The Worth of My Coins

I remember walking the streets of Manila one early morning so many years ago, heading towards my preferred destination that day when I chanced upon a sight that I thought only existed in movies and in the news broadcast that we see on television.

In a parked utility vehicle were two children of about two or three years old, perhaps brothers, playing giddily after waking up, as children always do when they wake up together with their siblings from night sleep. I had questions again in mind similar to the ones I had when was in the jitney with the old man wearing unpaired slippers. This questioning mind runs always in times like these.

Was it their vehicle that they were using as a roof in the coldest of the night? I examined the clothes they were wearing and they were dirty and tattered and the things upon them were likewise. They could not have possibly owned that costly vehicle.

Why would they sleep on the streets? Are their parents with them? I looked around and I could not see any older person around. I looked further and I could see a woman in tattered clothes also, about fifty years old in age, walking towards my direction and I proceeded to go about my concern. It was so early in the morning that the streets were not yet filled with people going about their daily chores and duties. As I walked away from the children, my mind was still heavy with questions. Why would they really sleep in the streets? The answer was of course very obvious—they do not have the proper roof on their heads. They are so poor that they could not afford to have a respectable shelter, so foolish of me then not to see this fact so quickly.

Deeper went my thoughts that I reckoned it is not merely the absence or presence of money that we ask why there are still people living in the streets. Why are they asserting themselves in urban areas when there are so many rural lands to settle and where there would be enough soil to grow food from and water is ever flowing in streams, and there would be natural materials to build a house made of natural resources, like that of thatches?

I could say that a house can be made of things that are made of wood and/or thatches and if money is more than substantial, you could build a house from concrete and steel, a more pleasant one.

Or you could build a house completely on thatches. There are materials that grow from the ground, the abacas and coconut leaves grow from the soil and this Earth has them in abundance. Soil is not like gold or platinum, minerals that are so rare to find. They are so common that in every step we make, there is soil. Where did all the soil go if there are people who could not grow their own food and harvest the materials to build a house? When there is soil to till, even if it comes in lesser mass, no one could go hungry. As the Chinese adage says, “I have one mouth to feed and two hands to feed it”.

Perhaps, many lands today (the arable and accessible lands) have become the dominion of some and not of the masses like they were centuries ago. We may castigate the poor for asserting themselves in urban areas—in languid and filthy slums, where jobs are scarce and life is too difficult—just like the people living in the streets. But where would they go if all the lands were already of dominion of some merely, where a single person or family owns sometimes thousands and thousands of acres of arable land. Where there are those who call themselves farmers does not even have a farm of their own. The children I have witnessed sleeping in the streets were creatures of urban life that perhaps they would ask themselves “To where would we go if we leave the streets?”

In the days of old, in the era of many ancient tribes—of the American Indians, the Neanderthals and the Maoris—where the concept of land and plants and animals comes all as God-given, put there by the Creator for all to live by so that no one would die of hunger—- men hunted in packs. There was the hunting leader and there were the rest of the packs. They moved as one and reaped the fruits of their pursuits as one. They approach the prey like a pack of wolves or a herd of lion. They also plant in great coordination that they have developed an agrarian scheme that is so systematic that many scientists believe to this day that many of these ancient people had attained a high level of civilization during their times.

The Indians of Old America hunted in groups, to lead a herd of bulls towards a cliff, in order to harvest the most amount of red meat. And the bounty is brought to their camps where colourful tepees decorated the broad wind-swept grasslands, and aromatic smell of burning herbs emanated throughout the prairie lands that they had dominated once before. Their women, their children and their olds would welcome them with great merriment and celebration and paeans of songs and dances would grace the night in order to honour the cunningness and virility of their men—the hunters of the clan. Most of the old men who wait for them were hunters before but have retired due to weakness of body.

While they hunt in packs, the old members of their clans, the women, the children and the sick could still be able to eat despite their inabilities. The weakest members of the clan are being carried at the back of their more virile brothers. They hunt in packs so no one is abandoned and left to die on in an environment that were at times unkind and punishing.

And yet we say at times that we live today in the zenith of human civilization—- as men today are already able to conquer space and developed human-like machines. And yet we say at times that the Indians and other ancient tribes that have roamed this Earth before us were backward and uncivilized. Who is truly the more civilized is a question we should ponder upon now.

What if water is already the dominion of the few? Would there be people living without water just as they live without land of their own? What if air would become the dominion of a few fortunate men?

The children sleeping on the streets drew heavily upon my thoughts that instead of proceeding with my own concerns, I took some time to pass by a bakery and fished ten pesos out of my pocket and bought six pieces of tasty bread. They were not so tasty but at a cheaper price, the bread came in larger sizes. It was the hunger of the children that was primordial to my mind in that situation and not their taste for good food.

I proceeded to the vehicle and slipped the bread into it while the two children looked back at me with the usual astonishment one finds in the face of children as they stared at a stranger who just came suddenly out of nowhere. If they were glad or not was not among the questions I had asked that morning; even after I had been able to slip the bread into the parked vehicle. It was enough for me to be rest assured that their hunger was satiated that morning.

It is no secret and certainly not a mystery to you anymore that the ten pesos meant so little to me. I am not rich but if I lose ten pesos or if they fell out my pocket, I would not mind them so much. I would look for it but would not despair so much if my search fails. But to the children who I found living in the streets, they meant the food on their breakfast table. I know how poor people are. I have been so poor before that the pangs of hunger have battered me before. I know their kind of hunger and I am familiar with the specie of hunger the poorest of the poor suffers. They ate on breakfast and sometimes their hunger is satiated until afternoon that my ten pesos would have been half of their daily need for food.

What is the worth of ten pesos to me? They meant my half pack of menthol cigarettes, my jitney fare for that day, my twelve-ounce soda, or a stick of chewing gums. But to the children and to the old woman, it was their food on the table.

Such is the worth of my coins.

( From my unfinished book “The Night of Angels” )