SikhSpectrum.com Quarterly Issue No.31, March 2008
12-year-old’s suicide casts light on Philippines’ poverty
Danny Chan
A Philippine schoolgirl’s suicide in Davao City in a bid to escape a life of crushing poverty has focused renewed attention on the plight of millions of the nation’s poor. Mariannet Amper, a 12-year-old in the sixth grade at Maa Central Elementary School, hanged herself in her parents’ home in their modest shack. Her parents discovered her corpse hanging on a beam from a rope on Nov. 2.
In a letter addressed to the GMA 7 television program “I Just Wish” that was discovered under her pillow, Mariannet had written: “I wish for new shoes, a bag and jobs for my mother and my father. My dad does not have a job and my mum just gets laundry jobs.” She added: “I would like to finish my schooling and I would very much like to buy a new bike.”
Her father, Isabelo Amper, said he recently turned down a request from his daughter for 100 pesos (approximately $2) for school projects because he lacked the funds. Ironically, he had obtained a 1,000-peso cash advance for construction work on a downtown chapel the day of her death. Mr. Amper had been unemployed for several months while his wife worked part-time packing noodles for at least 50 pesos a day and also did laundry for 100 to 150 pesos.
“I told her I did not have the money, but I would ask my wife if she could get it for her,” Mr. Amper, a construction worker, said in interview. “The next morning I was able to get a small cash advance but by the time I got home Mariannet was dead. … I suspect she did it because of our situation.
“We never knew that our daughter had dreams for us,” he added. “As for me, I can’t get work. I’m already old. No one would want to hire me.”
His wife Magdalena discovered their daughter’s diary among her belongings. An Oct. 5 entry stated: “It feels as if we’ve been absent (from school) for a month. They’re not counting my absences any more. I just realized that Christmas is just around the corner.” (Mr. Amper clarified his children had in fact missed school for only three days because the family was unable to afford food and transportation costs.)
Another diary entry recounted how the family was unable to attend Mass because they were unable to afford the fare and her father was running a fever, so she and her mother took in laundry instead.
Mariannet lived with her parents and younger brother Reynald; five other children, all in their teens and twenties, had left home and had started families of their own. Their house on a hillside community near the Yniguez Subdivision in Maa District lacked indoor plumbing or electricity.
A neighbor described how the family was rejected by the community because they lived in poverty and their children were ostracized by other youngsters because they were filthy.
Mariannet’s tragedy comes on the heels of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s announcement that economic reforms were lifting millions of Filipinos out of destitution. “The common people are now feeling the benefits of a growing economy,” she said, adding P1 billion would be earmarked for “hunger mitigation programs.” But a report from Social Weather Stations concluded about 9 million Filipino families rate themselves poor, mostly in the southern Philippines. The survey found many had experienced “severe hunger” in the past three months.
Global Call for Action Against Poverty, an anti-poverty non-governmental organization, released a report stating economic growth had yet to reach ordinary Filipinos. Reports also indicate nearly 14 per cent of the country’s 87 million people subsisted on less than a dollar day.
