A child's death in exchange for social support

The government has been created to provide basic and important services to the people. When the government fails to deliver such services, the government needs to answer for that failure.

Early this November, a grade 6 pupil from Davao City in the Philippines committed suicide due to poverty. In the girl's diary, she wrote that she could not stand their situation anymore. She is one of the youngest among 7 children -- she has a younger brother.

On November 1, Marianette asked her father for 100 pesos for her school project. Unable to give the money to his child, he asked her to ask her mother instead adding that maybe she has some money. Unfortunately, her mother does not have money available.

A father that he is, the following day the girl's father went to the construction site where he works to get some advance payment. He got a thousand pesos. Sadly, when he got home, he found out that his little girl is already dead, she hanged herself.

Her four other siblings were not with them because they already have families of their own. Her mother is a part time clothes washer and her father is a seasonal construction worker.

The national government, in a press statement, assumed responsibility for the girl's death.

Being a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, it has a daunting task of ensuring the welfare of the people it serves. But who really is to blame?

There are several other issues that came up based on newspaper reports. The girl was known to have been taunted by her classmates for "being poor." She had been absent from school for three days according to her mother that the little girl have thought to have been four months as stated in her diary. Her absence was because they do not have any money for allowance. She even asked permission from her mother to work but was dissuaded to do so. These are a lot of factors already.

Taunting is a painful thing to happen. Being young as they are, children tend to brag about what they have. And in the process, some even put down others who are not as well off as they are.

I never got wind of what else happened to the girl before she died. My friends and I have discussed what happened and we came up with several reasons or factors that lead to her committing suicide at a young age.

1. Value for Education - we could never comprehend how at such a young age the girl thought of committing suicide. Is it because of her hunger for education that her absence deeply affected her? You do not find a lot of children who truly value education. In our discussions, we share that during elementary school days, we did aspire to excel in class but we also look forward to reasons to be absent. We believe that she may have given her education greater value than we did.

2. Television - she may have watched several soap operas in their neighbors television that bore so much drama on life's challenges. She may have witnessed several scenes where actors say they want to die because of the suffering they endured. And this may have prompted her to think of suicide. Again, my group thought that at those times, what we thought of doing was to get adopted by rich families, not take our lives.

3. Depression - the taunting may have pushed her on the edge. Children taunt others without regard to what those other children feel because it is "fun." We even assumed that some kids may have told her to just die because they are so poor. And we all know that children say what they want. At such a young age, we believe that they do not have the capacity to ascertain that what they say may be taken seriously. Take a kid being scolded for example. They will even challenge their parents' authority until they get a gentle slap on the cheek or a piece of leather on their behinds. Children are brave but they are careless or rather care free.

And most far fetched of our theories is: Drama. Taking everything into consideration, the little girl may have thought that to get attention, she must do something big. And she may have believed that death is the biggest attention getter of all. Where she may have learned this, we can only guess. She had long wanted to have her family's life be given some comfort. She wished for school supplies and jobs for both her parents.

And her wish came true. Help came pouring in just this week to the bereaved. But it is too late for her. She may have thought that a sacrifice is needed so that her younger brother could have a better life. And that sacrifice is her own life.

So who's to blame? I believe we all are. We have taken our kids for granted. We have immersed ourselves in our work to give them better lives that we forgot that what they need most is our presence. The opposing sides of the government is intense in their struggle to take each other down that they have forgotten about the little ones who should have been the reason they are where they are now. The people elected by the people lost sight of who they work for. They lost sight of their collective goals. They are lost in their individual battles. And so we lost a promising little girl.

How many more little ones have to do such horrible acts for us to wake up? How many more should we lose to start working together.

Someone once told me that for a country to really achieve real change and realize that something is wrong, it must pay the price of loosing 2/3 of its citizens in a civil war.

We do not need war to change. All we need is commitment and intent to change.