The Catholic Church—ally of the poor

Commentary

by Denis Murphy

 

For the past 50 years the Catholic Church has been the most reliable ally of the urban poor. This may not be true with all parts of the Church or at all times, but in comparison with other powerful institutions, the Church has been outstanding in this regard. It has campaigned for justice and dignity for the poor. In times of trouble it has extended a protective arm to everyone working in poor areas for the people’s well-being. In times of sorrow the Church has been compassionate.

 

Cardinal Jaime Sin, on the eve of the third and final vote on the Urban Development and Housing Act (March 1992), phoned senators and House representatives, urging them to vote for the bill. How did these politicians feel being asked to support a controversial bill that was soon called “the lousy Lina Act” by its opponents? (Sen. Joey Lina was its principal sponsor.) Not only was the bill controversial, the presidential election campaign of that year was in its last months, so controversy was the last thing politicians wanted. Anyway, in the end they backed the bill, which has proven to be extremely important for the poor.

 

I heard Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales tell a roomful of government housing people, informal settlers and NGOs that the government should exert greater effort to understand the poor. He said the very poor are hungry and near desperate and have little time to worry about “cut-off dates” (sometimes if they were not present by a certain date in a site, they would not be resettled). The cardinal explained the poor cannot easily hold on to documents and many can’t read. He spoke, I thought, with a warm and understanding heart. We make things difficult for the poor, he said. The government later changed its policies.

 

I saw Bishop Julio Labayen lead a rally at the Philippine International Convention Center while a major public event was being celebrated. He demanded that the police bring back a young priest whom the bishop believed had been taken by the government and hidden away, perhaps to be tortured. He wasn’t worried about his image as a bishop. He wanted his priest back. Unfortunately, the bishop was mistaken. The priest had fled the country on his own. The priest’s own sister had lied to the bishop about his arrest.

 

Bishop Labayen and other bishops and superiors time and time again would help wives and mothers find their dead and tortured sons and husbands. Bishop Francisco Claver called down God’s vengeance, “gaba,” on those who tortured prisoners. What is said about the Catholic Church applies also to member churches of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines. They, too, had their shining moments.

 

As we have all noticed, not all Church people acted as well. In recent years interest in the poor has declined in the Church. Bishops and men and women high up in the Church show the same ugly biases against the poor as people who have never meditated on the Gospel. One group of priests wrote Mayor Alfredo Lim at Christmastime last year, pleading with him: “On our knees we are begging God that you, Mr. Mayor, do not allow those urban poor people to rebuild their homes.” Priests begging God and the mayor to stop the poor from rebuilding their homes—during the Christmas season!

 

A famous Jesuit, Fr. John Courtney Murray, once said, “Cruelty in a woman is unnatural.” Men are expected to be cruel at times, but not women. I believe we can also say, “Bias and hatred toward the poor on the part of religious people is truly unnatural.” We expect the Church to help the poor. We expect compassion from its leaders. After all, it is the Church of the Poor, and God has His own mysterious, abundant and “preferential love” for the poor.

 

We have a new pope who has put poverty and the poor at the center of Christian life. We have a new young cardinal who has shown he will follow in the footsteps of his predecessors in the service of the poor.

 

What must they do? John Lloyd, writing for Reuters in BusinessWorld last July 1, has suggestions: “Francis (and other bishops) has to inspire his priests with the zeal to reconvert their often semi-detached flocks into activists for radical social change. He must avoid the excesses of leftism, yet not collapse into mere populism. He must identify the Church with programs of poverty alleviation. He must develop practical answers to the unemployment of the young (maybe as pastoral assistants, aides to aged parishioners or menders of crumbling churches). He must be present at policy discussions on the economy and he must give social teaching some realist underpinning. The Catholic Church has a great many men (it’s chosen to marginalize women, for the most part) of high intelligence, of whom Francis, a Jesuit, is one. Let them bend their minds to address poverty’s constant companion—unemployment.”

 

Yes, hope beckons, but we ask all who can help to hurry. Half of our children go to bed hungry and live all day hungry. Our prostitutes are younger than ever. I’ve noticed pregnant women walking in the slums, sometimes barefoot. Their dresses are tight around their swollen stomachs. They have no money to buy a more appropriate dress. They have nothing to give their children but themselves.

 

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates [urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com].

