DIGGING DREAMS

Dreamy sepia lenses, overflowing laughter in our senses, and growing fonder in our houses - that is how we often remember our childhood years. An age where we learn the young concepts of love that are often associated with happy feelings, fulfillment of filial duties, and the daily practice of social justice.

In a contemporary era of abominable cynical concepts of love, how can one truly find it when one only sees the suffering of inherited poverty? When the daily practice of love and filial duty is digging through the harsh punishment of reality - to work at an early age searching for hope as murky and dark as the mine’s cave underneath an abandoned little child’s dreams grave.

In a little mining community of Dap-Dap in the coastal municipality of Rapu-Rapu, mines have borne the grave of hundreds if not thousands of children whose dreams have died because of extreme poverty. This community had heard many children dreaming of clashing away from the inherited fate of being a miner. Too odd compared to how children of their age might perhaps answer of dreaming to be a doctor, teacher, or lawyer.

Instead, beneath their answers that are characterized by how others might see it as a form of ‘escape’ is the powerful courage of a child to dream of their family’s salvation with them as the sacrificial lamb. They knew that with their condition, the only way to save a sibling that is starving, a father that is ailing, and a mother that is turned away by stores because of debts is for them to work with their bones as young as their innocence.

Jeremy Balinsayo, a nine-year-old first-born child, is now the breadwinner of his family. He worked in local small-scale mines for about a year after his father had fallen into an illness that resulted in his father not being able to work instead of him.

“Kaipuhankaya,Kuya.Daemanmaka-trabahosiPapatanaghihilang kaya,” Balinsayo shared.

For them, their current state doesn’t give them the luxury to choose what to do. Before even dreaming of playing, they are compromised of working for the benefit of their starving household.

“Minamansanamakuwakipang-gastosmitadaemankamingibang pwedengmakuwaan.Akomanpatiangpanganay,” He added.

According to him, he had assumed the role of being the provider of his family because most of his siblings are still too young to even fetch a pale of water.

“Saraditon pa man ang mga tugang ko. Kaya ako na sana muna ang kaipuhanmag-sakripisyo,” He said.

He is only one of countless children who came before him to work in a mine at an early age confronted by the calls of their stomachs. The dysfunctional social system that feds from the charity that they are certain will not be forthcoming has long disappointed them in being saved from this multigenerational cycle.