Here they come a’caroling

What can the people of Metro Cebu do to solve what has now become the problem of ambush carolers in the jeepneys and on the streets?

Betty Ganub, head of Cebu City’s anti-mendicacy task force vowed that the agency will round up kid carolers and turn them over to the Department of Welfare and Social Services for assessment and intervention.

This is a good resolution that the task force should follow through not only in the runup to Christmas with its attendant surge of metropolitan mendicants of all ages from as far away as Basilan province, but the whole year through.

We can never over-repeat the truth that kids belong to homes and schools and not to the streets where accidents may claim or predators ruin their lives.

Parents, especially of the indigenous Badjaos need to be dissuaded from putting their children at risk by leaving them unsupervised in our thoroughfares.

The general public, meanwhile, should be warned that they can be party to destroying a child’s life if they give him or her some coins that might be used to purchase addictive sealants to sniff.

The task force is hard-pressed, nay afraid to deal with older carolers, “Those over 18 with tattoos,” Ganub.

Commuters in fact fear the older carolers, too. They give them some money in exchange for their rap numbers that become carols late in the year not out of pity but to make sure they quickly disembark from vehicles.

The opening spiel these carolers recite inside the jeeps do not help. In part they say, “brothers and sisters, what we are doing is better than what others are doing out there. They steal. They rob.”

What these youngsters may not realize is that their message only serves to irritate most if not all jeepney passengers—workers who sweat week in and week out just to put food on the tables of their homes.

They have no business emotionally blackmailing passengers unless they are really part of some syndicate in which case Ganub is prudent in planning to bring along cops to round them up for violating Cebu City’s ordinance against mendicancy among others.

Otherwise government agencies need to implement new and improved ways of reaching out to these youths who seem to have no clue that they can try to raise their standards of living without having to play frustrated troubadours. Let them try entrepreneurship or vocational school.

Or perhaps, business and other civil society groups can find a way to hire these musically inclined young ones as permanent features of this urban society with its heritage of song, a la the singing restaurant staffers of floating restaurants in neighboring Bohol province.