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Knowing and unknowing

Commentary

By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer

 

Marietta, a woman of buoyant good humor with whom we have worked for years on the R-10 road in Tondo, was telling us why she was happy with her new home in the resettlement area in San Pedro, Laguna. “I have a real home now,” she said. “When I die, my wake can be inside my home, not out in the street.” Traffic on the R-10 roars dangerously close to the poor people’s houses. Holding a wake there is a risky matter. We were surprised that Marietta, still in her 40s, should be thinking of her death and wake.

There are many things we don’t know about the urban poor, including the depth of their unawareness of matters that affect their lives. In a survey made of poor families living along the San Juan River in San Juan City and Quezon City, we found that most of them knew almost nothing about the Urban Development and Housing Act that sets limits on evictions, and nothing about the “Covenant with the Urban Poor” that was signed by President Aquino. The covenant restricts resettlement to on-site, in-city and near-city relocation areas, and forbids the distant relocation patterns of past years that saw up to 80 percent of the people sent to far-off sites abandoning their homes there and returning to Manila. There were no jobs. The poor are not aware they have housing rights guaranteed by law and the Constitution.

When the survey respondents were asked about eviction, they told the interviewers that they knew they were living illegally on the land near the river and therefore had no rights. They told the interviewers to talk to their barangay captains because they would do what these leaders told them to do. The barangay captains traditionally do what the mayor wants in eviction matters, so the poor were in effect turning over all decisions on the matter to the mayors who often are the source of evictions orders.

This ignorance of their rights can be a temptation to the government to ignore the people’s rights, though it seems that the government’s first task should be to inform the people of their rights. These days, even deadly criminals are so informed. We all know the short speech the detective gives as he puts on the handcuffs: “You have the right to remain silent. What you say may be held against you in court. You have a right to a lawyer…”

Are poor people denied similar information? Are they told, “You have a right to question the eviction orders, you have a right to near-city or in-city resettlement”?

We found that 90 percent of the communities along the San Juan River were unorganized. There may be a leader who takes care of Mass in the  capilla  during the fiesta or intercedes with the mayor in special cases, but there is no organization that brings the people together to discuss matters such as imminent eviction and how they should respond. The people, through lack of awareness of their rights and lack of an organization capable of a critical stance toward evictions, are very vulnerable to government “bullying.”

Most importantly, the poor people are not aware of how God looks on their situation, which is, of course, the way we should look on them. God doesn’t want them to live in slums. Neither does He want them forced or talked out of their homes and sent to places that, for lack of jobs, may be more injurious to them than life in the slums. He wants His people to be treated justly. Pope John Paul II once said through his Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace: “Every family that finds itself living in slum-like conditions through no fault of their own is a victim of injustice.” That’s injustice committed by the rest of society.

I feel we may be caught up in a gigantic typhoon of propaganda and spin. People are told they are being evicted “for their own good,” but the people say they have lived along the esteros and rivers for 20 or 30 years and no one has been hurt by the many floods they have experienced. Then we are told the poor families along the waterways are blocking the flow of water and causing the floods that bring the whole city to its knees. Actually, most families along the waterways are at least three meters from the water, and public works officials and World Bank experts have said they do not interfere with the flow of water. We are also told the same poor families pollute the rivers and Manila Bay itself. Research tells us only 5-10 percent of pollution is from the poor. If all the poor along the waterways did nothing all day except “make  ihi,” they still couldn’t pollute the rivers and bay, so vast is the volume of water.

What we need in the matter of pollution are waste treatment plants for industry that really work and treatment plants to serve the hundreds of thousands of families of all income levels whose waste is now poured directly into the Pasig River.

Our haste to evict may be leading us to illegal actions. Some lawyers believe the government plan to give evicted families P18,000 for rent in lieu of resettlement, with a promise to resettle them after a year, may be illegal.

We are gradually shifting all guilt and all necessary sacrifice connected with flood control on to the shoulders of the poor. Reality is much more complex. We are not informing poor people of their rights, though Ramon Magsaysay once promised, “Those who have less in life should have more in law.” We are not helping them organize so they can fully understand and deal with the evictions they face.

Does the country want to go down such a self-righteous road, blaming the poor for our ills, or can we face the huge, complex flood problem, and other problems linked to climate change, as one people, giving new meaning to the old slogan “one for all and all for one”?

There is time. The engineering work for flood control will not even begin for a few more years. Why not solve the problems we face with compassion for all our people?

