Introductory Message

I have been exposed to people of different walks of life because of the nature of my parents’ job. My adventure started when I was only 4 years old and already attending nursery schooling. Every school-day afternoon at 3 my friends Joel and Don-don would fetch me from the school where I was studying in. Most of the time I was excited to come home and hear all the stories from the rest of my friends of what transpired during the time that I was not with them. I had a lot of friends. Our house at that time was a half-way home for street children from the Zapote market in Las Piñas City.

I was literally brought up with street children. Believe me, there was not a dull moment! Each day that was spent with them thought me more and more about how it was like to be in their shoes. Episodes where my friends would get into arguments with each other and fight that would most of the time end up with knives drawn was a common sight. Children of their experiences tend to be hard and desperate. They would steal money and items from my grandmother’s sari-sari store and sell our bicycles or everything that they can get their hands on. Some of them ran away to go back to living in the streets even though they were well taken care of.

To elaborate more on their behavior, most people who were raised in a hard-up life do not change even if given the opportunity to uplift themselves. We ask ourselves, why? We easily criticize them, calling them stupid for not working and utilizing the opportunity handed to them. Whether we like it or not, this is the wrong way of looking at it. It is like people who are all the time confined to their office talking about what is happening in the grassroots level or the rich who did not even experience not having something to eat talk about poverty. These are what we call hasty generalizations. To be able to explain something we have to take on different perspectives and experience it firsthand. Nobody wants to be impoverished, but people have a lot of tendencies (conscious and unconscious) because of our rationality.

Unlike animals that are only governed by their instincts, people think, feel and are influenced by their environment physically, emotionally and intellectually. Here is where culture and the notion of identity come in. Culture, traditions and norms are not phenomena that happen overnight, it is created through a long period of time. Because of this, societal behavior is molded to what we perceive as traditionally right or wrong. Due to these dictates of society we cannot consider identities innate to people. We are who we are because of the labeling of the society that we live in. It is a discriminative environment, not of race but of economic circumstances. This act is the reason why different echelons of society especially the poor tend not to dwell apart from their economic situations.

Education also plays a big role in this struggle. Empowerment is derived from the level of education each person has. Without it people become submissive, unequipped with the necessary knowledge needed to uplift their standards of living. Most of the time they find themselves seeking refuge in faith and superstition and end up believing that their situation in life is God-given and is just meant to be. This is another way of looking at Marx’s “religion is the opium of the masses”. If we were living in utopia everyone would have equal opportunities, but then again we are not.

The human society is very complicated. Everything is intertwined, from economics to demography, culture, human behavior, religion and politics. It is inevitable that some get left out. It is not the matter of accepting what is but of acting on what should be done to address our current situation. Everyone has a role, a public responsibility; it is just the question of identifying our role and picking up our responsibility and to start acting on it! The problems that we are facing have been there since the beginning of civilization. Solutions have been done in other countries, why can’t it be done here? A question that can have multiple answers. Let us do away with our pessimism and start working together.

Jonathan Q. Van Haute
FLSS Development and Political Researcher