NO Ilocano or Pangasinense child may ever be driven to take his life simply because of poverty the way the new tragic icon of extreme poverty, 12-year-old Mariannet Amper of Davao City, did last All Soul’s Day.

This, not because we are a rich region or province or that we are a more spiritual lot of people having an abiding faith in God’s blessings and His deliverance but because we happen to be simple folks used to living on our own backyard or neighborhood resources for our provision. And too, thankfully enough (?) we still have local leaders who would, out of political instincts, not want to turn a poor man’s (voter’s) request for assistance down. After all, there’s still that perennial source of unofficial funds, jueteng, around, correct?

Manette, the young suicide, pokes a finger very close to the eyes of everyone of us who live, not the least of whom are those given the task of alleviating hunger and poverty in the countryside. That she lived in a relatively rich city like Davao, supposed to have a myriad of opportunities for both the rich and poor, does not at all depart from the fact that her family still lived in grinding, unrelenting poverty that kept her away from school for
sometime. It had apparently tormented her young mind so that she may not even finish her elementary grade, with her sick father unable to give the P100 she needed for a school project, that she decided to end it all with a rope hanging from the ceiling of their little house.

To us, living witnesses of her act, we see it as a painful last moment with that rope quickly tightening around her frail neck. To her, it was simple, sweet surcease.

As we mourn her death, let us look around us, poor though we may ourselves be, to see how we can help the much less fortunate than us. There are too many of them in our midst—and we don’t mean those familiar street beggars only –but those of our neighbors who may not even have the glib tongue to tell of their own daily fights with hunger and material needs, too shy (or too afraid) to approach snooty, indifferent welfare officers for assistance and too weak to even look heavenward for grace and deliverance.