Lessons from a departed sister

On July 9 I got one of those phone calls from overseas we always fear: My sister Maggie, a member of the Sisters of Charity, was very sick. The next day my wife Alice and I were on that long flight across the dark Pacific with plenty of time for somber self-centered thinking. Irish pessimism told me Maggie was dead, though we didn’t know for sure. I was alone now, I realized. All the others I grew up with—brothers, Maggie, parents, cousins—all were gone. If there was no one left to talk to about those days, would the memories themselves pass away? I also realized I had lost the best sister any man ever had.

I learned many things in the days after Maggie’s death. I had, for example, a small glimpse of God’s care of his aged followers; I learned of incidents in our family history that may have influenced what I have wound up doing in life: I recalled special memories of Maggie here in the Philippines, when we visited the Mangyan in their village outside Calapan, Mindoro. And I realized once again that the kindnesses we show people remain in their memories long after all other memories of us have faded.

At my sister’s funeral Mass about 200 Sisters of Charity attended. Nearly all are retired. The youngest nuns are in their 50s; only 10 percent of the nuns can put in a full day’s work. As an institution, the Sisters of Charity of New York are comparable to a retired person close to God after long years of loyal service. During the Mass I watched the older nuns prepare the ciboria and other vessels for Holy Communion. They were like sisters (small “s”) in their mother’s kitchen preparing a meal. They were so at ease, so at home there at the altar, so close to one another that God, who is mother and father, was clearly among them, chatting with them and helping shoulder to shoulder. God has a special love for the poor, the Church teaches. He has an equally special love for the old people who have served Him loyally all their lives. I was very happy Maggie was with the Sisters.

Cousins told me our great grandfather was evicted by England in the 1800s from the small farm he had outside Cork City, Ireland. The Murphys walked into the city without land or money and became what we now call “urban poor.” I’ve often wondered how I wound up in life working with urban poor people in Manila, especially those in danger of eviction. The apple doesn’t fall very far from the branch.

I remembered the day we went with Maggie to visit the Mangyan outside Calapan. We knew the Holy Spirit nuns who worked there, especially Sisters Magdalena and Victricia. The Mangyan gathered after dinner to greet the visitors. They sang and danced and told stories of their past. When Maggie’s turn came, she talked about the people of New York City and their tall buildings, crowded and noisy streets, and subways. She described how people went underground in the morning to get a train to work and came up at the end of the day. As she talked we noticed the people were troubled.

Much later Sister Victricia told me the Mangyan understood that New Yorkers lived underground like snakes and other wild animals. They felt so sorry for New Yorkers that every Sunday they prayed for them at Mass. Politicians like Mayor Michael Bloomberg may take credit for the progress that city has made in recent years, but maybe it was really due to the prayers of the Mangyan people.

In dealing with the illnesses of old people, Maggie, like most doctors and nurses, had her own bag of tricks. Kindness and street smarts are needed. In the last conversation we had by phone only a week before the fateful July 9 call, she told me about Henry, 87, who was a regular patient at her clinic for old people in Richmond University Medical Center, Staten Island  (the old St. Vincent’s Hospital). Henry complained of fits of sneezing. My sister examined him but could find nothing wrong. She did notice that every time he touched his chest, he started sneezing. She finished the examination, then told him in a very serious tone of voice:

 “Henry, you must not touch your chest ever again. Can you do that?”

“Yes, Sister.”

“Promise me now, you won’t touch your chest.”

“Yes, Sister.”

He returned a few months later. The sneezing had stopped and he said he had never again touched his chest.

All the people I talked with about Maggie—patients, colleagues, fellow sisters, friends and relatives—mentioned her unfailing kindness. The people we most admire in life are those who show kindness to all.

Meanwhile in the United States, columnist Charles M. Blow wrote in the New York Times (Aug. 10) of signs that Americans are becoming a people without pity or kindness. A cross section of Americans was asked, “What factor was most responsible for the continuing poverty in the country?” The respondents were given a list of possible causes. The cause singled out by most people interviewed was: “Too much welfare prevents initiative.”

To these people, poverty wasn’t due to a lack of education or of opportunities to work. Instead, they made the victims the guilty party. The poor are guilty because they are poor. The same results might be found here if such a test were administered. The Philippines cannot compete with other powerful countries if it relies solely on the skills of the capitalist world. It can compete and find its own appropriate mix of capitalism and culture if it remains a country of kindness and pity. Each people must moderate capitalism in their own way.

