Just before Independence Day the other week, a group of newly enrolled children from a shelter excitedly set out on the first day to walk to school at Sacatihan, Gala, Pamatawan, Subic town, Zambales.

The road up the hill would give them an easy walk to freedom through education - the great liberator. But then, as they crested the hill, to their dismay the asphalt abruptly ended. The rains had turned the rest of the way into a muddy quagmire that had the children squelching their way through ankle-deep sticky mud, symbolic of the political corruption, waste and abuse that mires almost one third of the Filipinos in pitiless grinding poverty from which there is no freedom.

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