At the busy corner of Cabrera St. and EDSA in Pasay City, a hole-in-the-wall carinderia, Kusin Ni Ato, has a curious Friday Special item on its menu: free legal assistance from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
For one year now, indigent people seeking legal aid and VIP clients in need of topnotch lawyers have crossed paths at this two-table eatery which opened on June 15, 2022.
And regardless of financial stature, all customers get to enjoy a warm bowl of goto filled with tendon and tripe, the classic Ilocano dish dinakdakan, or the Tagalog version of dinuguan (soupy version), among others, with legal advice on the side.
“I wanted to get rich,” said 44-year-old Juman Paa, the youngest son of a jueteng kubrador-turned-kabo father and a public school teacher mother, as he explained how he decided to take up law after retiring early as a corporate treasurer of a big mining firm.
“It was a hand-to-mouth existence growing up. We knew the value of hard work because we saw it in our parents,” he said.
As a young boy from Cabanatuan, he initially wanted to dabble in fine arts but found himself tinkering with ledgers and worksheets instead when his elder brother died while taking up accountancy in college.
And after his early retirement, armed with his savings and backed by an understanding wife who is also a lawyer, he pursued a law degree and passed the Bar exams in 2015.
“Looking back, I really thought I was going to get rich as a lawyer. But after I passed the Bar, I didn’t have any clients. A friend told me to go and look for clients inside our jails. So, I went to Camp Karingal in Quezon City,” he said.
But instead of finding wealthy clients, he found prisoners languishing in jail because they could not afford private lawyers to handle their cases. Lawyers from the Public Attorney’s Office, after all, handle multiple cases, making it impossible for them to give the same attention as a private lawyer hired by a rich defendant.
“I served as pro bono lawyer of inmates at the female dormitory at the Quezon City jail. I helped about 30 women inmates – almost all of them got acquitted. They only needed a lawyer to follow up on their cases,” he said.
“If I get a paying client, I would automatically save a portion of my earnings to bring food to the inmates. I’d order goto for them to warm their tummies, and sometimes Jollibee chicken. It’s heartbreaking how some of them would only eat half of their chicken to save the rest for dinner,” he added.
When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, jail visitations were stopped. Paa thought it was the end of his personal advocacy. Fate, however, had other more delicious plans.
“During the pandemic, I started a cooking blog with a friend. That’s how Kusin Ni Ato was born,” he said. Kusin was a Filipino take on the word cuisine, while Ato was Paa’s nickname among the inmates he served – attorney for short.
Last year, he decided to open his eatery in Pasay City, offering the same goto that comforted him as a hardworking lawyer, and comforted the prisoners whose lives he touched. Aside from dinakdakan and dinuguan, there is also mami ng Cabanatuan, tinumis ng Nueva Ecija, paksiw na pata ng Legaspi, papaitang baka, and adobong bahay guya ng Bulacan.
Paa’s former inmate-clients whom he got acquitted were among the first employees of the carinderia.
“A portion of the money we earn from the carinderia, about P15,000 a month – we use this to fund our monthly feeding program inside jails,” he said.
The jail visitations were organized and sponsored by Kusin ni Ato and donors in collaboration with the Knowledge Advocate of Volunteer Lawyers and Paralegals, a group of lawyers created by Paa which has recently been designated as a member of the technical working group of GOJUST (Governance in Justice) for jail and court decongestion funded by the European Union in partnership with the Philippine government.
“Everything we cook has a purpose,” Paa said. “This goto means so much more to me and to my clients. In a way, it is the taste of justice.”