“Neighbors” is Rappler People section’s space for community and human interest stories told in a personal way.
Recently, a woman was caught emerging from a sewer in daylight. The place was in Adelantado Street in Makati — a good eight-minute walk from where I work. This portion of Makati is dominated by towering buildings, accessible walkways, parks, and manicured landscaping.
The photo stirred countless discussions and memes on social media. The woman, whom we have come to know as Rose, denied living in the sewage, but was nevertheless given P80,000 in aid by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). This sparked debates online on “who deserves the P80,000” given by the department.
“Makati streets, man. They never fail to surprise,” says the caption on Reddit, where the news first broke.
Part of why Rose caused a stir on social media and became worthy of being photographed is precisely because of where she was found. Rose represents the divide between the image of the ideal city and what lurks on its fringes or even literally underneath it. I don’t know if this story would have become big news if it happened in other poverty-stricken cities across the country. But in Makati, it certainly is a different story.
Makati’s business district and areas like BGC in Taguig are considered “aesthetic” places. But the appeal of these centers is that of exclusion. One realization I had when I started working in Makati was that a large portion of people who populate the city were not residents but workers from adjacent cities. That it doesn’t take long to fill up buses going to Bicutan and Alabang is proof of it. I recall somebody say that if a worker cannot afford to live in the city where he works, then it is not a real place but a theme park.
A few days later, after going viral, the DSWD gave Rose an P80,000 grant to help her establish a sari-sari store. She was photographed in a supermarket in front of carts of groceries, drew the ire of netizens.
“Lumabas lang sa imburnal, may P80k na agad?” (So all you need to do to get P80,000 is emerge from a sewer?) was the common thread among the people who criticized the aid given to Rose. The sentiment is followed by: “We work hard. Where is our P80k?”
There is something jarring in this reaction of questioning whether this woman deserves the help she got. At the heart of the meme is the thinking that Rose had escaped the suffering “necessary” to earn an amount as big as P80,000 — that she somehow cheated her way into receiving what, for most of us, is a life-saving amount of money.
This is the same annoyance we express about the recipients of 4Ps, of government housing, and pandemic doleouts.
Others should suffer as we do. It’s unfair if we’re not suffering together. We denounce poor people receiving cash aid if they don’t exhibit telltale signs of suffering. If they’re not a breath away from death. We live in times where hard work is a virtue, and our resilience is a badge of honor, but we rarely question why what we call living is almost always just surviving and suffering.
But we are not the people living in the sewage. We are the people who complain behind our smartphones, sipping an overpriced coffee in an air-conditioned establishment. Yet, despite the privileges we enjoy, a sight of a person like Rose reminds us of our immiseration — of our having to work untold hours to make ends meet, enjoy a certain level of comfort, and be not like the woman who lives in a sewer. Rose injures our delusion of privilege.
The ire over Rose receiving cash aid represents our panic over society’s lack of safety nets. The pernicious effect of neoliberalism has made us believe that success is a matter of individual grit and determination. This is why benefit claimants wound us. It isn’t the meager aid itself that offends — it’s that, in receiving it, they appear to bypass the suffering we’ve come to accept as the cost of survival.
Our anger should be redirected towards demanding a robust government welfare. Wage hikes, national housing, free healthcare, accessible public transportation, and food security are what we should demand and should be our notion of progress. We must be able to imagine a world that isn’t this. – Rappler.com
Drex Le Jaena holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He lives in Manila.