Unchanged social divide

I didn’t have a deprived childhood but my natal family clearly did not belong to the privileged few of my hometown. My family was best classified as peasant, as my father’s family owned over a half-hectare of land consisting of a residential lot and an agricultural area where coconut trees, fruit trees, vegetables and nipa palm were planted, while my father himself was a leaseholder of a two-hectare rice farm. My mother, in turn, operated a small eatery in front of the town high school. We lived in Negros Occidental, a sugarcane heartland, but my family was not involved in the sugar industry.

I became aware that our family was not well-to-do but neither were we very poor while I was still in grade school. My ideas of poverty then were shaped by the presence of the sacada cuartel not far from my father’s family land, and the sight of local laborers toiling in the sugarcane fields. (The cuartel is a bunkhouse where migrant sugarcane cutters or sacadas lived during the sugarcane milling season.) I didn’t know how it came about, but I remember that seeing the workers under the scorching sun made me think of the aches they must feel at night. I also often wondered if they would ever become rich like the family of my grade-school friend. But the clearest picture of poverty that has stayed in my mind since my youth came from a trip to get sugarcane at the siding (the area where the cut sugarcane was temporarily stored), after which my companions and I proceeded to the cuartel. The cuartel was a long building that was divided into rooms. In one of the rooms with an opened door, I saw a woman and her two small children sitting on the floor eating with their hands. The floor was dirty, the woman and the children were dirty and everything around them just looked so dirty!

When I reached high school, my view of the social divide among the families in my hometown and in the neighboring towns became sharper. Many of my schoolmates came either from a barangay of my hometown which then hosted a sugar mill or from the adjacent town which then had a bustling port. Because their families had monthly incomes from working in the sugar mill or earnings from businesses driven by the port, my schoolmates from those places were better off. They also flaunted it through their daily merienda expenses and their haughty stance. The students from the sugar mill barangay were further differentiated from the rest because of the sugar mill’s school buses that brought them to school in the morning and fetched them after class in the afternoon. Similarly, the students from wealthy families in my hometown poblacion (town center) distinguished themselves by being brought to and fetched from school by their family cars though their residences were within walking distance from school.

Conversations among older people that I overhead while I was still in high school further implanted in my mind the division between the haves and have-nots. In one instance, a worker at the municipal hall commented that the sugarcane planters truly had lots of money because while he was resting at the Bacolod City plaza, he saw many new cars, most of which were Mercedes-Benzes. In another instance, friends of my father were discussing the differences between the “good rich” and the “bad rich” as regards their dealings with poor people.

I believe these conversations and my own observations of the lives of the sugarcane workers pushed me to constantly think of leaving my hometown as soon as I finished high school. And I did. Suffice it to say that by being a working student and through assistantships and scholarships, I ended formal schooling with a doctorate degree. In between schooling and after I finished, I worked away from my hometown. Then after having been away for 35 years, I came home.

I built my house in an area that used to be sugarcane fields but has been converted into a housing subdivision. The many new homes in this subdivision as well as in the nearby subdivisions present a picture of a growing middle-class community in my hometown. But this is illusory. True, my hometown now has more professionals who work locally and abroad, as well as service providers who are employed abroad. But many of them are not “natives,” they actually come from other areas but have built their homes here because of the availability of residential lots that are cheaper than those in Bacolod.

So where are the “native” poor families that previously lived in or around the sugarcane fields? Most, if not all, have not changed their lot. They just cannot be easily seen now; they are hidden from view. Relocated to areas near the waterways, they now live in cramped spaces. The men eke out a living by vending ice scramble or other snack foods, while the women sell various home-cooked merienda, or work as daytime household help. Another indicator of the worse lot of the poor is the presence of children (from 5 to 13 years old) who roam around the subdivision to collect recyclable garbage that they can sell, collect firewood, or offer their services to the homeowners. They all do not go to school.

The unchanged lot of the poor had earlier overwhelmed me during our visits to the barangays to campaign against a coal-fired power plant that was being proposed in my hometown. In places near and distant from the poblacion, the many dilapidated houses made of temporary materials confirmed the poverty of the owners. In my barangay, many of the houses I knew in my youth had not changed while some even looked worse. During those visits and afterwards, the sight of many unkempt children inevitably stirred up many questions in my mind—how many of them will be able to finish grade school, much more high school? How many will be exploited because of their lack of education? Will anyone reach or finish college? How many will ever experience riding an airplane? How many will not even be able to go to the capital city in their lifetime? How many will eventually drink each night to numb the pains and aches caused by the grueling tasks in the rice fields or sugarcane fields? How many will die young?

My formal schooling enabled me to be engaged in government and non-government projects and programs directed at uplifting the welfare of the disadvantaged. I now wonder if I had at all helped. Nonetheless, when an opportunity arises, I still volunteer to assist to give voice to the less privileged.

Formerly with the Ateneo de Manila University, Romana P. de los Reyes, 64, now resides in Negros Occidental where she intermittently applies her anthropology training to community volunteer work.