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

Snows of yesteryear

Commentary

Denis Murphy

 

Sixty years ago this month, a group of young American Jesuit scholastics, myself among them, sailed into Manila Bay. Fr. Francisco “Fritz” Araneta was our superior. He was home after years of study abroad, and began presenting his country.

 

He pointed out a young woman, a legendary heroine, asleep on the mountains. He spoke of Corregidor Island, and told us of its fall. Part of the story he got from another Jesuit, Fr. Pacifico Ortiz, who had been there with President Manuel Quezon until they left with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. He told us there were sharks in the waters between Corregidor and Cavite, as if he expected us to jump in if he didn’t warn us. We saw nothing but green mountains and the blue sea. It was a wonderland.

 

We were in our early 20s. We would study philosophy at Berchmans College Cebu, then teach in one of the Ateneos before going on to theology. We had been 21 days on the old freighter Pacific Bear without seeing land, until we stopped at San Fernando, La Union, to unload the heavy-duty trucks intended for Ambuklao Dam.

 

I don’t remember much of the next few days. I recall visiting Intramuros and the immigration office there, and seeing the demolished walls of the city and the poor people everywhere, even on the site of the old cathedral. They were called “squatters” by everyone. I never dreamed I would spend most of my life working with these people.

 

At that time there were about 27 million Filipinos; now there are 93 million, more than thrice the 1953 figure. The extremely rapid population growth is arguably the most important historical fact of the last 60 years.

 

We were wearing white soutanas in public for the first time. We felt very odd, but the people didn’t seem to notice. I remember our trip to Cebu on the Basco, a small freighter, packed with people and cargo, chickens and pigs. All three days of the trip the people stared at us in our white soutanas and we stared at them; both sides were fascinated with what they saw. One in our group, Ed Spinello, had been a football player at Fordham University. He stood 5’9”, but he weighed at least 250 pounds. The people realized he never used the toilet. When he got up to walk around the ship, every eye followed him. Parents pulled their children out of his way.

 

Besides Spinello and myself there was Cal Poulin, who died in Cagayan de Oro in 2012. Asked once what he wanted on his tombstone, he said: “Here lies a Jesuit missionary of 60 years.” He died a year before that time was up. The fourth man was John Van Bemel, who left the Jesuits soon after ordination. We lost track of him. Spinello died shortly after ordination. Such are life’s vagaries.

 

We were fascinated by the way the mothers made “homes” out of the few square meters their family occupied amid all the cots and cargo in that ship. We were looking at families, not a crowd of individuals.

 

Flying fish followed us all the way with leaps of up to 20 meters. We saw the small islands scattered over the sea in their turquoise rings. We saw thunderstorms marching across the sea toward us on dark spindly legs. We were on our own; Father Araneta had stayed in Manila. For us it was a first-class adventure. Actually I think it was the love of adventure as much as the missionary spirit that moved us to volunteer for the missions in the first place.

 

We landed in Cebu on June 21, the feast of St. Aloysius Gonzaga. We knew the American scholastics who had gone ahead of us in 1951 and 1952. We met our Filipino classmates for the first time. Looking back now, I don’t see any way in which all Americans differed from all Filipinos. Some of each group loved philosophy, some found it torture. Some were interested in the fine arts, others were not.

 

We heard Ramon Magsaysay campaigning to become president at Fuente Osmeña. He said America would never give the weapons the Philippines needed to defeat its enemies (the Huks) “unless they saw the name Ramon Magsaysay at the bottom of the page.” He got a truly rousing reception in Cebu. Just four years later he flew from Cebu to his death.

 

One night not long after we arrived, I heard loud noises coming from the mountains behind the city. I left my room to see what it was. It sounded like people beating on pots and pans, and I saw rows of torches moving on the mountains. “What is it?” I asked the superstudious Filipino scholastic who lived next to me. He had a scholar’s interest in angels. Whatever problem came up in class, he related it to the angels: “What has this to say about the angels?”

 

He told me the people were making noise because they wanted the moon back. I hadn’t noticed the eclipse; nearly half the moon was gone and the night was darker. He said, “They believe the dragon took part of the moon and they want it back. If I were you, I’d stay in my room. Sometimes the people look for victims to sacrifice to the dragon. They prefer fair-skinned people. It’s about the light you see. Stay in your room.”

