BY MELANIE JIMENEZ
REFLECTIONS HEAD
(Image by Sabrina Lovino)
Living as a Filipino-American in what we consider to be the greatest country in the world, my family had always taught me to be grateful for the things I was given, and the life I was fortunate to grow up in. I remember looking at photos of starving families and motherless children in the villages of the Philippines and learning to thank God for the blessings I enjoyed every single day of my life. The blessings others often went without.
The Philippines is no stranger to hard times. In 2013, Super Typhoon Yolanda devastated Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, leaving thousands of people homeless and stranded. Their lives were completely uprooted and their hopes were bleak. Just a few months ago, in January, the Taal Volcano erupted in the Province of Batangas, spreading deadly ashes all across the country and effectively putting a halt to the tourism and fishing industry in the area. Most recently, the COVID-19 epidemic has brought life in the Philippines to a standstill.
The shops and vendors that used to line the streets are now closed, leaving the sidewalks barren. Life is nothing more than an endless cycle. Stay indoors—if you’re lucky enough to have a house to live in—and nothing more.
In the slums of Tondo, Manila, there is an actual trash mountain that people live on. There, the ground is so polluted and poisoned that green ooze seeps out and the smell permeates the air for miles. It is actually coined “Smokey Mountain” because of the numerous fires that erupted when the site was still an active landfill. Villages pop up along the mountain because the rent is free and people can collect plastics and other recyclable goods in order to turn them into recycling centers. In tight-knit communities like this, where houses are nothing more than cardboard shacks with tin roofs, and houses are less than 2 feet away from one another, COVID-19 spreads like a wildfire.
Life in the Philippines is very different from what it is here in America. Over there, people work for their wage daily and earn only what they need to survive. They get paid much less than a living wage, sometimes less than a few American cents a day. In some cases, if they work for themselves or their own family business, they get paid only as much as they manage to sell in a day.
For these people, quarantine is not an option. In order to safely make it through quarantine, one needs to stock up enough food and supplies to last them for fourteen days or longer. But, when you make barely enough money to survive a single day, how are you supposed to get through fourteen of them without working? How are you supposed to collect enough money to buy food for you and your entire family—enough to last two whole weeks? How are you supposed to keep your family safe from the virus if you don’t have a working toilet, or running water, or access to a convenience store to buy yourselves masks and disinfectant?
These are the questions I find myself asking every single day. But, I am thankful that I don’t have to live a life centered around these issues. I am thankful that I only have to aid in the solution.
For these people, who live with the risk of contamination every day and have already been exposed to the virus, potentially getting sick is the lesser of two evils. When staying at home means certain death by starvation but COVID-19 boasts a smaller mortality rate, it is easy to see why many ignore the stay-at-home orders.
Poverty has always been at the forefront of international leaders’ minds. In dire times like these, even more so. But what these government officials fail to realize is that peoples’ situations are very different. Their social status sometimes cannot allow them to wait out the storm at home.
To them, quarantine is just another link in their chains. And poverty is the heaviest link of them all- the one that needs to be broken first and foremost.
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