Cairo to Calatrava

Last Saturday, the tabloid Bulgar carried this most sordid headline: “4 Anak Nilunod ni Mommy” (4 Children Drowned by Mommy).

I’ll give a brief summary of what happened, omitting the names of the people involved. A 35-year-old woman told her husband she was taking her four children, aged 12, 6, 5 and 6 months, to the river. Two hours later, she returned alone and told her husband she had drowned all the children. The husband rushed to the river but was too late to save the children.

The woman said she had drowned the children because of poverty. Reading about the incident, I realized poverty is so much more graphic when it’s described in Tagalog: “wala na siyang maipakain”—she could not feed them anymore.

I’m going to return to this incident toward the end of my column, but I want to be very clear here that I’m not zeroing in on Calatrava. It could have been any other town in the Philippines, or some other country. My column title, “Cairo to Calatrava,” gives a broader context in which such tragedies happen....

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Source: Michael Tan, Pinoy Kasi column, Philippine Daily Inquirer, September 9, 2009