Looking away

TO ASK “Where are their parents” is to be hasty and shallow in one’s attempt to fathom the problem of street children. To off-the-cuff put the blame on lack of parental guidance is too much of an oversimplification of what is ostensibly a complex urban problem.

If it were not complex, the problem would have been solved already. But because it is complex it requires the combined efforts at both analysis and solution of everybody. Hence, the question to ask and answer has to be: “Where’s everybody?” It is too facile to say that these kids were attracted to the city’s glitzy life. It’s more like their parents left their rural abodes because of the lack of opportunities for decent living in the countryside. If so, the first question would have to be: “Where is government?” What are local executives doing to improve living conditions in mountain barangays to prevent uneducated and desperately poor parents from fleeing to, and taking their chances in, the cities?

How many more of them, survivors of Yolanda but with nothing left, have flocked to the cities to become urban poor statistics because officials have no plans for their eventual rehabilitation and return to the provincial municipalities where they come from?

Next, “Where is the Church of the poor?” Where are the parish priests of the parents of street children? How are basic ecclesial (not Christian?) communities reaching out to poor slum-or-street-dwelling parishioners and what spiritual guidance, if nothing else, are they giving the latter? Or are they even considered parishioners at all by well-dressed and well-fed folks in the parish?

And where are the Church lay organizations? How many of them are engaged in effective apostolates with destitute parents and their problem children?

The last question would be: “Where is civil society?” Here, the good news is that many civil society organizations (CSO) and/or non-government organizations (NGO) exist that are actively engaged in helping, among others, disadvantaged youth, children, and their parents.

However, they are all funded by foreign donor organizations. None of their work is sustainable without foreign aid. I work with an NGO that reaches out to the urban poor in general and to abused, prostituted and trafficked children in particular and the little financialaid we get from local donors represents a minute percentage of the aid we get from foreign donors without which we cannot sustain the bulk of our social work.

This is an indictment on our vaunted Catholicism that we are not charitable enough to take care of our problem children.

So, where are the parents? They’re just out there. They can be easily found and helped if only most everybody were not looking away.