Mang Juan pedals cycle rickshaws or “sikad” to and fro everyday while talking to himself. On his good days, he would laugh at himself while his customers would look amused and at most times, intrigued at the things that occupy his brain. At times, he would get angry at himself for no particular reason. He does not harm anyone. He dutifully transports his guests wherever they ask him to, for a meager eight pesos.
Ate sits by a popular food cart stall in one of the busy thoroughfares in Quezon City. She patiently prepares customers’ orders and plays Candy Crush on her smartphone after each task. Her food cart faces West so when the sun sets, she gets the full light effects of the dusk. She does not mind. As long as she has her phone to keep her company, she sits on her post from nine in the morning until nine at night. She used to earn Php451 before the Department of Labor and Employment approved the Php15 increase in minimum wage in the National Capital Region. Now she earns Php466 a day.
Toto is a 17-year old high school student from Lake Sebu, South Cotabato. He dreams of educating children in his hometown and so despite his age, he is determined to finish high school, enter college and earn a degree. He lost his mother to cancer when he was 13 years old. Although he has no idea yet how he will be able to go to college and eventually become a teacher, he talks about the realization of his dreams with wide-eyed wonder.
These people are the ones whose names you will not see often in the comments section of a Facebook post when a social news network or a news organization with more than four million Facebook Page likes would share their breaking news on Bongbong Marcos’ Oxford diploma.
Mang Juan does not own a smartphone as his daily trips would only finance his meals.
Ate would rather play Candy Crush than comment on an article on her Newsfeed.
And Toto would rather save his allowance rather than go to the computer shop and ogle on the blitz of the political hullabaloo.
These are the people whose stories seem mundane as compared to the glamour of a drama anthology every Saturday night. Their plight is just three of the millions in the country whose whimpers are lost in the noise of avarice and self-serving goals. Perhaps, their goal in life is to make it one more day while they pedal away the voices in their head, while they crush every candy as they fight off the heat of the setting sun, and while they spend the night watching the stars shine across the summer sky and think of dreams.
In a country where political dynasties thrive, budget allocation for mental health problems are scarce, tycoons champion contractualization as the answer to the shopping center industry’s profits and students commit suicide because education has become too commercialized, the stories of Mang Juan, Ate and Toto are sometimes lost in the ones which repeatedly proliferate the pages of a newspaper such as but not limited to: the Senate probe of Mamasapano encounter, the perpetual failure of the MRT to deliver its mandate, and for web traffic, Kris Aquino’s sex life.
But the stories of Mang Juan, Ate and Toto should not just go down in history as three in 103 million. As mere statistics of mortality rate. Their stories should inspire a world aggrandized by wealth, power and fame to listen closely and take action because everyone is his own story. And in these stories, we are connected. Somehow.
David Mitchell who wrote Cloud Atlas said in the same book: “Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
On February 1, 2015 Loraine Tabayoyong, a UPOU student with muscular dystrophy, died. She was about to receive her Associate in Arts degree and wear her Sablay in July 2015. She wanted to be a writer.
I do, too.
And while I peck at my keyboard and get lost in my own world, I think of Mang Juan, Ate and Toto (and Loraine) and how in so many ways, my humanity is interlaced with theirs and that in the end, ultimately, we just dream of a better life and a better world.
So I write.
Written March 29, 2015
The Prodigal Kid 