The other gates of Hell
FOR centuries China was once called the sick man of Asia, a country bullied by foreign superpowers, oppressed by feudal rulers and ravaged by hunger and opium. It took not just one but two revolutions – the 1911 toppling of the last dynasty and the 1949 socialist revolution – to drive those demons and wipe that image away.
Today, the Philippines stand close to taking that image of being a bullied and a backward country.
We are, however, not called the sick man. We are rather called the ‘gates of Hell’ by this famous American writer, fiction writer, whose fiction hews close to the truth.
He got it right about our capital city whose streets choke with traffic and smog, litter with shanties and garbage. Alleys are filled with petty crooks and prostituted women, and offices filled with corrupt officials. You don’t call that hell I don’t know what.
But there are more gates of hell the rest of the country is living in.
The second gate opens every June to millions of kids who will be cramped in a small room, under the shade of a tree or a crowded gym. They will bear the heat or the rain to listen to lessons told in voices running hoarse, write in notebooks if they have any, and read books if there are any.
This is a system where there is a shortage of 150,000 classrooms and 60,000 teachers. This is compounded with K+12 as teachers wonder where to house additional students in kinder and Grades 7 and Grade 8 this year. Creativity and learning hits a wall called many things – lack of classrooms, budget, and everything.
This makes learning in public schools a matter of survival. By the average of 100 students who enter first grade, only 14 will graduate in primary level. Poverty and poor learning environment contributes to this factor. This is not education. This is ten months of hell.
The second gate lies at the embassies in Riyadh and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where 4,000 OFWs have camped in their doorsteps for two months begging for the doors to open to protect them and handed a ticket to fly back home.
The Saudi government is instituting a “Saudization” policy that prioritizes employment for their people over the OFWs. Come July 4, the future of hundreds and thousands of OFWs will be uncertain. Already, undocumented workers have been detained and sent back.
Bureaucracy has only allowed around a hundred coming home, three of whom are from Davao. Three OFWs have already died in the ‘tent cities’ in the embassy due to extreme heat.
By closing its gate the embassies refuse to be a refuge to our kababayans the so-called bagong bayani, and this makes hell to their state of being caught between a rock and a hard place. Would they go home to a country reeling from unemployment, high prices and demolitions, or stay in Saudi Arabia that promises both money and misery.
Such is the suffering of OFWs, who earn 23 billion pesos for the country a year, yet could not be given a ticket back to
home or given subsidies to start life anew here once they re-settle back.
When our very first president once said he would rather have “a government run like hell by Filipinos.” I don’t know if he had these elitist leaders in his mind.
Not even our new president, one of Time Magazine’s ‘100 influential leaders’, could exercise his influence to save the capital, the OFWs, and the schools, educators and the students out of this rut.
If we learn from our histories, it takes the collective action of people to exorcise the hell out of their existence.
Activists have been doing this by taking to the streets or in parliament and demand the political will to stop elitist politics and bring reforms to empower the people.
We had our revolution in Balintawak, and our Edsa uprisings. These are the very conditions that make upheavals inevitable. Send comments to tyvelez@gmail.com