Sprained an Ankle and a Broken Heart

I went home with a sprained ankle and a broken heart. Today, I visited the 13 elementary schools that are a part of the daily feeding program of our partner foundation. After I visited the three schools in the municipality of Murcia, I heeded to the next city in the list. A principal who is going to the same route with us asked if she could hitch and seeing no problem with it, we allowed her to.

The principal is assigned to the most remote school of District I of Murcia. She shared with me the lot of the children studying in her school. The children live in far-flung areas and some of them need to walk for about five to seven kilometers just to reach the school. At first she is annoyed by the attitude of children in class. Some lift their feet on the desk, some are sleeping and some seem to be just present in flesh but mentally absent. There are also instances when she is taking a nap during lunch breaks and some of the children wake her up and ask her for rice. “That is so insensitive of them!” she thought. Similar scenarios recurred over the past weeks until she took initiative to find out the root cause of all those observations she had.

She and a group of her teachers visited the area where most of the problematic children reside and there they found out what could be the best answer to what they have been asking all along. Their hearts were crushed upon witnessing the pitiful situation the children and their whole families are in. Parents shared that they can hardly feed their family. They have many children and they do not have work or fixed income to meet their communal needs. Some children were honest enough to share with their teachers that most of the time when they do not have food to eat at home, their parents gather them around the table and they just stare at each other, pretending that they are having a buffet, trying hard to imagine they are fed with delicious food just to counteract hunger; at the very least, even if their stomachs weren’t filled, their minds were.

The principal cannot contain her overflowing tears as she relates the story. And I am not naïve not to feel anything. Despite the sadness I felt over the story, I cannot help but ask: “whose fault is this then?” For some, it might be untimely to raise such question but I feel that it’s a mortal sin to delay the answer/s for it. We have to at least be aware of who are the people behind this so that we can come up with measure to genuinely help the real people concerned. It is futile to deal with rotten fruits or weakly branches when in reality the part that needs most of our attention and care is the dying roots.

We all go back to the parents who have full knowledge of their situation and have an idea on their capacity to rear a family. It could have been best if they have considered their lot before heeding the call to “go and multiply!” My heart bleeds for the young ones who could have been a lot better had they been given equal opportunity with other children born of well-off families. I believe they are way too young to experience hardcore difficulties and they are way too innocent to bear bitterness to this world because they felt it has been unfair to them.

I am aware of the poverty and distressing situations our fellow Filipinos go through but it’s truly different when you hear it from someone who directly experienced it and all the more if you have experienced witnessing such yourself. I used to give alms if I have extra but with my recent encounter, I have learned that we need more than money to put a stop on this. We need the change of our hearts, our values, and our very system.

I could only hope that I can do more. I have wished at some point that I would be a billionaire and address their needs but even then, I know deep in my heart, the problem would still persists. To reiterate, money could help but it isn’t the perfect solution. The perfect solution should not be a directive from helping agencies or suggestions from persons in authority rather the perfect solution must come from those people concerned because they know better themselves than anyone else. They know what works for them and those that do not.

As to my sprained ankle, it is basically due to carelessness and no one left to be blamed except myself. The beauty of the accident is that, it taught me not to go too far like going abroad to involve myself in NGOs that deal with problems like what the principal shared; I should stay because we have so many problems such as this more than we could imagine. And if I really want to live my life to its fullest, then I should find a way to be of help to others, not tolerating them of their wrongs but extending genuine help even if it means making them accountable to where and what they are right now.