Baby Niño

Nearly lost in the background due to national attention on the tense legal maneuverings between the Department of Justice and lawyers of former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is the little story of baby Niño, whose plight had been covered by the local media in the past few days.

The boy whose real name, Christian, wasn’t known until last Friday, was left by his mother, who was  poor, confused and in the middle of a complicated relationship with a man not her husband, weighted with the care of four other kids.

Her identity surfaced when government social workers in Daanbantayan and the doctor who deliver  the baby recognized the pink-cheeked baby whose face was flashed in TV and appeared on the front page of Cebu Daily News.

Niño  was abandoned  in the care of kind strangers.

The plight of  baby Niño  underscored in  a way   findings by the Department of Social Welfare and Development in Central Visayas (DSWD-7) that the Pantawid cash doleout program had achieved limited success in terms of improving the lives of Cebu’s indigent families.

According to the program’s regional coordinator Daisy Lor, the situation of most indigent households “need more than one intervention and it should be sustainable.”

What steps are needed to ensure a lasting impact is what the Aquino government has to figure out.

People fall through the cracks.

This mother wasn’t a beneficiary.  And even if she was, there was  no guarantee that a modest cash stipend through the Pantawid program would encouarge Niño’s mother to send her  children to school, much less keep them intact.

The laundrywoman was  so poor that when she gave birth in the Daanbantayan district hospital, fellow patients in the  room took pity and gave her food to eat.

Medical staff reached out and waived all charges,  even giving the baby free vaccinations,  a  checkup and other screening procedures.

After all that, the mother still felt helpless and ended up staring at the poverty ahead, and decided to leave her newborn to a government worker.

Some of us who could afford to eat  thrice a day, have a roof over our heads and change into clean clothes daily may find it hard to imagine what this kind of desperate life is like, to have no one else to turn to except uncertain government aid.

Thus it’s easy to condemn the  administration for continuing a program of its predecessor that had been described as abetting the dependence of indigent families to the point of indolence.

The Aquino government showed that it can exercise political will when it arrested Rep. Gloria Arroyo. May it  show the same fortitude in ending the poverty of hope whose victims go by the name of Niño.