Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman on Saturday said she and her staff were hurt by persisting allegations that their agency hid homeless families in the capital because of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit last week.
“It hurts, most especially to my comrades who really worked hard. But… this is how things work out in the National Capital Region. We [receive] words of thanks and gratitude when we are in the provinces or cities outside Metro Manila,” the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) chief told reporters at an event held by the agency at Quirino Grandstand in Manila.
She said it was Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada who asked the DSWD to register homeless families in the city under DSWD’s modified conditional cash transfer program (MCCT), an expansion of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps).
Aside from the P300-P500 in education assistance per student and P500 in health assistance per family, P4,000 is allotted for the monthly rental of a family covered by the MCCT. Soliman clarified that the DSWD gives the money directly to the property owner renting out space, not to the tenant family.
She also took exception to statements by Manila Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo accusing DSWD of giving out P4,000 per family so they could find temporary shelter during Apec week.
“We cannot hide poverty. We cannot hide them. We only reached out to 77 families,” she said. Regarding the vagrants who were brought to the Boystown complex in Marikina City, she maintained that it was “not a roundup and not because of the visitors, [but] because it is the right of every Filipino to be assisted, to be given access to education and houses.”
“We invite them to our social centers but when they insist on going back to the streets, we cannot force them,” she stressed in an interview on the sidelines of a DSWD program marking National Children’s Month.
After the program, which gathered around 3,500 4Ps beneficiaries, a number of scavengers were seen collecting leftover food and plastic bottles at the venue.
One of them, a 53-year-old man who just wished to be called “Kuya Boy,” said he escaped being rounded up by the police and social workers days before Apec week by staying near St. Joseph Church in Gagalangin, Tondo.
He recalled that on the night of Nov. 10, as he was on his way back to the sidewalk where he usually spends the night at the corner of Mabini and Kalaw, he saw a group of policemen, social workers and even employees of the Manila city pound gathering street dwellers near City Hall.
“Kinaladkad kasi ’yung mga tao. Pati mga aso nila kinuha (People were being dragged around. Even their dogs were taken),” he said.
He said he had once spent time in Boystown and “I didn’t like it there. The food wasn’t enough.”