A recent suicide of a very young schoolgirl due to desperate financial straits shocked most of the Filipino nation and caused reverberations of guilt rippling accross the collective national conscience.
In the afternoon of November 2, the poor girl hanged herself with a nylon cord in her family’s ramshackle hut after pouring out her bitterness and desire for a better life for her younger brothers and sisters in a diary which she tucked under her pillow shortly before she ended her misery.
It was a tragedy that in its own right parallels the spine-tingling and touching tale of Anne Frank, a 15-year old Jewish who later died in a Nazi concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen. Anne’s famed diary told of her hopes for the betterment of humankind that is caught in the maelstorm and folly of wholesale destruction and bloodshed.
Young Marionnet’s story uncovers the misfortune of a long-suffering Filipino nation being ruled by one of the most corrupt and self-serving power-hungry entities in the planet. Her untimely death should be a wake up call for genuine reform and sincerity of Philippine officials in alleviating the grinding poverty that afflicts a great swath of the Philippine populace. In a country that is endowed with agricultural and untapped energy resources, there is no excuse for this malady to go on.
Suicide victim Mariannet Amper’s diary is a tale underscoring the current plight of millions of Filipino children who are languishing in lives of extreme difficulty and pitiless struggle to survive under the harshest circumstances in a country with a notoriously very wide gap between the pampered rich and the impoverished masses of Filipinos living under sub-human conditions.
But in a country of uncaring, indifferent, and emotionally callous people, children can never hope for succor. Who will listen to cries of a hungry street urchin begging for attention and food. While the spoiled Philippine elite partied and flirted in the glittering clubs and hotels of Manila and other sin cities of "the only Christian nation" in Asia, Mariannet Amper tearfully wrote her farewell letter to an unfair world.
Her wishes were simple. A bag, a bicycle for her brothers and permanent and gainful occupation for her parents.
For weeks, Mariannet Amper, a 12-year old youth in the southern Philippine city of Davao had been unable to attend classes in her distant school simply because she had no money to pay for transportation, much less a miserable peso(Phil. currency) to buy her poor self as well as her six siblings even a morsel of food.
Life indeed was too cruel for Marionnet and her family. When the heavens rained luck and fortune in the unequal society of the Philippines, it was evident that not even a drop of elusive grace was bestowed upon her clan. Born on an impoverished home, Marionnet’s horizons have all but narrowed into a hellish existence where the only way out is through eternal sleep. Her recent extreme choice to end her terrestrial sufferings shocked a whole nation and led not a few, including this writer, to shed guilty and bitter tears.
Considering her tender age, life could have been kinder, a bit gentle to Marionnet. But the odds are just too overwhelming, too desperate for her to overcome. Education is being denied her and her younger brothers by the cruel fact that they live quite far from school. That distant schoolroom offered them a sliver of hope, a tiny glint of light at the end of a tunnel of utter desperation and grinding poverty. Day by hopeless day she cried and despaired in going to class. LIke majority of Philippine families who eke out a bare hand to mouth existence, a car or any means of transportation is but a luxury they can never afford under depressed circumstances. Here in the Philippines, car ownership is the province of the priviliged few while the rest of the masses have to contend with often unsafe public utility vehicles such as passenger jeeps where transport fare continuesly goes up according to the whims of oil firms and the OPEC, of course.
Her father, a carpenter with no permanent job is often sick and bedridden and her mother barely manage to feed them with a meager daily income of less than a dollar(about fifty pesos)for doing menial jobs. It was just too much for Marionnet to bear. Their desperate condition slowly constricted her young mind and pushed her hard into the corner of abyssmal pathos.
Yesterday, Mariannet was given last rites by the Roman Catholic church and buried in a local cemetery while hundreds of weeping classmates and friends bid her goodby for the last time.
For the millions of poor Filipinos, this brave girl who took own life just to remind leaders of this country will forever be a heroine and a saint.
May the Great Almighty be with you always Marionnnet, goodbye little brave one.
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