Fil-Am and street children -victims many times over
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By: Father Shay Cullen
Poverty is the look of perpetual hunger on the face of Angelino, the eleven-year-old boy that sits anxiously poking the dubious contents of a tin can that serves as a cooking pot. He fled the hunger of his six brothers and sisters to beg for them but could hardly feed himself. His parents are human wrecks.
Under a low concrete bridge on the riverbank of Olongapo City, a dead cat rots in the tropical sun. A dozen street children have made their home among the concrete pillars and somehow survive amid the disease-ridden garbage.
Bernardo, 15, declares the left over chicken bones collected from the garbage of a fast food joint are cooked and a group of filthy urchins in rags rush over to get a share. Under the grime and dirt Bernardo's face looks strangely Caucasian. He is a Filipino-American, one of the many throwaway children abandoned when the Americans left the US Navy base at Subic Bay in 1992.
The urchins have a tough time staying out of the jail without help. The Preda charity in Olongapo has social workers caring for them as resources and circumstances allow. They are skinny emaciated and suffer cuts and wounds that quickly become infected in the putrid green slime of the stagnant estuary.
If only the American fathers knew how much suffering they caused by abandoning their own kids, I am sure they would have had a change of heart and done more to help them. Short moments of fleeting pleasure has led to a lifetime of hardship for the children of their passing passion. Responsibility rests with the local governments too. Olongapo and Angles, Cities provided the sex bars and hotels and the young girls -some only nine years old.
The 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war was celebrated this past week but the legacy of the US still lives on in the children left behind especially in the Philippines where the American troops came for rest and recreation.
The parents of the street kids and Fil-Am children are in an endless struggle to fight joblessness and survive the depression that life has thrown at them. Their anger at the hard and miserable existence and injustice of society is what rains down on many of the kids. They can't take it for long.
No wonder they run to the streets when told, "better if you had never been born", or "you will amount to nothing you useless hungry mouth".
We cannot expect to find a home filled with laughter and love in these circumstances rather a loveless home where children are born not out of love but desperate restless coupling.
How true this was for some of the kids born of American sailors or sex tourists out for fun without a care for the consequences. Bernardo is just of the estimated 3 to 5 thousand Fil-Am children throughout the Philippines. Many street kids and Fil-Am children have been helped over the years by the Preda charity in Olongapo. Fil-Am children get scholarships and job placements until the present, the street kids get non-formal education, food, clothes, picnics and legal assistance when they are jailed.
Bernard's mother, was a bar girl at 15, at the California Jam club and lived in with a US sailor. When the base closed she was abandoned and her baby. Her hopes and dreams of marrying and going to America were shattered. In desperation she left Bernardo with a family in the Olongapo slums. They couldn't sell him so he grew up unloved and unwanted. He joined the street kids soon after he dropped out of grade 4. He has been rescued and helped to start again.
What children like these need urgently is a home where they can feel wanted, respected, affirmed and educated in dignity and given a future away from the streets. Few have seen the cruel conditions and subhuman lives of these children who have run away from the abuse and harsh treatment that was there daily punishment in their shantytown hovels tottering on the banks of the estuary and stinking canals.
We need a new home for them and the ideal location is an abandoned building in Castillejos, Zambales near our main center.
The street children and throwaway need this home and we asked Governor Vic Magsaysay and the Zambales provincial government to give us the use of the abandoned buildings in Castillejos that were given to the province by the Pinatubo Foundation.
We are offering to raise the funds to renovate the property and make it a home, provide the staff and full support and invest in livelihood training and employment for locals at the compound. The province has yet to respond to this urgent need for development and employment that we can help create.
To help the Fil-Am children, I connected with a US lawyer willing to file a class action suit for the mothers and children against the US Government in the Washington based international Court of Complaints. The United States had then and still has unfulfilled responsibilities to the women and children fathered by their sailors. The court case was a sensation at the time in America. The court decided that the women were engaged in illegal activity (prostitution) and had no right to bring a law suite because of that. The men were not held responsible.
Unlike other Amerasians, children in Vietnam and Korea Filipino children were discriminated against by being denied US citizenship.
Most American fathers never recognise or acknowledge their son or daughter, this is another heartbreak and painful injustice and there is no way to prove it except by DNA testing to which none will agree.
Every child has the right to a father and an identity. It is the most natural thing in the world but one denied to so many children. We can help change that and challenge both Governor Magsaysay and the Provincial Board to help and ask America to look once again at the Fil-Am children and recognise them as their own too. [End]
