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Saturday, November 22, 2014

Are We Needed?

A Saturday morning class at Bahay Pag-asa

Some people have asked us this question.  If, as a result of laws passed in the Philippines, municipalities and regions are required to set up centers for youth in conflict with the law, then what is the need for non-governmental organization (NGOs) to do the same.  Can this effort be left in the hand of governmental agencies.

The answer to that question became painfully obvious recently when the conditions at one government-run center for street kids and abandoned or abused children were exposed by visitors from an NGO.  The story made headlines here:

Nathaniel R. Melican
Philippine Daily Inquirer
5:45 AM | Sunday, November 16th, 2014

MANILA, Philippines—Officials running a local government facility in Manila that is supposed to shelter and nurture street children have come under fire for acts of negligence and maltreatment so severe that shocked observers likened the place to a “concentration camp.”

To stress just how bad things are at the Manila Reception and Action Center (RAC), welfare advocates wrote City Hall for the third time last month. This time, they enclosed a photo of “Frederico,” one of the wards, showing the boy lying on the pavement, reduced to skin and bones.

Frederico’s appalling condition showed the kind of care—or the lack of it—that children like him had been receiving at the RAC, according to Catherine Scerri, deputy director of Bahay Tuluyan, a nongovernment organization promoting children’s rights.

It was Scerri who took Frederico’s photo on Oct. 12 during a visit to the center, which is located on Villegas Street in Ermita, a five-minute walk from City Hall.

“We don’t know much about his identity,” Scerri said of the boy, who had since been transferred to another youth center with Bahay Tuluyan’s help. When examined up close, the emaciated child sported rashes and a “black eye,” she recalled.

Based on the scant details she had gathered, Frederico was found abandoned in Paco and brought to the center on March 8. After seven months, for reasons still unclear, the RAC staff members have yet to determine his real name, age and address. They cited the lack of funds for medical treatment to explain the boy’s pitiful state, she said.

“It can definitely be described as a prison. (My colleagues) have compared it to a concentration camp. It is supposed to rehabilitate street children but it is not a child-friendly place,” Scerri told the Inquirer in an interview on Thursday.

Operated by the Manila Social Welfare Department (MSWD), the RAC was established about 30 years ago as a place where the police or village watchmen can bring child vagrants and beggars. It occupies a cluster of buildings built in the 1930s.

In February, a month before Frederico arrived at the RAC, the Manila-based NGO sent the first of a series of letters to Mayor Joseph Estrada and MSWD chief Shiela Marie Lacuna-Pangan, raising its concerns.

The letter, signed by BT Executive Director Lily Flordelis, called on the officials to improve the conditions at the RAC—or just close the place down if they could not do it.

Aside from poor health and nutrition, violence—bred by overcrowding and strained resources—has been part of the children’s daily diet of misery. “Many children we have spoken to complained that they were physically abused, assaulted and even tortured by the RAC staff,” Flordelis said.

These incidents largely went unreported to higher authorities, she said. If ever documented in cases where the victim had to undergo a medical examination, the resulting reports were “very superficial” because the examination was done “in the presence of the same officials who had beaten up the child, thereby inhibiting (full) disclosure” of the injuries.

In the interview, Scerri also noted that “bullying” was apparently being tolerated at the center.

During an earlier visit, she said, she caught “two boys carrying a younger boy by his wrists and ankles. I was alarmed so I intervened after the workers there didn’t do anything. When I talked to the young boy, who was about 10 years old, he was terrified because he almost got beaten up.”

Bahay Tuluyan also noted how RAC personnel had failed to notify the children’s parents and guardians weeks or months after the minors arrived there.

“The center officials said the place can accommodate about 100 people, but on any given day there can be as many 400 there. Recently I saw about 160 boys sharing a room just about five-by-six meters wide. They have nothing in there but a bucket—for those who need to pee,” Scerri said.

Sought for comment, Estrada said he had “reprimanded the head of the MSWD (Pangan) and the RAC for this.”

“They said they did not mean to neglect the child (Frederico) and that this is an isolated case. I have ordered the MSWD to improve the treatment of children there. This won’t be repeated. If it happens again, heads will roll,” the mayor, adding that he found the boy’s photo disturbing.

He vowed to pour in more funds for the center. “Hopefully next year we can improve RAC and its facilities; we expect (the city government) to be debt-free by then. We don’t see a need to shut down RAC’s operations. The services there will improve.”

Pangan and RAC officials, led by acting chief Gloria Antonio, did not respond to Inquirer requests for an interview.

Scerri said Estrada made the same pledge when she and other Bahay Tuluyan officers finally had a meeting with him on Nov. 6 and 10. “He promised us that there will be more funding and even new buildings (for the center) in 2015.”

“We have been campaigning for improvements since 2008 but we’ve seen very little (progress). So we are hoping the government will show sincerity. We want to see a clear action plan.” A third meeting with Estrada is set on Nov. 26.

