Carton crib

Ang Pasko ay sumapit, mall megaphones blare, Wait. Isn’t that the pirated version of the winning carol at  the 1933  Cebu Christmas  contest? Christmas is still 43 days away. Most homes haven’t dusted off star lanterns or Nativity belens.
But a different calendar kicks in here early September. Indigents decamp overnight  on  cardboard  mats along city sidewalks. “They appear like clockwork,” writes Sun Star’s Publio  Briones III. “Their temporary living room/dining room/bedroom/kitchen (has) a view to boot.”
Their scrawny kids flit from jeepneys to buses to cars warbling off-key carols, They bang flattened bottle caps. The “tambourine brigade” is again cadging for a few coins. Most are grimy school dropouts. Penury forces  33 out of every 100 to quit  before reaching Grade 6.
About 6 percent of 12.6 million children today are out of school. Don’t be conned by that sliver. They make up majority among the poor. “Wheels of inter-generational poverty (turn) against them,” Unicef notes. Hunger locks your street caroler into a life sentence of poverty.
More will surface in the runup to Christmas. They’ll  blend into the woodwork, spurned by some, unnoticed by most. Do tinsel and partying keep us from reading, in these canto choirs, “signs of the times”?
If we “open our shut-up hearts freely, we’ll discover they’re ‘hard as flint,’ Jonathan Powers wrote in “Scrooge Is Here.” “No steel ever struck (from them) generous fire. They remain secret, self-contained and solitary as an oyster.”
Christmas 2013 comes, as it did two millennia ago, to a “pork-giddy” officialdom Inquirer’s unrelenting investigative  reports have shown five senators and 23 representatives implicated in the pork barrel scam. These included: Bong Revilla (P1.01 billion)  Juan Ponce Enrile (P641 million), Jinggoy Estrada (P585 million), Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. (P100 million) and Gregorio Honasan (P14 million).
The Commission on Audit put its foot down in “Notices of Disqualification” for over P6 billion dissipated in pork slabs. Without raising her voice, COA chair Grace Pulido Tan told a stunned Senator Estrada: “Return the money.”
Suddenly, everyone is getting a  refresher course in the forgotten – no, ignored — decree of  restitution. Remember the tax collector  Zacchaeus?  He became the butt of jokes because the Master lunched with him. “Zacchaeus stood, and said unto the Lord. ‘Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold,’ Luke  writes.
Restitution is putting right what is unjust. This is not new. Scholars remind us  that Moses decreed  laws of reparation. That rule held down through the years. All COA’s Grace Tan Pulido did is to begin  enforcing  this  swept-under-the-rug ignored law. Those “Notices of Disqualification” reinforce the no-nonsense probe by Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales.
A  million more Filipino households  went  hungry in the 2nd quarter of this year. Social Weather Stations states that’s up from the March survey’s 3.9 million families The 5th, 6th and 7th National Nutrition Surveys repeated the stark story of chronic hunger savaging, with little letup, mothers and kids.
“All children have the right to live,” says the 2010 report: ‘Winning the Numbers, Losing the War.’ But many start dying after they are born.
The ‘rise’ in  number of Filipinos who experience  hunger is not due to a surge in rates, National Statistical Coordination Board Secretary-General Jose Ramon Albert said. Pin that on population growth. “Sure. But don’t bother telling Jinggoy, Johnny & Co. Bongbong keeps mumbling the mantra of self-absolution.
Tell  Naty instead. She is a 53-year-old beggar who looks a haggard 80. What matters is even leftover food, she shrugs. Alms cadged from shoppers and churchgoers tide Naty and her grandkids over to the next day. Walang  tutong sa taong nagugutom. “There is no burnt rice to a hungry person.”
In the dumps where ill-fed squatters huddle, tuberculosis spreads like wildfire. TB incidence here is 275 for every 100,000 people. (It’s 137 for Thais.) Handouts couldn’t buy for Naty the anti-TB medicine she needed.
Percentages mean little to street carolers. Where is the next meal coming from?, they ask. Hunger triggers a lethal cycle. Chronically malnourished mothers give birth to stunted children who often die early.
More infants are orphaned  here  today than in 2006. And one out of every four pregnant women are “nutritionally at risk,” says the 2013 study by the Institute of Child Health Development. Worse, “there has been no change in the past 15 years.” On average, 11 mothers die daily during childbirth. Most of those deaths were preventable. .
Indeed, there’s need to curb the leakages: the P130 billion Malampaya Fund; P12.5 billion motor vehicle users’ charge; the Pagcor Special Fund and the PCSO Charity Fund.  Beyond that is need to back the Ombudsman in prosecuting those charged. Justice is the bedrock for structural reforms.
“Christmas is the only time I know of when men and women seem, by one consent, to open their shut-up hearts freely,” Charles Dickens wrote in 1843. He added: The hungry are not “another race of creatures, bound on other journeys. We all are fellow passengers to the grave.”
Crammed into a stable, the  first Nativity  crib, resembles those carton mats on sidewalks of city streets 43 days before Christmas.