Human Touch

Following is an excerpt of an opinion piece written by Michelle P. So, Executive Editor of SunStar Cebu, a local daily newspaper. Her introduction is not included because of length, but the piece is about her and her former classmates' visit to the Missionaries of Charity malnutrition center in Cebu City:

"We were not prepared for what we saw when we entered the rooms. Babies crying like they were playing Metallica rock, toddlers running around or climbing out of the cribs, and one skin-and-bones kid lying in one corner of the room. Many of us had not seen a severely malnourished child until yesterday.

The sight broke our hearts. The skin-and-bones kid looked up at our classmate Apollo, thinking that when he grows up, he’d like to be just like him-- never hungry for long and always well-fed.

The center has 57 malnourished kids in its care. Seven of the kids are girls in their early teens and afflicted with tuberculosis. The 50 others are children below seven years old but we could not tell their biological age from their small frames. One eight-month old baby looked like he had just been delivered.

The children have been put in the center to be nursed back to health. Almost all of them come from a large family who live in a depressed area. They were brought to the center either by their mothers or by public hospital staff.

Once the babies are put in the care of the Missionaries of Charity, the mothers can visit them only every Tuesday. When the mothers do not return after the babies have been nursed back to health, the MC sisters, when they can’t find the mothers, bring the kids to the social welfare department.

We were not allowed to pick the babies up because a handwritten sign on the wall said so and the fading ink no longer allowed an explanation of why we couldn’t. Besides, the caretakers had more urgent baby matters to attend to than sit and compose an essay of why visitors couldn’t pick up the babies.

But a female helper, who was bathing one baby after another (50 babies, remember?), said the sign was for the benefit of student visitors who know very little about handling babies and might drop them.

We knew the undertones of the sign. The babies might get used to being picked up when they cry and there are not enough hands to pick up each crying baby when the visitors are gone. The babies are sick and are easily susceptible to germs.

An argument for the passage of the Reproductive Health Care bill is found at the Missionaries of Charity center in Pasil. Those who oppose the bill need only to visit it to know why."

I finished that article with a mix of emotions. I was very sad for those children and the millions of others in this country that suffer in various ways. Granted the extreme nature of deprivation described in this account does not affect the millions, but certainly this level of suffering reaches the tens of thousands.

I was happy that we are able to help many children avoid this kind of life where every basic necessity for health and happiness is lacking, including the simple need of a caring human's touch. Many of our kids have already experienced the above-described deprivation to some extent, but at CSC we get to share with them a Savior's love and the other things in life they need to be happy and healthy.