By Tom Palmeri (1982)
Just twenty-two years ago, I came to the Philippines as a young Jesuit missionary whose first assignment was to spend three years studying philosophy on the island of Cebu . We studied hard, but I discovered life was not going to be all books and classrooms. We also got to go on weekly picnics to the beach. And of all things in the Philippines , the most beautiful are its endless miles of shoreline. I also discovered the faces of hungry children, for whenever we would take out our lunches to eat, we would be surrounded by a ring of children, mostly dressed in gray rags, seldom asking for anything, but always staring, with eyes that grew larger with every bite we ate.
As I look back on my life now, I can recognize that the three years I spent studying with the Jesuit community in Cebu were the most frugal years I have ever experienced in terms of food and living accommodations. The problem was not that we had too much. The problem was that those faces belonged to children who never had enough. At the end of six years in the Philippines , I returned to the United States and I left the Jesuits. But the faces I had seen did not leave me; they have been with me ever since. And so seven years ago I came back to see if they would still be here. This time I came armed with an American nurse for a wife and fresh from a year and a half’s experience in Saigon where we had established and operated a one hundred crib live-in nutrition center for severely malnourished children. Initially, I was coming to teach Philosophy at Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro City, but we already had other things in mind as well, and it did not take long for them to materialize.
We had assumed that conditions in the Philippines would be much better than they were in Vietnam simply because of what the war had done to that country. What we found was something very different. Apparently, we had underestimated the impact of the American aid that had poured into Vietnam . In any case, what we discovered was that there was far less infant abandonment here but that malnutrition was even more severe. When we arrived in Cagayan, we brought with us our oldest boy, who was barely three and a half, and two Vietnamese babies, one of whom was a little girl with no arms, that we had adopted while in Saigon . Now one afternoon, as some of the more scruffy kids from the neighborhood were in the house playing with ours, Diane and I looked at the kids and then at each other. I told her to get out a big jar of peanut butter and start making sandwiches. It was a very humble beginning, and in the long run it proved to be a very unsatisfactory approach, but at least we had started.
And then we discovered something that I had never realized before at all. The children on the beach who gather round and stare with their hungry eyes are not the worst cases. They’re still able to be up and about. The ones that are really sick are kept at home and you never see them unless you search them out. And that was just what Diane, who had worked before in Public Health, began to do. And what she found!
Joseph was a seven year old boy who was the same size as his two year old sister. He could neither walk nor talk, had a bowel movement once a month, and was mentally retarded. The cause was simple enough, a thyroid deficiency, and had it been diagnosed and treated within the first month of life, he could have been normal. We immediately began providing him with thyroid tablets daily.
Amelisa was eight years old and weighed only thirty pounds when she knocked over a kerosene lamp and set her dress on fire. We found her two months later with a badly infected burn down her side and under her arm, without even a dressing on it. We hospitalized her at first and then began changing the dressing each day.
Ten year old Heidi weighed only thirty-five pounds and had miliary tuberculosis, which means that it had spread into the glands of her chest. We put her on three drugs, including daily injections of Streptomycin. But when Diane described her case to the Head of Pediatrics at one of the local hospitals, the doctor simply said, “We’re never able to save one like that.”
Family to Family – Writings
As the magnitude of what we had stumbled into dawned upon us, we realized that we would have to organize ourselves more effectively. The small organization that we had worked for in Saigon had ceased to exist after the Communists had taken over. But as we wrote and told some of the people who had supported us before of what we had found, contributions began to come in. Finally, we formed a new organization of our own under the name Family to Family. Instead of random handouts, we established a feeding program that provided two hot nutritious meals each day to malnourished children in our neighborhood. The backbone of each meal was corn-soy-milk, a high protein food that the American government gives out freely in underdeveloped countries. To that we added vegetables and fruit in order to insure the needed vitamins. We treated all of the children for parasites and provided as much medical assistance as we could afford. And for the mothers, there were lectures on nutrition and hygiene.
When we had first arrived, we had told the government social workers that we were interested in adopting two Filipino babies and would be willing to provide foster care to any they had until it could be determined where they would go. It wasn’t long until we had the two we were going to keep. The first was a boy who weighed only nine pounds after four and a half months in a hospital nursery. The second was a one month old girl, with a bilateral hare lip and cleft palate, who weighed less than she had at birth. When we saw the condition the children were in and came to realize how many others there were who needed help, we told the social workers that we would take in additional children for temporary foster care until they could make better arrangements for them. Our goal was to treat the foster children just as if they were members of our own family, and so we finally came to set a limit of five to the number we would care for at any one time. Together with our own six (Diane gave birth to a baby girl just three years ago), that makes for eleven children in the house, and any more than that would turn our own home into an institution and destroy the very essence of the kind of care that we want to provide.
And what do we have to show for seven years of effort? At present, there are over a hundred children in the feeding program. Twenty-five children have come to us for foster care that has lasted anywhere from one week to four years. Ten of these children were able to be returned to their families, two were adopted by us, and eleven have been adopted by other families, either here or abroad. Last year we began a day care program for twenty children. They were all malnourished and came from families where there was a desperate need for the parent who was watching them to seek employment. The little boy who needed thryroid is still getting it from us. His height has doubled, he walks and talks, is toilet trained, and can do simple chores around the house. Unfortunately, he will always be retarded, but he is far less of a burden now to the family that loves him so dearly. Amelisa’s burn completely healed after three months of daily dressing changes, and three years later we arranged for surgery to release the contractures that were making it impossible for her to move her arm away from her side. And Heidi, the girl about whom the doctor said, “We’re never able to save one like that,” was pronounced completely cured two years after we started her on TB medication. And you can imagine her mother’s joy, for Heidi is one of seventeen children of whom only three have survived.
I wish I could say that we have solved some fundamental problem, but I honestly can not. At times we see a minor breakthrough in some limited area. For instance, local Filipino families seem to be becoming more disposed to adopt abandoned babies, and if our presence has in any way helped to promote that, we are very pleased. But the larger problem of malnutrition and neglect, due to both ignorance and poverty, seems to grow worse every day. Part of this is due to the migration into our area of people who expect to find jobs here and don’t, but much of it is also due simply to the growth of the population in general and to a deteriorating economic situation. Whatever the reason, it seems as if we are once again engaged in a struggle in which there is little hope of ever seeing any “light at the end of the tunnel”.
Seven years ago I returned to the Philippines , wondering if the hungry faces that had haunted me for so long from such a distance would still be there. I found they were, more of them than I had ever dreamed. But somehow, with the loss of distance, they have also lost their power to disturb. They are no longer there, they are here, and so am I.