Others First

Mornings in our area are noisy. Jeepneys roar; the wet market at the corner bustles. And the village gossips gather to discuss the day's top stories. Everybody else frenetically tries to get something for breakfast, sends small kids off to school, readies for work, trying to put some purpose or excitement to a new day in the same humdrum life.

I myself was busy one morning. The ornamental plants in front of my small rented place had overextending branches and unhealthy twigs that needed trimming off. While I was working on the plants, a group of people gathered at the bakery nearby, discussing anything as they waited for bread.

Shortly, the whiff of fresh pan de sal began to spread. The communal conversation shifted accordingly to the hot bread, for the moment at least. When the original discussion resumed, each participant spoke his views through mouthfuls of bread.

Every now and then an irate wife would come, ranting at a husband who had been stuck in the idle talk. Back home the whole family was waiting for the pan de sal, so that the kids could go to school and the grown-ups to work. But, to many, the morning tsismis was a kind of much needed diversion, to break away from the monotony of their lives.

In many homes in our area, pan de sal paired with coffee or a cheap chocolate drink already makes a full breakfast. It costs more to have rice; you would need viand to go with it, aside from the fact that rice alone is already expensive. The neighborhood bakery still sells pan de sal at two pesos apiece, despite the heightening price of flour and sugar. With twenty pesos worth of bread, a family of five has breakfast ready, no additional cost of kerosene or charcoal for cooking.

It is good enough to have some food early in the day, to break the fast of several hours during the night. No matter how meager breakfast is, one is still lucky to have some. Others have to bear with an empty stomach until about midday, if at all they can find something to eat by then.

As I continued to trim the plants, something cold touched my arm from behind. I was jolted with fright, thinking it could have been a snake or a big rat hiding in the plants. Fortunately it was neither. It was a small scavenger kid.

The boy smiled big, perhaps to compensate for the scare he had caused me. I turned away, but observed him from the side of my eyes. Maybe I wanted him to go away. But he stood there for a while longer, and then began to move on.

The kid was about four or five years old. His clothes, as well as his small body, were dirty; although he appeared to be quite healthy. He had no slippers, but it didn't seem to bother him. The skin at the base of his feet were probably hardened enough that footwear was no longer necessary.

As he started pulling a partly filled sack behind him, I was seized with guilt about my behavior towards the boy. Inside his sack were his precious finds, things that had become useless for others. It occurred to me what he wanted - any trash that I might need to throw away.

Several other kids were digging into a garbage receptacle across the street. The little boy walked towards the group. He had trouble pulling the heavy sack, but pulling was the only way to move it; his tiny body could not bear the weight of the load on his shoulders.

Before the boy could go any farther, I called out to him. My heart was now drowning in remorse. He was smiling big still as he turned back to me, as if that smile had never left his face - as if I had never being unkind to him. Maybe the boy was so used to being ignored or driven away. Or maybe he was just pure-hearted, incapable of holding resentment.

I asked if he liked to have fresh pan de sal. He smiled bigger, a raw compliment of the kind I had not seen in my entire life. I pulled his sack aside and led him to the bakery. When I asked how many pieces he could consume, the boy looked towards the other kids across the road. I got the message.

There were 50 pieces of pan de sal in the plastic bag that I handed to him. He quickly got one; I thought he must be really hungry. But, to my great amazement, that first piece of bread was not for himself. He let out a tiny kitten from his sack and fed it. Then he called in his other friends.

“Put others before oneself,” an old wisdom tells us. A nice thought, but hard to follow. It seems experience does not really make us wise any more than it makes us callous. We have a lot to learn from little children, whose innate humanity pours out spontaneously without being filtered through screens of selfish interests.

The bums in my neighborhood will do better emulating the scavenger kids around. Early mornings are a time for doing something productive, not for getting intoxicated with self-righteous opinions that don't really count, after all. It's better to dirty the hands digging garbage bins than pollute the mind with delusions.

My initial behavior towards the boy that morning stills haunts me. How heartless of me to have turned my back on the little child that was only asking for my leftovers. I regret my arrogance, my acting as if a fellow human being didn't even deserve my garbage.

But it seems the little scavenger boy had forgiven me, right then and there. So, in turn, I shall learn to forgive myself. I probably will, but it will take some time for sure.

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