GMANews.TV story is best online investigative report

GMANews.TV's story titled "No time for tears: Kalabit kids beg, work for food" written by staff member Rorie Fajardo has won as "best online investigative report" in the 2nd Annual PopDev Media Awards. Sponsored by the Philippine Legislators' Committee on Population and Development Foundation(PLCPD) and the United Nations Population Fund, GMANews.TV will receive the award on Tuesday, December 12, in Quezon City. By RORIE R. FAJARDO, GMANews.TV When children from urban poor communities in Metro Manila go hungry, they waste no time crying. They beg for food or do odd jobs to earn money to buy their meal. Eight-year-old Dong Vasquez, small for his age, has been called kalabit referring to his habit of calling the attention of vendors and buyers at the flea market in San Roque by touching them with his ring finger. It is here in the market where he asks for food or loose change to buy food. Dong, the second in a brood of seven, is not the only child in the family who has mastered this craft. His younger brother, five-year-old Mark Edison, also begs for food from vendors, village officers and teenagers hanging out in the streets. Children either begging for food or toiling on their own to be able to buy food is not a surprising site in Sitio San Roque, Barangay (village) Pag-asa in Quezon City. This community of shanties lies in the heart of the 54-hectare North Triangle government property, which also hosts high-end residential areas, commercial stores and ecology parks. Across San Roque is the prestigious Philippine Science High School, a public school known for its advance science and math curriculum where children of both affluent and poor families study. Sine 1986, the 6,300 urban poor families or 25,200 people of San Roque have been fighting for land security in 11 hectares of North Triangle. But as they fight for decent homes, the families also struggle every day to put food on the table through their informal and irregular jobs. The task is made more difficult by the big size of their families. To each family, a child is born almost every year without fail. Eddie Boy, 32, father of Dong and Mark Edison, tells GMANews.TV that he and his wife Joanna, 37, do their best to keep their children from getting hungry. "Nakakaraos din naman kami kahit papaano, (We manage to get by)," he says. The couple earns an average of 400 pesos daily from selling different wares, including toys, shoes and water meters to neighbors and employees of the National Power Corporation, a kilometer away from the community Occasionally, Eddie Boy earns from betting in the neighborhood, such as in January when he won 1,000 pesos after hitching his hopes on Filipino boxing champion Manny Pacquiao, against Mexican boxer Erik Morales. Too, Eddie Boy brings to the pawnshop whatever appliance the family could afford, including the family’s electric fan and second-hand television — which he pawned early this year when his wife had kidney problems. Children going hungry The Philippines has committed to fight poverty, reduce by half the number of hungry Filipinos by 2015, under the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG). To achieve this goal, the Philippines must fulfill yet other goals — reduce child mortality rate, improve maternal health care, and put in check the spread of curable diseases. In all three concerns, international and local studies note that the country is lagging behind targets. In its 2002 rapid nutritional assessment, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) listed the Philippines as one of 10 countries in the world with the highest number of underweight and undernourished children. The total number of undernourished children from these ten countries account for three-fourths of the global figure. Other countries in the list were India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Vietnam. The 2003 survey conducted by the government’s Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI), which was released this year, showed that six out of 10 Filipino households could not feed their children nutritionally adequate meals. The reason: there was not enough food and not enough money to buy food. The FNRI study said one in every two Filipino children nationwide was not eating enough because his or her household did not have enough food and that the household could not afford to buy more. In other words, every other Filipino child is not nourished sufficiently. Food insecurity was most prevalent among children born to poverty, according to the FNRI. They have limited or no means at all to find food, could not acquire or consume sufficient quantity and quality of food, or are not even sure that they would be able to eat in the next meal. The tragedy of food insecurity is writ large all over the shack that the Vasquezes call home in Sitio San Roque. While Eddie Boy says he makes sure his seven children, aged one month to nine years old, would not go hungry by feeding them three times daily, his meager earnings could not assure his children would get the nutritional value of the right kind and volume. During the interview, Eddie Boy’s five elder children, swarmed over a piece of ripe mango and santol , which the eldest child, nine-year-old Edesa had brought home from school. The children were evidently thin and small for their age. Fresh wounds and old scars blemished their legs. The youngest, one-month-old Jasmin, is the luckiest one because she gets to drink pure formulated milk. The family spends about P216 for Jasmin’s weekly consumption of 540 grams of milk. Eddie Boy says the elder ones, two-year-old Gabriel and year-old Jasper, get to drink cheaper milk mixed with am (water from boiling rice). "They are already used to it. They get diarrhea when drinking pure milk," he says. When asked what she eats when she goes hungry and there is no viand at home, Edesa said she sometimes ate rice mixed with soy sauce or sprinkled with salt. Edesa survives on biscuits and juice while studying at the Pag-asa Elementary School, where she is in Grade 2. Her younger brother Dong often buys fried bananas on stick worth 3 pesos before going to school. Previous FNRI studies had shown that about six million school children like Edesa go to school everyday hungry. They belonged to the lower 40 percent of the Philippine population, or those enduring extreme poverty. Work for food Crystel Ilano, 12, neighbor of the Vasquezes, collects sackfuls of garbage everyday from residents to earn the sum P30, which goes to food. She drags the sacks toward the entrance of the village, about a 15-minute walk from her new foster home, where trucks collecting garbage pass by every morning. When work is done at sunset, Crystel buys biscuits and junk food with her earnings. She also settles her loans at the nearby variety store. "I am allowed to loan biscuits and candies there whenever I go hungry," she told GMANews.TV. Crystel, the seventh of 10 children of Romy and his estranged wife, has been out of school for three years. The farthest she’s reached was Grade 2. She knows going back to school has become remote because her father has no regular work, while her mother had abandoned them. "My father asked our neighbor to adopt me," the girl with hair dyed brown says, referring to her new foster parents living just behind the Vasquezes’ shack. While her guardians are good-hearted, Crystel has to work, too, to help earn the money to buy food. Food loan Buying food on credit from vendors has become the coping mechanism of many poor families desperate to keep their children above hunger. Housewife Lorna Quitain, 36, "loans" biscuits and bread from a vendor plying their neighborhood. She pays on a weekly basis for the food, often amounting to 120 pesos for four packs consumed in a week. Quitain tells GMANews.TV that buying food on credit assures that food would be in constant supply at home for her six children, aged four to 13 years old. Her husband Roman earns 8,000 pesos monthly as a hotel bellboy but this is barely enough to cover the family’s food and the children’s school needs, Quitain says. It is a big help, she adds, that the family no longer pays for their one-room basement house in Pandacan, Manila. The Quitains were among 200 poor families from Pandacan who got help from the National Housing Authority for socialized housing. These days, Quitain says her 12-year-old son Michael Angelo gives her lessons on what food are rich in nutrition. Thanks to his science lessons, Michael Angelo gets to tell his mother that their regular diet of instant noodles and canned food are not good for health. "But what could I do?" Quitain asks. To the poor and the hungry, the nagging question, first and last, is affordability. Noodles and canned food may be bad for health but by Quitain’s tiny and shallow pockets, "that’s only what fits in my budget." GMANews.TV