"We can help in our own small ways."
"We can help in our own small ways."
In my previous article in this space, I wrote that this is not the time to find fault or to blame whoever for the crisis we are in. It is time to cooperate with the government, to make sacrifices, to follow the leader.
For now, our leadership has had to take draconian measures, of which the enhanced community quarantine, or lockdown, is the ultimate weapon.
One could feel the heartfelt sadness in the president’s Thursday evening address to the nation even as he was insisting that LGUs must follow the directives set by the national government, and where he reiterated that it pained him to impose this lockdown.
True, those directives came in a generic rather than specific manner. Defining the guidelines needed to operationalize the lockdown came bit by bit, and created confusion, especially with a failure to communicate these properly.
It is in this light that we should understand, and in fact appreciate what LGU officials like Pasig’s Vico Sotto did, in allowing tricycle drivers to ferry stranded health workers. That may have been a deviation from the lockdown dictat, but it was an immediate solution to a real, on the ground problem.
To come up with snide remarks such as “pabebe” are uncalled for. To suggest workable alternatives is what we should be doing rather than carp and insult over social media.
Which brings me to another problem: the immediate economic difficulties most of our people in the NCR, perhaps more than in the provinces of the Luzon-wide lockdown, are now experiencing.
There will be a time for us to write about the magnitude of the economic fall-out. Government and private sector experts now in the isolation of their self-quarantines could be doing the math and in fact, should be doing so, as we write.
There is however something more real, more urgent.
And that is the day-to-day survival of the poorest of the poor. Apart from those who live in the streets and those who are completely without work or means of livelihood, we have a legion in the national capital region as well as other urban centers of families whose daily survival is contingent on their daily means of livelihood.
In Tagalog, we call these the “isang kahig, isang tuka” among our brethren. The “no-work, no-pay.”
Our focus thus far has been on big companies who can afford, and rightly so, to advance the 13th month pay, or advance one month’s salary to employees idled by the quarantine. In our company, we did that the day after the president declared the lockdown.
But as individual Filipinos, we should also worry about the construction workers paid on daily or weekly basis; the jeepney, taxicab, bus, tricycle drivers whose livelihood depends on what is left over after paying the vehicle “boundary” and gassing up. Without “pasada,” they earn nada.
You have sidewalk vendors, “kargadores” in wet markets and wholesale distribution centers like Divisoria and elsewhere who find themselves in the same predicament. We could cite so many of them.
How will their families survive? Being “no work, no pay”, and with incomes so meager, so survival-mode, they have hardly any savings to tide them over. They cannot leave the city for the provinces where extended family ties might at least ensure daily survival, never mind if they may have to subsist on root crops or whatever could be foraged. They are under quarantine; their day-to-day survival also quarantined.
How long can they and their families last without sustenance?
How long will those food bags being assembled and distributed by LGUs last, even assuming that everyone who should receive, does in fact receive? The distribution alone is a logistical problem, and I doubt if all our LGUs and their barangays have either wherewithal or ability to reach out to everyone.
Will those who bought more than they can consume in three months, in a greedy spree of panic buying, share their food with these legions of the poor?
At this point, I recall what President Erap always said: “hungry stomachs know no law.” But beyond the fear of what the desperate poor could do, beyond worrying about chaos, let us be brother Filipinos to them.
Why, even our food manufacturers have written the Secretary of Trade and Industry, stating their factual worry about their own capabilities to produce enough for normal demand.
Following normal “JIT” or just-in-time procurement of raw materials and factory supplies, they are now caught in a gridlock of low inventories. Some have had to close down their operations; most would not be able to produce sardines or noodles or canned goods beyond Holy Week.
What if the crisis lasts beyond April 14? But more significantly, how will the no-work, no-pay survive even NOW?
But we can all do something, those of us who have the fortune of being better-off, whether middle class or upper middle class. Never mind the uber-wealthy, whose corporations are now doing appropriate CSR with their workers and donating to our hospitals and other institutions.
We can all do our part.
A few days back, I called my driver in Manila to ask how many in his immediate neighborhood in Manila are the no-work, no-pay types, and whose families are left with nothing to sustain them.
I then called a daughter to provide them with a weekly sum, not too large, just enough to buy food necessities, and give the same to my driver’s affected neighbors.
Another daughter and her husband called their immediate circle of friends, and together, they are now giving enough to sustain 50 families in the poor neighborhood they have identified.
I am not writing this to call attention to what little generosity we could afford. I write in the hope that those who read can do the same, and ask their friends to do the same. In small ways, but together, let us help our poor. Let us get the “isang-kahig” enough “tuka” to tide themselves and their families through this crisis.
Let us not leave everything to government, whether national or local. Because in our own small ways, we can help.