty in this country by the next decade. That may seem like an impossible dream, a quest more admirable for the scale of its aspiration than for the possibility of its realization. Yet when you come right down to it, why should that be so impossible? Why should that be so quixotic?

Ambition, Shakespeare said, should be made of sterner stuff, and you can’t find sterner stuff than the tears of gratitude and joy streaming down the faces of those who have not only been given houses but communities to live in, who have not only been given a roof over their heads but a gladness in their hearts. You can’t find sterner stuff than the 30 families who have been plucked from utter want who now live like human beings in a spot of Bagong Silang, the 150 families who will live like human beings in other spots of Bagong Silang courtesy of what the Fil-Ams raised in just one event in Las Vegas, the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of families that will live like human beings over the next several years in other Bagong Silangs in this country, in other New Births or New Days or New Lives in this country.

I don’t know how Manny Pacquiao’s fight will turn out (he was due to make a pitch for Gawad Kalinga earlier today), but I do know that somebody else has already won a far more magnificent fight for the country and will continue to win far more magnificent fights for the country in the coming years.

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff, and none comes sterner than the spirit shown by the people who have dedicated themselves to this. Men and women, young and old, Pinoys and Fil-Ams who have worked tirelessly, eagerly, joyfully to bring the vision of the Philippines freed from want a little closer to reality. It is the exact opposite of the baleful spirit of corruption. Corruption in the end is selfishness, an inability to see beyond oneself or one’s family, an overriding need to secure self and family beyond all others, at the expense of all others. Either the men and women of Gawad Kalinga have gone past that or they have extended the meanings of self and family to include the farthest of the far, the poorest of the poor. They too are self, they too are family, walang iwanan, you don’t leave them behind, you don’t leave anyone behind. That is grandness.

That is ambition.