 

I stayed in my room until the dragon gave back the moon and the mountain people went to bed. My neighbor came and told me he was only kidding about the human sacrifice. It was the only time anyone can remember that he did something frivolous.

 

“What does it say about the angels?” I asked him. He laughed. It was the first time we saw him laugh out loud.

 

I once again thank the Filipino people, who have been angels mostly over the years.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates [urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com].

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Not the ‘gates of hell,’ but worse

Commentary

By Denis Murphy

 

 

Manila is not the “gates of hell” Dan Brown described in his latest novel “Inferno.” If anything, it is worse. Brown and observers like him see only the shell of poverty, the part of it that is visible from a car or from a walk on the edge of an urban poor area near their hotel. They don’t know the truly awful scenes in the heart of the slums and they don’t know the people. And most Filipinos have little more real knowledge of the slums than our foreign friends do.

 

Foreigners and most Filipinos lack an understanding of why the slums are here, how little is done to help the urban poor, and how much courage and self-sacrificing love exist in the slums. Cardinal Chito Tagle and Pope Francis have urged us to listen to one another as a precondition for understanding one another: To understand all is to forgive all.

 

Yes, in the slums there are pimps, men ready to kill for P500, drug lords, child prostitutes, parents who encourage their children to become prostitutes; there are drunks, lazy people, opportunists, violent husbands, vultures who prey on the weak, and all types of bad characters. There are, however, as I have experienced in my 43 years of work in the Tondo-Baseco slums, men and women, especially women, of near-heroic love and unselfishness.

 

I also believe there are embers of compassion in all our people, so that a gesture of concern by a decent government or an engaged Church, or a group of young people, can fan the embers into flame and into genuine concern for the very poor. Why worry about what Dan Brown or others say? We will be judged on what we do to help the poor who are there before us, as Jesus promised they always would be.

 

Let me give an example of what embers of compassion look like and how these can be fanned into life.  We were driving on Aurora Boulevard in front of St. Joseph’s Church last week when we saw coming toward us, against the traffic, an older man, a scavenger, pushing a kariton that was piled high with the stuff he had gathered during the night. On top of everything was a cardboard box turned upside down, and balancing on the box were two small puppies. The box tilted this way and that and the puppies looked around for help. The man, who seemed to be in his sixties, was smiling at the dogs and reassuring them they were safe, and perhaps for a few hours at least he was smiling at life itself. After all, he had finished work and had earned his P150 or P200 for the night. He was on his way to the junk shop to sell his stuff and then he would head home for breakfast and bed with his puppies.

 

Then something remarkable happened: None of the drivers around us blew their horns at the man for coming against traffic and slowing them up in the rush hour. Ordinarily, these same drivers would be furious at a wrong-way driver. People have been shot for blocking traffic. Here no one was angry. They sympathized with the old man. Compassion was still alive.

Maybe the drivers liked the old man’s self-reliance and jaunty air in the face of poverty and old age. Maybe they liked his affection for the puppies. Whatever the reason, the drivers saw him as a good man in need of help. If there were a program for the old man, they would readily have signed on.

 

Let the old man stand as a symbol for the urban poor and the rural landless poor and the tribal people hustled out of their land by mining companies and others. The job of the government, the Church and ourselves, I believe, is to awaken the interest of all people in the poor of the country. Like the old man, most of the poor are decent, interesting people.

 

The poor need help. No one escapes poverty by himself or herself. Not Batman, Superman, or even the Irish superhero Finn McCool, who is so strong he can lift himself up by the scruff of his neck, can manage to get out of poverty unaided.

What might a program for the old scavengers and people like him be? We should note, first of all, that if he has a home, he is fortunate. There are hundreds of scavenger-families who sleep at night in or alongside their kariton. Let us talk about what can be done for them. At night they pull their wagons up on the sidewalk wherever they can and huddle together for the night, more like people in the Tabon Caves 50,000 years ago than residents of a modern city. They are liable to be beaten or robbed, or rousted by the police or by security guards, or well-off people who fear the presence of homeless people.

 

Suppose we set up camps around the city where the poor scavengers can come at night, where they will have water and be safe, where perhaps a medical person can examine the sick and the children can get a bite to eat, and maybe some tutoring. Can Ateneo de Manila University, Miriam College and the University of the Philippines open their parking lots at night to the kariton of the poor and homeless? The security guards are already in the schools to keep an eye on things. The homeless people will be safe and will leave in the early morning.

