By: Rosanna M. Tubelonia
I know I am supposed to write about OSH in the company blog site But sometimes the urge is too strong to write about something else- this time, on children’s health and safety. This is one of those days….
The urge was triggered off when I saw this clip of Melinda Gates, wife of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, over at www.ted.com. Said site allows speakers to talk about their respective passions and advocacies in a limited time.
It made me remember an image of two boys back in December of 2010. Back then, I was still employed with the DOLE. My then-boss and I had just came off a meeting at noon from the Intramuros building and had to rush back to our Quezon City office for another important meeting at 4pm of that day.
But the “trisikad” drivers of Intramuros declared a strike thereby blocking vehicles from going out of the area. We saw the traffic start to build up just as our service vehicle emerged from the DOLE Building. My quick-thinking boss instructed our driver to take the long route going to Quezon City – which means taking the South Pier road which passes through the former Smokey Mountain area.
It was in one of the intersections where we had to stop that I saw this image, now so deeply-embedded in my mind. The sight? A boy, about seven or older, throwing a pail of water over the feces of a much younger boy, most probably his brother, who was still then defecating. They were both small-framed (from malnutrition ?). The older boy’s t-shirt was dirty and hang loosely over his frame. The younger boy was bald, bare-footed, naked, snot-nosed and with a bloated stomach. Probably and most surely to worms due to the very unsanitary conditions they were living in. I was not shocked at the crudity of it all. What I felt was anger. At the absence of parents or any adults supposedly to nurture, to guide them and give them the love and protection they need. We Filipinos pride ourselves on being family-oriented. But where are the parents of those two children? As it is, they will probably not reach adulthood in a healthy state. They are but few of the millions of children born to us whose chances of a quality life in their adulthood are already compromised given the conditions they were already born in.
At the beginning, I was angry with the parents. But then again, did they know that they will be subjecting their children to such miserable lives when they did the “act”? But wait a minute, did the parents knew they had a choice or even options? What have we done as a society to make sure that they have options? And ultimately and collectively, did we do something to make sure that the information reached them in time? Did we empower them to exercise their options? These were the thoughts that occupied my mind which made me dizzy for a time. After a while, I prayed for the safety and health of those two children and others like them. I also resolved to make my voice heard over matters like this.
By the way, you were probably asking what did Melinda Gates talked about at the clip I saw? It was about bringing back birth control into the global consciousness. Melinda- Catholic and mother of three And by the way, my other passion aside from OSH is preventing child labor using the OSH approach!
