A Caucus-Race
jgregorio@theguidon.com
I grew up close to my grandmother and everyday I see the unyielding goodness of old age. You are deeply intelligent, you know how life works, and you have proven true or false the world’s oldest clichés. I mean that with no tinge of romanticism. How more succinct can you describe the vantage of more years?
That became difficult to answer when I saw several homeless senior citizens during one commute going home—an observation that would be valid for several days. And then I lost count.
Problematic in a supposedly fast-paced globalized world where the future is our present is that those who can’t keep up are left behind. In this regard, never have older people been more marginalized.
I did a context check and visited Golden Acres Home for the Aged (GA) in Quezon City. GA is home, at least for now, to 217 senior citizens from diverse backgrounds: a former concert pianist, a mother of 10, a former congressman.
Perfectly able people who call here to surrender an older relative and those of us who might think similarly are clearly extremely uneducated about the needs and the nature of old age. Neglect and abuse of older people happen because we are ignorant about them. When they suffer from memory loss or debilitating strength, we are arrogant to think they are losing something, when, in fact, it is us who are lacking in concrete knowledge about them.
Where best to get this knowledge from but school? Inasmuch as we need to know about our heritage in History, we should also be taught to know more about and understand older people. This is not about understanding “others” because, unless we die soon, we will grow old, too.
The challenge to build newer, better homes for the aged doesn’t entail our sending our grandparents away. It is simply our best bet at facing the reality that some older people are homeless. I am not urging the Ateneo’s future national leaders or its perpetual philanthropists to have mere compassion for the elderly. We should think in more concrete terms.
For example, children with cancer, those differently-abled, and those lacking education aren’t the only urban poor. Our sector based and faith formation orgs should allocate resources to look into the life of the elderly poor.
The Office for Social Concern and Involvement should have a coordinating branch that links us to social welfare agencies, if we want to donate or volunteer. Besides, daily needs of the elderly that are lacking in GA are simple: bath and laundry soaps, hypertension medicine, and rice, among others. It is very easy to help and the administration can do something to make our involvement more efficient and effective.
This shouldn’t stop in the Ateneo alone. This month, the Quezon City government opened 300 volunteer jobs (exercise programs implementers, public school tutors) for its senior citizens with an incentive pay of P3000 for 24 hours work for a month. Maybe other cities, too, can take this lead.
It makes sense to think about this now because by next year, the senior citizen population of the Philippines is predicted rise to seven million from the four million in year 2000. This generation, who spent the best years of their lives thinking about how life could be great for us, will have something to look forward to if we look forward with them.