As to Frederico, she said, “we received news that he’s already doing fine and has started to put on weight. But there are still many things needed to be done for him. We still don’t have a complete diagnosis of his condition.”

“His case may be considered ‘isolated,’ but we have strongly established that the problems at the RAC are systemic. The children may actually be safer and more able to fend for themselves out in the streets than inside the center, where they only end up traumatized.”

We have learned that bureaucracy-mired organizations are often ill-equipped to handle the emergency needs of children in danger from poverty, starvation, illness and the violence experienced by children who find themselves in convict with the law.  Centers for these children must be able to act quickly and set realistic limits to the numbers of residents they can care for.  If government-run centers simply admit every child brought to their door and there is no corresponding increase in staff, nutrition, medical care, and other resources, then shelters for the street kids will begin to look like "concentration camps" and centers for children in conflict with the law will begin to look like jails.

At Bahay Pag-asa Bacolod, we are careful in our admissions programs because we want to maintain a safe and family-like atmosphere for the children and youth in our care.  As a private, Lasallian, non-profit organization, we operate as a fulfillment of our mission to provide a "human and Christian education for the young, especially the poor" rather than simply fulfilling a government mandate.  We are able to direct donations quickly and directly toward helping feed, house, educate and care for the children in our center.  Our experience is that the children entrusted to us grow up healthy and advance in their education.  They master academic skills and they take courses that enable them to seek employment for skilled workers.  They experience the Gospel as "action" more than "preaching" as we work every day to model compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and love.  We are not the solution to the entire problem but we are part of the solution - and a very important part because we are developing a program that can serve as a model for future centers for children in conflict with the law.
We know that we are needed and we hope to work with governmental agencies to help find the best programs and placements for the children who find themselves in danger or without hope.  We are needed.


Saturday, November 1, 2014

A Challenge from Pope Francis



Pope Francis called for abolition of the death penalty as well as life imprisonment, and denounced what he called a "penal populism" that promises to solve society's problems by punishing crime instead of pursuing social justice.
"It is impossible to imagine that states today cannot make use of another means than capital punishment to defend peoples' lives from an unjust aggressor," the pope said Thursday in a meeting with representatives of the International Association of Penal Law.
"All Christians and people of good will are thus called today to struggle not only for abolition of the death penalty, whether it be legal or illegal and in all its forms, but also to improve prison conditions, out of respect for the human dignity of persons deprived of their liberty. And this, I connect with life imprisonment," he said. "Life imprisonment is a hidden death penalty."
The pope noted that the Vatican recently eliminated the death penalty from its own penal code.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, cited by Pope Francis in his talk, "the traditional teaching of the church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor," but modern advances in protecting society from dangerous criminals mean that "cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."
The pope said that, although a number of countries have formally abolished capital punishment, "the death penalty, illegally and to a varying extent, is applied all over the planet," because "extrajudicial executions" are often disguised as "clashes with offenders or presented as the undesired consequences of the reasonable, necessary and proportionate use of force to apply the law."
The pope denounced the detention of prisoners without trial, who he said account for more than 50 percent of all incarcerated people in some countries. He said maximum security prisons can be a form of torture, since their "principal characteristic is none other than external isolation," which can lead to "psychic and physical sufferings such as paranoia, anxiety, depression and weight loss and significantly increase the chance of suicide."
He also rebuked unspecified governments involved in kidnapping people for "illegal transportation to detention centers in which torture is practiced."
The pope said criminal penalties should not apply to children, and should be waived or limited for the elderly, who "on the basis of their very errors can offer lessons to the rest of society. We don't learn only from the virtues of saints but also from the failings and errors of sinners."
Pope Francis said contemporary societies overuse criminal punishment, partially out of a primitive tendency to offer up "sacrificial victims, accused of the disgraces that strike the community."
The pope said some politicians and members of the media promote "violence and revenge, public and private, not only against those responsible for crimes, but also against those under suspicion, justified or not."
He denounced a growing tendency to think that the "most varied social problems can be resolved through public punishment ... that by means of that punishment we can obtain benefits that would require the implementation of another type of social policy, economic policy and policy of social inclusion."

Happy Halloween from Bahay Pag-asa!


Bahay Pag-asa residents had their first ever Halloween Party yesterday complete with a costume contest, scary movies, a lesson on the history of Halloween, and even home-made caramel apples!
Since we did not have pumpkins available the boys carved jack-o-lanterns out of green papayas and banana tree bark.  Somehow it all worked out.


It was a fitting celebration for the boys since they had just (one week before) won first place in performance (drama and dance) at the Symposium of Child's Rights held at the Bacolod Girls' Home.  They were asked to repeat their performance at a second workshop held at Bacolod's New Government Center.  And they are being asked to bring their talents again to the Regional Center at the beginning of December.



We expect two or three new residents this week and we look forward to the graduation of two of our residents from Therapeutic Massage Program at the University of Saint La Salle.