 

The schools can become homes of peace and compassion for the hundreds of young and old people who are literally homeless in the Cubao area.

 

What must be done?

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

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The poor didn’t benefit

Commentary
By Denis Murphy

Philippine Daily Inquirer

How did the midterm elections affect the urban poor? More than any other group, the poor need free elections to improve their lives, but the simple truth seems to be that in the last poll exercise they hardly benefited. It was partly their own doing.


The urban poor in the Philippines now number about 20 million, according to the UN Habitat. They are the fastest growing of poor sectors. They live in the larger cities, the great engines of the economy, but to paraphrase the Gospel, they are in but not of the great wealth found there. They are like the small fish along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef that clean parasites off the sharks, manta rays and other highly dangerous marine creatures. The big fish drop by these special “cleaning” areas when they feel the need, the little fish who love to eat parasites do a first-class cleaning job, even going into the gills and jaws of the sharks, then the big fish sail off, leaving the small fish with nothing in the great ocean but their parasites.

There was a sticker used in the election of 2010 that read: “In a democracy, reform comes from the ballots of the poor.” It expresses the classic belief of people organizing the poor, that if they can gather the poor into political parties that are informed and eager for change, they can win political power through elections, and then use the power to help the poor.

I don’t see that this happened in the last elections, except in very small areas of Manila, in very small ways. Still, elections remain the main political hope of the poor. Realistically, there is no other path to a decent life. But for now, the politicians who believe they can win the poor people’s votes at election time by giving them money and food, coopting their leaders and making endless airy promises, have been proven right once again.

Thousands of poor people have sold their votes. They have taken money in exchange for their free democratic votes that are the key to the locks and chains that hold them in poverty. People who sell their votes lose their self-respect and agree with the powerful that change is not needed, or possible. Taking money encourages the power-brokers to manipulate the poor all the more.

Why should anyone help such poor people? But before we start blaming the poor, we should remember that while among the poor there may be pimps, men of violence, drunkards, as well as lazy, greedy and vulgar people, there are even more decent, hardworking and caring ones.

There are many good people among the poor. I once saw a heavily pregnant woman walking barefoot through her slum community. Her dress was stretched so tight around her swollen belly that we feared her child could be hurt. She had no money to buy a more suitable dress. She had nothing to offer her baby except herself. All her life she will sacrifice for her children though she is hungry, unhappy and often a victim of violence. She will never give up on them.

There are innocent victims. Think of the 12-year-old prostitutes who work along the piers of Tondo at night. They charge P30 ($.75 cents) for touching (pakalog, groping) and P300 ($7) for sex, often in the back of a truck, with the men who hang out at the piers. When you see two or three of the girls together, you are aware they still have the thin legs and the awkward, shy stance of children. They should be playing childhood games, not waiting for customers.

The great reason for helping the urban poor is, of course, that God is with the poor. God is not with them because they are good and deserving of help any more than He was with the Israelites because they were good. He helps the poor, as the Prophet Ezekiel tells us, just as He helped the Israelites, not because they are good, but for the sake of His Own Holy Name.

At the risk of trivializing a serious matter, here is how things may work. A smart fish who has traveled outside his or her own sea—someone like Nemo, perhaps—one day advises the small fish-cleaners: “You don’t have to do what the sharks and manta rays want. You are not slaves. Organize yourselves, elect leaders and tell the sharks you are tired of your parasite diet, and you want the sharks and others to bring a variety of food when they come, or no cleaning.”

“Suppose they just eat us instead?” one of the small fish asks.

“If they eat you, there will be no one to remove the parasites, and that will pain them more and more. Don’t worry, stick together, and they’ll do what you want,” the smart fish says.

So the small fish stand firm and confront the sharks and the other great fish. The small fish win, and they now live with dignity and have expanded their services to include beauty treatments, massage, and organizing advice. The fish who started it all is now a Senator of the Sea.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates [urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com].

An old novitiate

Commentary
By Denis Murphy

Philippine Daily Inquirer

You know you are getting old when you drive into a religious novitiate and care more about the men and women in the cemetery than the present novices. I realized this as we drove into the Jesuits’ Sacred Heart Novitiate in Novaliches one day.

