THE MOUNTAINEER

Begging in various forms
Edison L. Baddal

BONTOC, Mountain Province -- During the meeting last month of the Provincial School Board, the current Chair of the Sangguniang Panlalawigan, who was among the attendees, strongly expressed her aversion to solicitation being done in offices by members of private organizations.
She bristled at solicitation as a way to procure funds, and the easiest at that, by organizations whenever its members have a program or project in the pipeline for implementation.

“There are more dignified ways in raising funds than solicitation. Organizations should be ingenious enough in finding means to raise funds like conducting sales and the like,” she said. She added printed warnings currently posted in office entrances prohibiting the entry of itinerant vendors should instead be changed to warn the entry of solicitors.

She reasoned said vendors should be tolerated in offices than solicitors. “The vendors are barely trying to survive or acquire cash through vending which is more honorable than soliciting which is tantamount of begging,” she said.

I took the occasion to take potshots against the abhorrent practice of open begging of Mountain Province folk in Manila, especially those who have already adapted it as a regular livelihood.
I suggested to a board member if the SP could craft a doable policy to regulate begging in Manila by our town mates. This is because I firmly professed that the practice “is giving a big black eye to the image of the people of Mountain Province even as those engaged in it do not even constitute one percent of the total population of the province.

To this, the provincial social welfare officer said that she would re-implement established provincial policies enunciated by past provincial administrations which her office usually implements vis-à-vis the issue.

She added the provincial government had been trying to regulate the practice ever since. In fact, the assistance of barangay officials, whose barangays the identified beggars come from, have been tapped on several instances but the latter were not so cooperative.

Surprisingly, her staff found out many of these professional beggars became rich. In fact, some have even produced many professionals and built boarding houses in Baguio City out of begging.
Many of these beggars wisely invested their solicited cash into fruitful pursuits.

Begging? The word struck a familiar cord in me. It seemed like a bolt of lightning hit me all of sudden from nowhere. Instantly, it evoked many poignant recollections of those old folks from Sagada and Dalican who made begging an occupation or livelihood in Manila.

Having sojourned in Manila for eight years back in the eighties as helper in my dad’s stall while studying at the same time, I usually espied them extending their palms for charity. This was done to bystanders, students, passers-by along boulevards, street corners, shaded walkways, or to customers of restaurants and street side eateries or to shoppers in arcades, buyers in street stalls or promenaders in parks.

Oftentimes, I saw them being shoved or shooed out of restaurants and other establishments like dogs as their owners detest them for inconveniencing customers. Uncertain as to who really started this practice, kinfolks intimated that many old folks from said places have been going to Manila to beg ever since the end of the World War 2, notably in the fifties.

However, the proliferation of beggars from Mountain Province supposedly started in the late sixties and in the seventies, many of them graduated to being professional panhandlers. According to stories, these beggars usually engaged in farming as their part-time livelihood.

During the planting, weeding and harvesting seasons, they were tied down to their farms then headed to Manila in-between said farm works to beg. During yuletides, though, not only old folks but many able-bodied men and women trooped in droves to Manila to panhandle.

On the pretext that they were there to carol, they entertained Manilenos through native dances executed to the rhythmic beating of gongs for loose coins voluntarily thrown their way by curious spectators.

Because of this, Mountain Province has been tagged as a home of beggars to a lot of Manila denizens. Quite humiliating and revolting, to say the least, this further added up to the prejudice that lowlanders have for highlanders, especially those from Mt. Province.

This is on top of our being regarded pejoratively by lowlanders because of our minority and ethnic social status. I can vouch for this as even in Baguio, which is literally an Igorot City, lowlanders have basically low regard for native Cordillerans (Read: Igorots) despite the fact that they are savoring the crisp climate that this Igorot city has afforded them.
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Almost a month later, while acting as one of the facilitators in a training involving the members of the Provincial Poverty Reduction Action Teams and their municipal counterparts on Community-Based Monitoring Systems in Bontoc, one of the participants raised a question on the CBMS survey form.

This was on the indicator regarding the estimation of a respondent’s income which is among the 135 indicators in the said survey form. His question concerned the category of income in which one of the choices is stated as “others”.

He did not mention it directly but he indicated it by extending his open palm mimicking the act of begging. At first, I thought that he is referring to open begging but later he bluntly stated the term “SOP”. Of course, the SOP is that money given to authorities to grease their palms on the sly.

Ostensibly, this guy belied his aversion to SOP for having categorized it as begging in the same vein as the said alderman’s aversion to solicitation which she opined as tantamount to begging. If anything, it also related to my personal aversion to open begging. I was disconcerted on both occasions.

This intriguing question caught me in a bind. One consideration that I entertained was the difference of the three forms of begging. Solicitation is done by organizational members to defray the cost of a project which are oftentimes beneficial to the public. At other times, it is resorted by community leaders to help defray the cost of burial of a deceased but destitute man.

On the other hand, those old folks who trooped to Manila to beg belonged to the poor, marginalized sector. They were destitute farmers who eked out a living from their farms but their being devoid of cash forced them to go to Manila to beg.

Their farms could barely sustain their nutritional needs and were usually advanced in years. Having limited options for livelihood due to illiteracy, they were forced to beg in between farming activities. Meanwhile, the SOP is the lifeblood of crooks to boost their material, financial and socio-political stock.

Another consideration is that while those old, slogging folks (my emphasis is on the old folks, mind you) who go to Manila to beg do so for having been left out of economic opportunities due to illiteracy and ignorance while those who get AIDS through SOP do so out of plain avarice and undue advantage

The moral question then is, which among the three is considered more palatable? I dare say that solicitation, for as long as it is done for a worthy cause, is acceptable. There is no need to intellectualize the issue as the crux of the matter is the purpose not the means. On begging as a livelihood, morally and socially, it might be reprehensible.

But while am prejudiced against those professional beggars, it is logically acceptable for those old, illiterate folks from their ranks who can no longer do backbreaking works in field or construction projects due to old age.

It is a totally a different story for those crooks who engage in SOP business. For one thing, the SOP funds are meant to make those indulged in it richer as well as to boost their socio-political stocks. As these crooks have been entrusted with power and public authority, it is the most reprehensible and insidious act itself. These SOPs, being public money, is basically robbing the
taxpayers’ money.

It is also treachery of the people’s trust. Adding insult to injury, the SOP takers are already blessed with much and yet they want more by bamboozling the hoi polloi through shady deals, questionable contracts and substandard projects. Thus, the act itself is not only larceny and naked avarice but also an extreme case of perfidy.

There’s then the rub as to why the Philippines is still at the tailend in terms of economic development compared with her neighbors like Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and even Vietnam which is a socialist country.