One more anecdote. My sister attended a community organization meeting in Lucena, Quezon, in 1982. One morning, instead of attending the sessions, Maggie, Fr. Tom Steinbugler and myself went to a nearby beach to swim. Suddenly there was a cry of shock and pain from Tom. He was bent over in the water. We got him up on shore and saw he had been bitten or stung by a jellyfish across his stomach. He had a hard time breathing.

My sister told him to bend over and breathe deeply. She told me later she didn’t know what to do. Tom later told me he feared he might die, and might have to go to confession to me. I thought we should urinate on the wound, but no man can pee on his own stomach, and I knew he’d rather die than have me pee on him. There was all this confusion, and then a woman from a fisherman’s shack farther up the beach came running with the traditional cure, vinegar. We put some on the red ugly wound and soon the crisis was over. The woman had seen our problems and knew right away what to do.

We were three very well educated persons there, but none of us knew what every adult and child in that area must know—that vinegar is the cure for a jellyfish sting. They also knew it was foolish to go in the water in the jellyfish season.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates (urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com).

Work and freedom

Commentary

By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer
9:24 pm | Thursday, September 20th, 2012

[On the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty are the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”]


On the last Sunday of July we took a night cruise around lower Manhattan, the New York harbor and the Statue of Liberty. The statue stands out in the bay, far from the lights of Wall Street and the financial center that burn day and night. I never guessed as we headed out at sunset that I would spend most of the evening thinking about my old immigrant relatives and the unemployed men of the urban poor areas of Metro Manila.

Our boat slowed as we approached Freedom Island where the statue rises; we drifted closer until we were almost underneath it. We saw it in silhouette against the last light in the Western sky. With its pedestal, it towers to the height of a 25-story building. The face of the statue as it looked down with deep concern on the poor and powerless people of New York, seemed wrapped in the type of head scarf Muslim women wear. Perhaps the goddess Athena looked down on ancient Athens from the Acropolis in just the same way Bicolanos might think of Our Lady of Peñafrancia.

A few hundred meters away was Ellis Island, where millions of poor immigrants landed in the 1920s-1930s, including my parents, aunts and uncles. Poor people were unloaded at Ellis Island; well-off passengers sailed on to Manhattan. For all passengers, especially for the poor, the statue was a great symbol of hope. It was the sign they were welcome in America and could begin life again in the new country. There would be problems, but the immigrants would be able to get jobs with which to raise their families, and they would be able to do so in security and freedom, protected by the country’s laws and labor unions.

It dawned on me that work and security/freedom are exactly what the men in the urban poor areas of Metro Manila are asking for.

There are government programs in the Philippines that help with income and microfinance, but they are usually for the women. This is not to criticize such programs but to highlight the great need for jobs for the men, especially the younger ones. What will happen to our society if the men are basically inutil and have to be carried along by the women? So few decent jobs are now available that the drug industry is one of the biggest employers of young men in the slums.

Can government make an extraordinary effort to provide jobs for the urban poor men? It seems unlikely that our leading job-creating industries—tourism and call centers—can employ the urban poor. Can the government, then, provide work by sponsoring public works programs? President Aquino promised to do this in the Covenant with the Urban Poor that he signed on March 6, 2010, in Del Pan, Tondo. In the covenant there is a section that discusses jobs for the poor communities. There is mention of public works created by government, and jobs that might be paid for by a combination of cash and food. The number of these jobs must be multiplied many times over:

“We will create large-scale public works programs that can generate a substantial number of jobs for poor men and women. At the onset of our term, we will emphasize labor-intensive public works programs that can generate a significant number of jobs for our poor people and give them access to at least the minimum amounts of money, food and dignity needed for their daily survival and well-being.”

The International Labor Organization has recommended that the Philippines use labor-intensive work processes in the infrastructure programs it funds. This will increase the number of men employed by 25 percent. Can the new flood control program employ such labor-intensive practices?

The Tzu Chi Foundation is a practitioner of public-works-type programs. During the recent post-flood cleanup work in resettlement areas in Montalban, it paid the people living there P400 a day to do the cleanup work. The work was done. The people had food to eat, and the men had their dignity.

There are many problems that can be solved through these types of public works: tree planting, for example, building of dikes and digging of water catchments.

We compete for the heart of the poor. If the men have work, even humble tasks at first, they will feel they have a stake in society. If they are unemployed, they are vulnerable to very destructive forms of alienation.

The Irish who came to the United States in the late 1920s, including my relatives, had just ended a civil war. There was nothing much for them in Ireland, especially for those who were on the losing side in that war. Most had only a fourth-year elementary education. America gave them jobs. They weren’t intellectually demanding jobs—construction workers, stevedores and transit employees for men, and waitresses and housemaids for women—but they gave the immigrants a foothold in the country and basic dignity. They were “making it in New York.” Their children had a chance to go to college and become doctors and scientists.

