HIS NAME can be Angelico, one of the 250,000 or more homeless children that live on the city streets, alleyways, in rubbish dumps and open markets. They have no secure home, love, care, security and dignity. Most have no parents that will recognize or accept them. They are the throwaway children of society yet for true Christians they are the most important people in the world, of great human value above all others. To accept and help them is to accept Jesus of Nazareth as he said himself. (Matthew 18:1-6)
Angelico was abandoned by his biological parents who had a broken relationship resulting in children like Angelico being rejected and neglected and finding their alternative “home” in a pushcart and living a life of day-to-day survival and self-support on the city streets or in provincial towns.
Angelico was given away as a child to a couple that agreed to informally adopt him. By the time he was 13, he was feeling increasingly unloved. He had no will to succeed. He failed in school, had no birth certificate and could hardly read or write and became for them a “problem” child. Yet he did not suffer any abuse or maltreatment with the adoptive family. In desperation, in 2020, the adoptive parents decided to return him back to his biological father who had rejected him at birth and was living in Manila.
It was traumatic for him to be rejected a second time and to be left with a man he never knew, one that did not care for him either. Angelico was neglected, hungry and continually beaten and rejected by his father. When the hurt and pain of being kicked and beaten was unendurable, he ran away to live on his own.
There are estimates of 126 million such children in the world at least. Angelico lived on the streets in Manila linking up with other street children and they scavenged in the dumps. They were begging on the streets, doing any odd jobs they could find, collecting scrap, junk plastic for recycling and buying and eating re-cooked leftover scraps of restaurant food called “pag-pag.”
They also had to escape being grabbed by pimps and human traffickers who would sell them to pedophiles to be sexually abused or raped. The street children, boys and girls, are very vulnerable, without protection and unable to make complaints to the authorities when they have been raped. When the human traffickers knock them out by giving them industrial glue to sniff, they force them to perform sex acts with each other on live-streaming sex shows to foreign customers over the internet. An abomination if ever there was one. The internet service providers (ISPs) PLDT/Smart, Globe and Dito and their Singapore-based investors and shareholders have the moral and legal responsibility to obey the anti-child pornography law (RA 9775) and block such criminal abuse of children. Yet they fail to do so despite all the public appeals. (To be continued)/PN