We go in past the old mango and balete trees that line the road; they are at least a hundred years old, but strong and shaggy, and somehow suggest you are on your way to an otherworldly type of place. There is a mystic air about the old grounds. Still we realize that the lawn that stretches from the house down toward Quirino Highway, between balete trees that are 50 feet in diameter, would make a wonderful par three golf hole.

The original novitiate building stands at the top of the hill, blazing white in the morning sun. Ironically, despite all the martial law rancor

between the Jesuits and President Marcos, the novitiate reminds a person very much of Malacañang: both are Spanish-style, two-storied, brilliant white and set in lush green lawns.

We spend the morning at a seminar discussing amendments to the Urban Development and Housing Act (1992). I am lucky to meet John Paul Dy, a Jesuit novice who accompanied me to the cemetery. I’m surprised by the renovations made. I remember the ivy covered stone walls, with Jesuits buried under the grass and leaves falling from the trees that overhung the cemetery walls. Now the cemetery is neat and modern, but the aura of age is gone. Gone, too, is the sense the old cemetery gave of the continuity of the Jesuit Order, which is its great strength: the men lying there know their work will go on.

No men opposed martial law with more courage than those buried there: Fathers Pacifico Ortiz, Joe Blanco, Jim Reuter, Benigno Mayo, Francisco Araneta, Antonio “Toti” Olaguer and, of course, Bishop Francisco Claver. I lived with them all, except Father Reuter. It wasn’t all serious work. One weekend Joe Blanco and I decided to grow mustaches. His turned out much better than mine. We walked to the Luneta from our house in Padre Faura to show them off.

Francisco Araneta was in charge of the small group, of which I was a member, that traveled by boat to the Philippines in 1953. He taught me how to play chess, then beat me three or four times a night.

Jim Reuter complimented everyone, including myself, a little more than we deserved. But looking back, it helped all of us to keep writing and performing.

Bishop Claver opened coke bottles with his teeth on one of our seaside holidays when we studied philosophy in Berchmans College, Cebu.

The two most outstanding men, I believe, were Bishop Claver and Horacio dela Costa, who was in Rome for most of martial law until he came home and died in 1976. The bishop was a courageous Bontoc warrior and a doctor of anthropology. He lowered God’s gaba on the army and police who abused people in Bukidnon and headed a local church that many saw as a model for others. Dela Costa was the smartest and wisest of all. He knew Philippine history as well as a person knows his own family’s history. He was probably the only man who could have led the Jesuits in the very peaceful transition from American to Filipino control.

Where are their likes today? Will we ever again see the Jesuits and other religious groups take such a strong position against injustice and authoritarianism as they did?

There were other great men among the even older Jesuits who are buried there—Fathers John Pollock, Joseph Mulry, Jim Hoggerty and some unique (eccentric?) men, such as, Hector Mauri who started labor union work among the sugar workers and sacadas, built fishing boats with nets 10 stories high, and designed SST aircraft that Boeing said were too advanced for their engineers to deal with. They recommended that Father Mauri send the plan to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. There was Guido Arguelles who was born one day before me, so we celebrated birthdays together. He brought fresh vegetables to the poor of Tondo, sang opera at the drop of a hat and was the only man I knew who thought carne norte was the world’s best food. The cemetery also contains the bones of 80 Jesuits “known only to God,” whose bones were transferred in 1945 from the ruins of San Ignacio Church in Intramuros.

Soon after we finished in the cemetery, the rain comes. In the Novitiate there is an air of recollection before the rain actually arrives, as if it gathers itself for prayer. The rain falls steadily on the old trees and the grass. It is the only sound we can hear. There is no one walking about, not even a stray dog. When the rain stops, the air is suddenly so fresh you feel you can wash your face in it.

For a short stretch of time the setting sun spreads its golden light. And then it is time for sleep.

As we drive out along the winding driveway, I feel certain that the men in the cemetery behind me are happy. But the question still remains: When will we see their likes again?

Jesuits and others were able to focus their energies during the martial law years on getting rid of a dictator. What can serve as a focus today? The new Pope (Francis) has suggested that it be the poor. Perhaps the poor and justice for all can serve as the focus. Perhaps the focus could be jobs, land and a better life for all the poor. In the “Covenant with the Urban Poor,” President Aquino promised public works projects to be done with the help of people paid in the form of cash and food. Why don’t we try such projects in our great need for jobs?

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates [urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com].