Public works projects will help our urban poor men in Metro Manila repeat such a transformation.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates (urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com).

‘Occupy Wall Street’

Commentary
By: Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer

 My sister and I went to Wall Street toward the end of September on an overcast day that threatened rain. I wanted to show her the building where I worked for a summer after my freshman year of high school. When we arrived at the head of that narrow street, where the sun seldom shines because it is very narrow and bordered by skyscrapers, we noticed that the police had prepared for a protest march.  They had divided the street into squares with portable metal fences resembling the cattle pens seen in the old Westerns, the wooden corrals where cowboys left their steers after the long drives across the plains.

Steam poured from a consolidated Edison street pipe and drifted in front of the New York Stock Exchange, lending it a sinister appearance. A white police van stood at the intersection of Nassau and Wall Streets to carry off any protesters that might be arrested. There were about 200 gloomy, bored policemen standing around. A big man in a plaid shirt and jeans preached about the need of showing kindness to one another. No one listened to him, except my sister and me. Afterwards he came over and shook hands and wished us a good day.

Then, all at once, the rain and the protesters arrived. Between 200 and 300 people marched along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. Almost as many policemen and policewomen walked with them. They went a few blocks toward the East River and then came back along the sidewalk where we stood. They had drums and shouted slogans, but it was hard to make much noise in such a cavernous and disinterested place. The marchers were mostly young, white males and they looked somewhat scruffy, I thought. They looked, to be honest, like the unemployed young men you might see playing basketball in the parks on weekday afternoons, while most of the city was at work. This was our first glimpse of the Occupy Wall Street group. It was one of their first marches.

The slogans they had on their banners and those they shouted were simplistic: “Close all the Banks,” “The Banks are Paid to Steal Your Money,” “Join us,” “Occupy Wall Street for a Day, for a Week,” “Wake Up.”  The police led them back toward Broadway and Trinity Church and then they were gone. Wall Street went about its business as usual.

 The next day the New York Times reported that the Dow Jones and Standard and Poor indices showed gains.

 A month later the “Occupy Wall Street” group had mushroomed into a worldwide phenomenon. On Oct. 15 I went with my wife Alicia to the park where the protesters stay which is adjacent to Ground Zero. The new memorial building towers over the park which is about the size of a football field. It was packed with 2,000 to 3,000 men and women, young and old, rich and poor, Afro-Americans, Hispanics, Caucasians and others and college and non-college educated people. Another Occupy Wall Street group was protesting in Times Square. The policemen were no longer bored. There were similar protests in 70 American cities, Asia, Europe and Australia.

We met a Hispanic woman who described herself as an “ordinary worker,” who told us she came to the park every day to watch over her 17-year-old daughter who spent day and night at the park when she wasn’t in school. The message of the Occupy Wall Street people was abstract, she said, about banks and mortgages, but it was repeated in anger and that helped her to understand she was being cheated. “We are being treated unfairly. The poor get poorer, the rich get richer. We need to come together to have a voice in how decisions are made.” A recent poll shows 67 percent of Americans agree with her.

The Occupy Wall Street people are able to focus people’s attention on issues that transcend race, class and education. In this case it is the wrongdoing of the finance industry which affects nearly America’s poor or middle class. Secondly, there is a great deal of basic political and economic education in the meetings and actions of the movement. People meet people of other backgrounds; they talk and come to appreciate one another’s problems. They hear different solutions and are free to agree or disagree.

The mood in the park on Oct. 15 was upbeat. People debated, sang and danced. Some walked around holding signs. The group seemed open to many solutions, including credit unions, that old staple of Church social action in the Philippines. We heard people debate the pros and cons of climate change, the relationship between unions and capitalism, and the usefulness of Che Guevarra for the Occupy Wall Street group.

Young Afro-Americans were often the voice of moderation in these discussions. One of them, for example, told the Guevarra admirer, “We will deal with our problems with the people we have here and now and with the institutions we have. We don’t need Che.” We didn’t hear anyone talk about changing the system, but of making it work for the good of all.

We found the building where I had worked years ago. There is still no marker recalling my summer there. I operated a ditto machine which was the size and shape of the bulky body scan machines used in our hospitals. Now the same work is done by personal copiers the size of a shoe.

Whether Occupy Wall Street is needed or not in the Philippines remains to be seen. We surely need its ability to bring the very poor workers and better-off middle class people together. We can also use its great emphasis on education.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His email address is upa@pldtdsl.net.