Street cleaning

At past noon yesterday along the Alabang-Zapote Road in southern Metro Manila, a young boy openly sniffed what looked like rugby in a transparent plastic bag.

Selling rugby to minors is banned, but the talk in the street is that a man comes around regularly to distribute the bags to children, mostly boys, who loiter along that main artery linking Muntinlupa to Las Piñas.

The kids are grimy, unkempt and malnourished. They look like they’re aged between 5 to 12 although they could be younger; poverty adds years even to children.

They loiter anywhere along that road lined with commercial establishments, even late into the night, begging from shoppers and restaurant patrons, motorists and commuters.

Filipinos are generally a charitable lot and tolerate the presence of needy children even if they might be bad for business. But these kids can be aggressive in their begging, whining as they follow people around, tugging at clothes and repeatedly tapping arms. After receiving complaints from customers, several establishments, mostly those with security guards, have shooed away the kids.

The streets are no place for children. Last year one of the beggars who liked to hang out near a roast chicken outlet was hit by a vehicle. I don’t know if the accident was fatal, but I haven’t seen the boy since then.

Police and barangay personnel are tasked to keep children unaccompanied by adults off the streets. Giving alms to child beggars is discouraged by the government. Police and barangay personnel must return the kids to their parents or adult guardians.

Many of the children, of course, beg in the streets with the consent of their parents, who may be itinerant vendors or beggars themselves. And since the street is home to the kids, where can they be taken by cops and barangay officials?

Not to government facilities, since there are almost none to accommodate those thousands of street children and their families.

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Yesterday social welfare officials in one city said street children are rounded up regularly. It’s easy to round them up, along with their parents. How to keep them off the streets is the challenge.

The solution is to send the families to a place with decent shelter where they will feel no need to go to urban centers to survive.

Obviously this is easier said than done. Plan B, when the nation is rolling out the red carpet for VIP visitors and street people get in the way, is to round up the homeless and keep them out of sight.

Since we’re not North Korea and the Marcos dictatorship is over, the street people are enticed with a carrot rather than threatened with a stick to stay out of the path of VIPs.

This may be an unwritten SOP for top visiting dignitaries such as US President Barack Obama or major international conferences. Let’s face it: the streets will probably be cleared of the homeless again when Manila hosts the annual leaders’ summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum this November. Authorities in Asia’s second fastest growing economy wouldn’t want street kids tugging at the skirts or hands of VIPs as they tour Rizal Park or rapping on APEC visitors’ car windows, begging and then scratching the car paint if they receive nothing.

Such roundups are not unique to the Philippines. There were similar reports when London hosted the Olympics. When Shanghai hosted the World Expo in 2010, I saw the homeless – including women nursing babies – emerging and sleeping along the curb in the main commercial strip when the shops closed for the night, and then vanishing early in the morning.

In the case of Pope Francis’ visit, what raised protests (apart from our toxic political atmosphere) was that he was here precisely to show mercy and compassion to the needy, and he liked reaching out particularly to children. He made an unscheduled visit to an orphanage, and he would have been interested in wading into a gathering of street people along Manila’s Baywalk.

Instead the government decided to treat over 400 street children and their parents to a weeklong stay in a Batangas resort with swimming pool for the papal visit.

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Some critics say the tax money spent for that “family camping” could have been used as seed fund for a facility that provides temporary shelter for the homeless. Others counter that such a shelter will be quickly overwhelmed and invite more urban migration. Mercy and compassion is best backed by resources, and the resources of this developing country are acutely limited.

Ours is not a welfare society, and the Department of Social Welfare and Development can only do so much to ease the plight of street people. We don’t have a tradition of soup kitchens and similar mercy operations for the homeless.

There are also concerns that state dole-outs encourage laziness and dependence. Even the conditional cash transfer, which (as the term implies) anchors fund handouts on meeting certain requirements, has been under constant criticism since it was launched during the Arroyo administration.

Even the most prosperous economies have homeless people. You see them sleeping in the streets, parks and subways of New York, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore. But some cities have an inordinate share of the destitute and homeless. In densely populated New Delhi, I saw a number of them, grimy and in rags, drinking water running in rivulets along the curb.

Metro Manila, said to be the 11th most populated metropolis in the world, also has a large number of the homeless. Obviously, easing poverty will bring down those numbers. It will also help if Pope Francis’ call for responsible parenthood will be spread to his adoring flock all the way down to the grassroots.

We all know the biggest reason for urban migration: the lack of livelihood opportunities in the countryside. This cannot be addressed overnight.

Perhaps someone can keep track of the plight of those 400 children who enjoyed the resort treat. In adulthood, if any of them can check into that resort again, or a comparable one, for eight days and pay for it with his own money, poverty alleviation would have gone a long way.

Until then, it doesn’t look like the government will stop clearing the streets of the homeless each time VIPs come visiting.