Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Hard slog as dance

Hard slog as dance


Updated 00:09am (Mla time) Jan 18, 2005
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A10 of the January 18, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


SCHOOLS have reopened while hotels have taken down their "Fully Booked" signs. Pilgrims, balikbayans and out-of-town pickpockets are leaving, as Cebu ends its colorful Sinulog festival honoring the Santo Niño.

This year's rites set records: from a religious procession of 700,000 to street parties and 46 contingents from Misamis to Pampanga choreographing versions of the prayer-dance to the Niño. Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia and Margot Osmeña, the wife of the city mayor, sashayed as lead dancers at the packed Sports Center. Cebuana-now-Canadian soprano Lilac Cano belted out native songs to a standing room audience. Crowds lined the sludge-polluted Mactan channel shores as a fluvial parade of 86 boats (one ran aground) scattered flower petals on the "galleon" with the Niño. That gut reaction evoked Luke's description about "crowds pressed forward" along Galilee's shores.

Ferdinand Magellan sailed up what was, in 1521, a pristine channel, with the Flemish icon of the Child. Given to Sugbu's rulers, the second Spanish expedition rediscovered the Niño in 1565. Over the centuries, the Child has drawn the desperate, the skeptics, even the cynical.

That mix nurtures legends. Some nights, an old tale goes, the Child walks the streets, comforting, healing. Mornings, amor-seco or "dry love" grass stud the Child's cloak, some swear. Botanists dub that weed andropagan aciculatus. All the yarn means, they shrug, is that the place is semi-arid. Cebu's forest cover is down to almost zero.

Given local affection for the Santo Niño, the Vatican permits the local church to set aside the third Sunday of every January for the Infant. But does devotion coexist, in Jesuit psychologist Jaime Bulatao's image, on a "split-level" with amoral conduct? Is worship sealed off from deeds?

Mayor Tomas Osmeña prays to the Niño -- and orders that the Child's Fifth Commandment be scrapped. "Pull the trigger," he tells policemen when dealing with suspected rapists. "I'll take care of the legal fallout."

Mayor Thadeo Ouano welcomes the Niño to Mandaue yearly. Yet, one of Asia's biggest shabu lab pitched tent in his fiefdom-without his knowledge, he insists.

Indeed, "there's a marked dichotomy between faith and life, between worship and activity," an earlier Cebu Pastoral Assembly noted. So, how do the vulnerable, specially the children, fare in a "split-level" society? "Are our children getting any better?" asks the Food and Nutrition Research Institute.

Malnutrition stunts 4 out of every 10 pre-schoolers in Cebu City, the 5th National Nutrition Survey found. Compare that to Siquijor's two. In Mandaue, 37 percent were anemic, higher than Bohol's 28 percent.

By age eight, classmates tower 11 centimeters over the ill-fed kids, a mid-1990 joint study by North Carolina and San Carlos Universities showed. IQs were markedly lower. Corrosive hidden hunger was tracked, at its devastating worst, in math and languages.

So did the 41st (out of 45 countries) ranking of Filipino students in the 2003 International Mathematics and Science Tests validate this finding? The linkage can be debated. But Edwin Markham's anguished query resonates: "Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?"

"Nutritional improvement within the 11 years (being compared) was not even five percent," the 5th survey update complained. "(At this rate), it will take maybe half a century before we can eradicate the problem of malnutrition."

Nationwide, one out of three among over 9.3 million schoolchildren is a puny underweight, alongside their Singaporean or Thai counterparts. Koreans or Chinese tower over another 3.2 million who are stunted.

Fund shortages kept the 6th National Nutrition Survey from drawing up a province-by-province breakdown. But the same dismal pattern persists. Six out of 10 infants, up to a year old, are anemic. Scrawny mothers often give birth to premature kids who, by age three will be stunted, the Asian Development Bank notes.

Worse, ill-fed kids can be sapped "from 10 to 14 percent of intelligence quotient (IQ)." That damage is irreversible. No pork barrel will re-light addled brains in dwarfed kids.

The three nutrition surveys document persistent inadequacy of an essential service. But "throwing more money at this problem will not solve it," says the World Bank's Development Report. "Services work when poor people stand at the center of its provision... When voices of the poor are heard by politicians, that's when providers have incentives to serve."

Broaden the poor's choices and participation, so they oversee and can discipline shoddy providers, the World Bank suggests. "Community-managed schools in El Salvador, where parents visited regularly, lowered teacher absenteeism and raised test scores."

Second, increase citizen participation by making relevant information available. Service delivery surveys in Bangalore, India, led citizens to pressure politicians to help ignored communities.

The third tack is, reward effective service providers and penalize the inept. Cambodia pegged salaries of medical workers to the health of households.

There's no alternative to the hard slog of reforming delivery systems, jammed by politics. Yet, that is prayer in its most concrete form in a schizo society that screams for redress to the Niño who said: "Let the little children come to Me..."

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home