Children of the rain

It’s the wettest day of the week. One man described it as the day most like a woman: fickle. One hour she’s bright and hot, the next she’s solicitous to plants and man.

Tomorrow, the weather bureau predicts, the rains will stop. But today if the grounds are wet there’s the hall for our flag ceremony. No one’s going to get wet or sick…It’s my mother instinct that keeps me on my toes at work.

Caring, that’s what keeps so many mothers purposeful and alive. When I read Harper’s Bazaar’s January issue on child labor, it absolutely disturbed me. Dana Thomas, who authored “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster,” writes: “No one uttered a word, not a sound I recall as I went on with the Chinese police in a tenement in Guangzhou. What we discovered when we walked in were two dozen sad, tired, dirty children of ages 8 to 14 making fake Dunhill, Versace, and Hugo Boss handbags on old, rusty sewing machines.”

Now would you ever buy a fake Louis Vuitton, Gucci, or Ferragamo? I wouldn’t. I can’t, I’d never buy an imitation for the above inhumane reasons.

From Dana again: “The room (I teach) grows absolutely silent as I put forth the facts. It is estimated that up to 7 percent of America’s annual world trade — $600 billion worth — is counterfeit or pirated. That fakes are believed to be directly responsible for the loss of more than 750,000 American jobs. That everything from baby formula to medicine is counterfeited. That counterfeiters and the crime syndicates they work with deal in human trafficking, child labor, and gang warfare and that counterfeiting is used to launder money, and the money has been linked to truly sinister deeds such as terrorism.”

And the rain goes on while I protest these despicable people.

Just the other day I had a meeting on trafficking of women and children with the Australian Agency for International Development, which is responsible for delivering non-military foreign aid, with Undersecretary Melchor Rosales presiding. Regional manager Bridie Rushton explained that their organization is geared towards improving the capacity of the Philippines government’s agencies responsible for law enforcement, counter-terrorism and transport security. Their agency works internationally to combat sexual exploitation, especially prostitution and trafficking of young girls, and to curtail trafficking of one million estimated children every year.

Child trafficking occurs with their abduction from the streets, and their sale into sexual slavery, forced marriages by relatives or in any place where traffickers, pimps and recruiters prey upon a child’s vulnerabilities. Children are trafficked for forced labor, domestic work, as child soldiers, and as camel jockeys. Unaccompanied boys are at high risk of forced or “voluntary” participation in violence and armed conflict.

Often the girls are sexually exploited by their employers. Philippine National Police Gen. Yolanda G. Tanigue and portfolio manager Patricia Georgina Domingo of the AusAID agency say that such children face malnutrition, illness, physical and psychosocial trauma, and impaired emotional development.

How to help? Report on syndicate activities, government border and provincial patrols. To adopt a child is a tedious process but adoptions are enticing Hollywood actors like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. We have Australian friends, the O’Brians, who adopted two children years back through Gina Tabuena and ourselves.

Some adopted children can cause more rain. For example, I can’t figure out how a destitute child introduced as a baby into a privileged home can end up a rich drug addict. I agree that family interactions and parenting styles can bear on the children’s development and future delinquency — but so can harsh physical punishment, especially when inconsistently applied. Equally, psychological abuse in the form of constant criticism can be harmful, more so than certain forms of physical abuse.

A child raised in a nurturing environment grows up realizing that certain behaviors are allowed and rewarded while others are not and they’re punished. In a nurturing environment, children learn to control their own behaviors, thus they learn to have self-control. Their norms and values about appropriate behavior become part of their character and identity.

The other side of the fence is a situation in which the child is attached to people who frequently commit illegal acts. This means that anyone who hangs around people committing various crimes is likely to be influenced and do the same.

Studies have demonstrated that children who grow up in disadvantaged neighborhoods and in economically poor and deprived areas have an increased risk of involvement in crime including violence. Children with disrupted home lives who have spent periods alone and away from parents and under a local agency are likely to become involved in offending behavior as youngsters.

Finally — and this is too bad — being born male is a predictor of later involvement in delinquent behavior. Statistics demonstrate that young men commit more offenses than young women. Therefore, boys bring more rain than sunshine! Thank God for girls.