Weddings on Estero de San Miguel

By Denis Murphy

Philippine Daily Inquirer
Tuesday, April 16th, 2013

My wife Alice and I were ninang and ninong recently to 24 couples who were married on the banks of Estero de San Miguel. The estero hasn’t been a famous venue for weddings, to say the least, but in the near future we may be surprised.


The couples will move a few meters along the estero from the fragile, congested shacks they now live in to beautiful family houses. Thanks to their own determination and the wisdom of a few government officials, they will look out their windows each morning to a clean estero, trees along the banks full of birds bathing in fresh air and sunshine. The only noise beside the birds will be students heading for Claro M. Recto High School. This is an example of the on-site, in-city housing President Aquino has promoted.

Urban poor people are often defined as families that live illegally on land they don’t own, in rundown, dilapidated houses. Does the shift of our 24 couples to the new houses mean they are no longer urban poor? Not in most people’s eyes: urban poverty is still linked to low incomes. But this tag may soon disappear from our 24. They may now be below the poverty line, but they are located in the heart of Manila, and so can take advantage of every job opportunity. Also their children are graduating from the nearby colleges at a higher rate than in other poor areas and they will soon bring good money home. The couples will then be above the poverty line. Are there other urban poor stereotypes that must be shed? Perhaps, but first back to the mass wedding?

We know how much excitement one bride can cause, so imagine the clatter and clutter as 24 got ready. Add to that the playfulness of their 50 or so children. Sadly for romantics, they were not marrying out of young love but because they needed a marriage license to enter the government housing project. Whatever the reason for it, the ceremony awoke in the couples an understanding of how much they had come to depend on one another over the years. Deep appreciation may be another name for love.

Remember the scene in “Fiddler on the Roof,” when the man asks his wife of many years, “Do you love me?” The wife makes fun of the question. What’s happening to him, she muses, and then she sings: “Do I love him? For 35 years I washed his clothes, cooked his meals, raised his kids, milked his goats, if that isn’t love, I don’t know what is?”

Urban poor areas are usually accused of being dirty, of harboring criminals, of allowing rowdy drinking and needless violence and of standing helpless in the face of corrupt politicians and drug gangs.

The 24 couples don’t want that identity, anymore than other groups of people would want it, and they have taken steps to eliminate such activity. They have put together a Management Estate Agreement that covers all the above, from garbage to drugs. They say they will put an end to the public drinking that leads to violence and all the other mistakes. Will that remove the last taint of urban poverty or are there other aspects of urban poor culture that need to be changed? Maybe not, but let’s not look only at negative qualities.

The urban poor may also have admirable qualities. The people of the Estero de San Miguel, for example, have shown remarkable strength of will in pursuit of their rights.

Vendors, drivers, scavengers, tricycle drivers, security guards, unskilled construction workers and small-scale businesspersons, they are not powerful in the eyes of society, but they have outlasted the powerful government officials who sought to evict them. They have attended close to 150 meetings with government agencies to get their housing on the estero. It seems a remarkable record of perseverance.

A few days before Christmas in 2011, President Aquino announced there would be groundbreaking for a housing project on the estero within a few weeks. However, an agency head called the people and said she was coming with a committee and she would decide about the groundbreaking, whether it would go ahead or not. The people told her, “Don’t come; you’re not welcome with that news. We won’t let you enter.” The day after Christmas, the community burnt to the ground. They didn’t give up. The people rebuilt. There were many other threats and endless anxiety over the years. Now they will live in the nice houses on the estero banks, with only the sounds of the birds and children on their way to school to disturb the peace.

With the help of their allied NGOs—Urban Poor Associates and CO Multiversity among them—some old notions about the urban poor are being redefined: They are learning to make their own analysis of their situation; to choose the solutions they think best to put together their own people’s plans for housing; and to undertake actions that are most appropriate. They have learned to organize, and they deeply appreciate solidarity. They act democratically in a persevering and resilient fashion. All this should be added to their usual age-old care for one another—they have always helped each other when times were tough.

“Urban poor was once a name assigned to poor people who lived illegally on land in rundown, degrading housing, in communities marked by violence, noise, drugs and abuse of children. Common usage now adds that they are well organized, democratic, independent in their thinking and planning, have great respect for one another and community solidarity, are persevering and resilient, and do not accept corrupt politicians and drug gangs easily.”

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates [urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com].


Read more: http://opinion.inquirer.net/50837/weddings-on-estero-de-san-miguel#ixzz2QoF8BoiC

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