The courage to survive

He is only 13 years old — this boy we can call Jaybe. He has no formal education, cannot read or write, and is one of hundreds of thousands of children lost and abandoned to live in Philippine slums. His father left the family for another woman and left him and his two brothers and a three-year-old sister, Jinna, with their mother, Janis. She taught them all how to survive as street vendors , selling rejected vegetables from the market to poor people like them, to support her four children.

Jaybe’s family lives, as millions do, in dire poverty. His brothers, sister and mother all gather back together at night to a tiny room made of flattened tin cans in a small hovel they call home, situated in a crowded slum in Metro Manila. Nearby, a dirt-blackened creek gives off smells of feces and rotten eggs. The stink is a daily punishment for being alive and poor in the Philippines.
They have no electricity nor water. Jaybe stands for an hour daily with a plastic bucket to get water from a communal faucet.

The smell does not reach the towering condominiums of the wealthy elite that own or control the wealth of the nation. The soaring condos stand tall against the skyline, glittering in the night. Such wealth and prosperity is far from the wildest imaginations of Jaybe and his family.

The family is always hungry. His only possessions are a dirty T-Shirt and cotton shorts. He usually goes out barefoot unless he finds castaway flip-flops in the garbage dump.

Jaybe scavenges for junk behind supermarkets and earns a few pesos daily. He bought cheap overripe bananas that were turning as black as the filthy creek. The children hungrily devoured them while he guarded them from the slinky evil-looking men that hung around when the children were playing in the mud and their mother Janis was out selling rejected vegetables from the market to people as poor as herself.

Janis buys “pagpag”for the family and brings it home in an old plastic biscuit box from which they all eat with their hands. Pagpag is the word for recooked leftover half-eaten food thrown out by the restaurants. It is survival food for the extremely poor.

Lolo Jojo used to be the family’s neighbor. He was old, skinny and emaciated. His sun-burnt gaunt face was marked by a life of poverty and human suffering. He was a pedicab driver. Every dawn, he walked on scraggly legs to the edge of the slum and rented out the rickety pedicab from the owner.

He paid P250 a day for it, and heaved and peddled that rusting bike carrying two heavy passengers along the back streets of the city. It was exhausting work and he shared his meager earnings with his aging wife and a grandchild. He was a dying man.

One warm, muggy evening, when Jaybe was waiting for his mother to arrive with the pagpag and hopefully a little rice, there was a sudden, loud frightening volley of gunshots that drove everyone into the ghetto of clustered hovels.

Jaybe grabbed his brother and bundled them inside the hovel. “Where is Jinna?”he asked, for she was missing. He ran out and saw three uniformed men with guns. More shots rang out into the night, and cries were heard. He ducked back inside.

A loud scream was heard in Filipino: “Don’t shoot, I am unarmed!”More gunfire, followed by loud voices and screams. Then it was quiet, a car started, a siren whined loud and the men drove away.

The dastardly deed was done, four bodies lay in the mud, dead, and among them Lolo Jojo. His eyes in hollowed sockets were staring into nothingness. His skeletal body sprawled at the door of his hovel. His disabled wife was crying. People emerged from hiding like frightened rabbits.

Further down the path was the three-year old Jinna, blood all over her dress, shot dead by a stray bullet during the police operation. Three dangerous criminals had been“neutralized.”

“They fought back”a police report later said, as it always did. Was Lolo Jojo a dangerous criminal? And baby Jinna – why was she killed? Was Lolo JoJo taking “crystal meth,”known as “shabu”? Possibly, but was he a drug courier? Likely not. Being a mere suspect is enough to get the death penalty there in the slum. As many as 6,600 had died that way. Many more have died, says groups keeping count.

If Lolo Jojo was a shabu user, then it was his self-medication. He could have spent P50 for a shot of shabu and that would give him a boost of energy to peddle longer and earn an additional P200 for the day. He could work longer and earn a bit more, but no one ever knew; there was no possession, no evidence, no charge; he was just killed.

Jaybe ran to Jinna, calling for help amid sobs, but no help came. Then his mother arrived. She screamed in agony at the sight of her little child. There was no ambulance, no one cared. They were too poor to think of taking Jinna to a hospital, and for an undertaker to make money out of them.

The lights shone from the tall condos nearby. There, the drug lords lived, with the rich elite, secure, safe, all living in luxury, untouchable. Below, in the slum valley among the alleyways of darkness, a drug war was going on. There, one secretive group was eliminating the competition, clearing the way for a new more powerful drug cartel and distribution network. As for Lolo Jojo and baby Jinna, well, they were “collateral damage,”as one politician called them. “Shit happens.”

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