blog -->, Children, Human Rights
“Because we are too menny”
One of the most tragic and memorable moments of any Hardy novel is in Jude the Obscure. Jude’s son, Little Father Time as he is known, strangles his siblings and hangs himself, leaving a note saying “done because we are too menny” (sic). His reasoning is that Jude and Sue will be better off without the children and less poor.
Tragic as this is in a novel, you can’t imagine it happening in real life.
Today I read one of the most depressing news stories I have ever seen. An 11-year-old Filipino girl has hanged herself in despair over her family’s poverty.
“I wish for new shoes, a bag and jobs for my mother and father. My dad does not have a job and my mom just gets laundry jobs,” she wrote in a letter she put under her pilllow before she died. “I would like to finish my schooling and I would like very much to buy a new bike.”
Her family lives in poverty in a hillside shanty town, 600 miles south of Manila. Apparently little Mariannet could no longer bear to show up at school with no shoes and was also distraught at missing school when her parents couldn’t afford the fare to get her there. On those days she would just stay at home and do laundry with her mother.
A neighbour said of them: “The Amper family are always being discriminated against. They’re poor, the kids are dirty and the other kids don’t want to play with them. Because they’re very poor, they’ve been rejected by their neighbours.”
Any child dying like this is beyond horrific. But what really got to me was that this was clearly a very sensitive and intelligent young girl who was deprived of something she yearned for; an education. I’m not sure you can call education a human right, but it certainly should be a right for those who want it, and those who could benefit from it.
Perhaps Mariannet would have been the first member of the Amper family to make it out of the slums. She certainly felt the shame of living there strongly enough to want to escape, even to die.
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007
08 Nov 2007 helena
A very sad tale - but one that highlights how important it is that we resist the selfish complaints of greedy French farmers, and do all we can to facilitate the globalisation of trade. The poor in countries like the Philippines will only be able to lift themselves out of poverty quickly if we all open our markets to Filipino goods and services.
It’s quite a leap to blame the death of a child in the Philippines on greedy French farmers…the Philippines has been ill served by its political leaders ever since it was a Spanish colony in the 16th century and then later fell in American hands. Since independence in 1946 its governments have been either corrupt or incompetent. It doesn’t help that most of the population is Roman Catholic, which puts procreation before contraception. As for globalisation - rather than helping the country it may in fact be hindering its growth - as many outsourcing jobs are going instead to China or India. How greedy are French farmers? Clearly there are some who get huge subsidies they don’t deserve. But take the wine growers here in the Languedoc. True, much of the wine they make is undrinkable. But if the fields weren’t covered in vines they would either be a scrubby fire hazard, or covered in shitty pink houses!
A sad tale indeed; and I fear the reasons for blame make a long list.
That picture is haunting me. That is the most horribly depressed child I have ever seen in my life. Oh, what the hell, this is hideous. I don’t want to debate global this or that, I desperately want a time machine, I want to go back and take care of her, I want to keep her from dying this way.
Sorry, I’ve got nothing intelligent to say…but thank you for posting this…it’s not something I will ever forget.
I remember reading a similar story (in the 1980s I think), about an American child, the eldest son of an Army family, whose move back to an American Army base from Germany had been so mismanaged, that the family had ended up penniless, while the father was posted faraway overseas. The eldest son of the family with several siblings, he had become so upset by his mother’s distress at the situation, that he hanged himself ’so there was one less mouth to feed’.
The mother received much of the blame for allowing her son to see her distress and to feel responsible for relieving it.
The story haunted me for years.