‘Ang babae sa imburnal’
The title roughly translates in English as “The woman in the manhole,” which sounds awkward. Imburnal means sewers, gutters, underground tunnels. “Woman from the gutters” sounds too harsh and has a negative undertone.
The image of a woman—matted hair and all—captured on camera emerging from a manhole on a busy Makati street corner last week went viral on social media; it also fertilized the imagination of many. It was obvious she came from the imburnal, the underground sewerage system, where the city’s scum and grime accumulate, where vermin lurk and multiply, and who knows what else.
Who is she? Why did she? How did she? Where is she now?
When I first saw the image on social media, I gasped, “What. On. Earth…” followed by amusement because it looked like it was straight out of a zombie movie (think “Train to Busan”) except that this was for real. Its profound impact on me came after I had a good laugh at its being vintage “only in the Philippines.”
The image, I mused, could inspire many good short stories and movie plots—tragedy, comedy, horror—but these could take a while to percolate. The immediate action of the authorities was to track her down. And give her the name “Rose.” No sooner had they found her than we learned that a P80,000 bounty was given her. Ours is an ayuda republic after all. And no sooner had she received the amount from the Department of Social Welfare and Development than a torrent of reactions cascaded, like the rush of muck when sewers are unclogged.
Expectedly, someone did a follow-up on Facebook with a short video of a man emerging from an imburnal and a person in authority awarding him 80 grand, no questions asked. While the video was meant to elicit LOLs, it asked: What then would you prefer: to toil away somewhere or to go down the imburnal in the hope of receiving P80,000 as ayuda when you emerge?
Department of Social Welfare and Development Secretary Rex Gatchalian justified the windfall despite online protests from the hardworking but cash-strapped.
In all seriousness, it is situations of extreme poverty bordering on desperation (raising a family under the bridge, in a garbage dump, and pushcarts or living inside an underground tunnel) that test one’s faith (mine, particularly) in a God who is supposed to be all-loving and all-giving. Methinks citing and crediting the poorest of the poor as instruments for the personal sanctification of the privileged few is wounding the poor twice. They should not be seen as the affluent’s stepping stones to heaven. Justice, not pity, is what the poor deserve.
The imburnal as refuge, sanctuary and home for the very poor speaks loudly not only about their poverty but also about our society’s poverty in the share and care department. And also about our government’s poverty alleviation programs. How to reach out to those who are left behind? Ang babae sa imburnal—whatever her real name is—surely has stories to tell. What is her life story? How did she end up in the lowest laylayan (margins, fringes)?
The bowels of Metro Manila are not anything like the romanticized underground in “The Phantom of the Opera” or New York City’s hidden tunnels that served as the secret dwelling of the man-beast in the 1990s TV series “Beauty and the Beast.”
Hereabouts, we tend to romanticize, if not humorize, the lifestyle and the coping mechanisms of the poor. Remember the long-running sitcom “Home Along Da Riles”? Sure, it was entertaining, what with Dolphy in the lead, but it was far from the real life beside the railroad tracks. I did a two-part series on families living right beside the tracks, their shacks just a few inches away from the speeding trains. It was scary. I could feel and see the trains wheeze by beside me. And there were the foot-propelled portable trolleys mounted on the rails that were used for crossing the polluted river when the trains were not in sight. I didn’t dare try them.
Before the manholes and other entrances to the Makati tunnels were sealed to prevent inhabitants from using them as their hovel, did the social workers do an inventory of personal objects found in the tunnels? What were they? These can tell a lot about the hidden lives in the imburnal and the many purposes they serve—for drugs, fornication, as homes and sanctuary for the hunted, etc. The big-time plunderers, murderers and other scoundrels with warrants of arrest about to be served them can consider transforming the gutters as their temporary sanctuary.
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