Walking near Rizal Park in central Manila I passed three street children sitting on the sidewalk. Separated from a beautiful, manicured golf course by a chain link fence, they were sniffing glue.
These three boys looked to be around 12-years-old. They were dirty, barefoot and dressed in worn-out, tattered ragamuffin clothing. My presence nearby was of no interest. They cupped their hands over their noses, squeezed tubes of glue and inhaled. A young adult woman, child in tow, stood nearby also sniffing from her cupped palm. The child toddled around playing in trash on the sidewalk.Scenes such as this are not unusual. They exist in virtually every city in the developing world. Poverty knows no bounds and it erodes human dignity wherever it exists. But, as with most people I know, I never get used to it. It haunts me.A more haunting image sticks in my mind from two days later as my colleagues and I walked to our hotel along United Nations Avenue. The World Health Organization is on this street and so too are a modern hotel with a glitzy casino, the main office of a large bank, a metro police station and an upscale hospital. It’s a high rent district.
In a gutter inches from this nightmarish, horn-honking turmoil a little girl in a tattered dress walked barefoot oblivious to the danger. She was no more than four-years-old. I started to move toward her but a young woman saw her and reached her first.
There was no adult nearby. It’s a reasonable guess she has been abandoned or she’s walked away from a mother high on glue, or asleep and unaware. But clearly, she’s alone like a lost kitten in this dangerously heavy traffic.
I hope the young woman takes her to the police station which calls child protective services which takes her to a safe place. But this is more than likely a fiction I’ve imagined to ease my own feelings of guilt than a practical solution.
It’s more likely she will be walked to the sidewalk and left once again. Someone will find her, perhaps an adult street person, and put her to work begging, taking her earnings and keeping her fed just enough to remain productive for them. Eventually, if she survives, she will be another child getting high or prostituting herself. Sixty thousand children are prostituted in the Philippines according to the resource network.
And I wonder how she will perceive of herself if she lives to adulthood. Having known only the streets and the harsh exploitation and abuse they serve up, will she even question whether she deserves this treatment, or will she have become so shaped by it that she accepts her lot and adjusts to less than human interaction?
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