If you can afford to buy and read this paper, chances are you are not one of those officially counted by the government to be in poverty. Merry Christmas!
In this country, the government’s National Statistical Coordination Boards (NSCB) says that as of 2009, you were in poverty if you belong to a family with less than P7,017 in monthly income, which translates to just 1,403 per person. With inflation, this poverty threshold should translate by November this year to P7,719 per family or P1,543 per person.
Accordingly, the poverty threshold should cover both food (69 percent) and none food items (31 percent). Can one really live with P1,543 a month or P51 daily? Of course, everybody can live even with so little, but what kind of life would that be? You may not die, but can you buy food and store energy for work without getting hungry and tired too soon? With so little food, can poor people withstand the diseases that often afflict them in the slums? With very little food, will poor children be awake and smart enough to absorb lessons if they ever happen to be enrolled in public school? Chances are they will not.
Ale and I were in Makati for three days last week. We were billeted in a place at the city’s Central Business District. There you might not see the poor. Everybody looks fulfilled in the streets and almost everyone inside the malls that we went into had a nice-looking shopping bag or two in their hands. But even in the center of Makati, there is still poverty when you look closer.
There was this little boy, for example, who moved from table to table at SM Makati’s food court. Do you know what he was doing? Caroling! He approach people in their tables and softly sing a Christmas song. In our table, I took a picture of him after giving him some money. He said he went on caroling inside the mall to help earn some money for the family. It was good at the food court. His only problem was how not to get noticed by the guards who would surely shove him away.
That was around 2 p.m. last Friday. Around 10 p.m., when we returned to Makati from Baclaran, we went down again to the SM food court for our late dinner. But before getting our food, I went first to the comfort room. There were many people inside the men’s room but the washbasins and table were remarkably dry and clean. I washed my hands before I went out when in the corner of my eye I saw the frail-looking janitor leaning on the corner near the wash basin. He looked very sleepy and tired already but upon seeing the drops of water on the washbasin table that I left, he sprang to life again and wiped the table immediately. He was doing his job pretty well. But seeing how tired and sleepy he was really, I returned and handed him a P100 bill with these words: Merry Christmas! He was surprised and then I knew that he was holding back his tears. He looked at me before he accepted the money after bowing his head. He wanted to say something but he just could not open his mouth. I smiled to him and said again Merry Christmas and left.
I told Ale what happened inside the men’s room. She said maybe the guy really needed the money very much to buy food or something before he would go home and that he could not utter a word because he was overwhelmed with emotion. After all, which janitor would expect to be given money inside the men’s room? I agreed because I know that many people like us who use the comfort room do not bother to pay attention to the people working there. I do not know why but to the handsome waiters and waitresses in nice restaurants, many of us do give tips even if a 10 percent service charge is already in the bill.
When we took the food that we ordered we found out that there was not a vacant table in sight. We had to wait for a while before we saw one. It was full of used plates and leftovers so we could not put down our food to eat. We were famished. I looked around and found the table cleaner some four tables away. I signaled him to clean our table. Within a few seconds the table was clean but before the table cleaner could leave I put some money into the table and said “Merry Christmas!” Again the surprised look in his face; again no word from his mouth came out which I know now to be shut because of his overwhelming emotion. Again because I knew and he knew that in his kind of work, no patron really cares to give them something even on Christmas.
So now I know that there is still plenty of poverty even in the richest city of the country. It is found even in the faces of those employed in large business establishments who are paid only the minimum wage, more or less. Naturally, the faces of the poor also include the unemployed. I know that the unemployment rates are highest in the more highly urbanized cities like Metro Manila or Metro Cebu than in the towns. Of course, the faces of poverty also include the underemployed and disguised employed who are plentiful in the rural areas. It is the poor in the rural areas who migrate to the cities to find a better life only to end up among the urban poor.
Presently, there is a controversy with the NSCB’s use of the new method of determining what one needs and how much to spend for food and other basic items to be counted out of poverty. It turned out that the new method gave a much lower poverty incidence compared to the old method.
But sadly, the truth is otherwise. For the past many years now, the Social Weather Station asked our people about their situation in life every three months. More than 50 percent considered themselves poor.