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By Jason Gutierrez
MANILA: On a humid summer day, street educator
Butch Nerja pounds the garbage-littered streets of Divisoria,
Manila’s chaotic merchant market district, to check on his wards.
He has just received disconcerting news that
some of the children he has tried to help have again gone back to
living in Divisoria’s maze of dark and pungent alleyways where
they are prone to drug addiction and abuse.
“We have to check on the whole hacienda,”
Nerja tells AFP, as he heads onto a sidestreet beside a stagnant
canal choked with garbage which doubles as a bathing pool for
children abandoned or living with their families on the streets.
The light joke belies the emotional burden his
unique job carries—many of his hundreds of wards are too young to
care for themselves, and without any money are forced to beg or
steal just to survive.
Others simply vanish after a while, their fate
unknown and their names and faces only remembered in Nerja’s
personal logbook.
A teenage boy naked from the waist up and
apparently still high from sniffing glue looks up suspiciously but
his eyes light up after recognising Nerja with his trademark curly
unkempt hair, and wearing his usual dark shirt and bright orange
trousers.
“Tatay [Father] Butch is here,” the boy
shouts, and within minutes a horde of soot-covered smelly teens
emerge from under the bridge, where they sleep on ledges just inches
above the muck.
The boy gives his name only as Francis, and
Nerja calls him the “guardian of the bridge” who leads the gang
in collecting recyclable waste for money.
Nerja takes him by the elbow and leads him into
a corner, where he gently admonishes him to stay off drugs and try
to return to a shelter for homeless children.
“I will come back for you later to bring
food,” Nerja says, and proceeds to check on another group of teens
sleeping on the footpath beside a rundown building.
Nerja’s wards are among the more than 222,000
children estimated by the social welfare department to be living on
the streets in some 65 cities and towns across the Philippines.
Of that total, some 70,000 are believed to be in
Manila, either alone or living with their families as nomads in push
carts, the social welfare department said.
Nerja says the number may be even higher, with
more and more rural families streaming into Manila hoping for a
better life but only to end up homeless. In many cases, the parents
drift apart and the children are left on their own.
‘Don’t pamper me’
“These children are very vulnerable to the
environment they live in,” Nerja says.
“Some are on drugs, and I try to establish
connections with them on a personal level and convince them to get
off the streets and into half-way homes.”
A self-styled “scholar of the university of
hard knocks,” the witty and cheerful Nerja, 45, was a street child
himself and has profound experience of the seedy underside of
Manila, a mega city of more than 12 million people.
He never knew his parents and was in the care of
relatives when he ran away as a child in the 1970s.
Eventually he found himself as leader of a small
gang of boys who sold sex to tourists. They all eventually became
addicted to drugs, and became fixtures in hotels around Manila’s
red light district.
“I did not like to be pampered by my
relatives. They always wanted things structured, with rules. I
wanted freedom, so when I was maybe 10 or 12 years old, I ran
away,” Nerja says.
“I enjoyed the streets, travelled a lot. But I
also met paedophiles and I later became a pimp. Those who were new
to the streets went under my protection,” he says.
When money dried up, Nerja took his gang to the
parks, where they hustled for scraps.
Later, he met social workers who convinced him
to join a shelter for boys, and a Catholic priest later took him in
as a personal assistant and friend.
“It was a tough and difficult life. I came to
a point where I was searching for something from the world, a
meaning,” he says. “At first I did not want to go to a shelter,
I was hard-core, but I later liked the direction I took.”
He took special classes that enabled him to
enroll in college, where he majored in psychology. He dropped out,
however, and married while still young, before returning to the
streets as a “street educator” for Child Hope Asia.
“I try to guide these children. There are many
heart-breaking stories, but there are also success stories,” he
says, adding that one of the children he has helped is about to
graduate from an exclusive university.
“I don’t want any rewards. I just listen to
their stories and try to guide them. During my time, I had to fend
for myself. No one was there to guide me,” he says.
“I was a former street child, I know how it is
to live on the streets. I was in conflict with the law often, I was
a drug runner, user. But now here I am, just returning the favour to
help these kids,” he said.
‘If a child changes, that is my reward’
Now a father to a young daughter and two teenage
boys, Nerja lives in a modest home near Manila’s Chinatown
district, where he is well respected even the neighborhood toughs
and petty criminals, to whom he offers advise, and helps out with
funeral and education expenses by raising donations.
The toughest part of the job, he says, is trying
to convince the children to abandon the streets, which many consider
a huge playground where they are free to break all rules, Nerja
says.
“In many cases they would stay for a few days
at a sheltering facility, but run away again, lured by their friends
and the drugs,” he says. “Some would later approach me and ask
to be returned, and that is the time you know they are prepared to
move on.”
Others who are in their early teens are likely
remain on the streets for a long time, he said.
“But what is important is they know you are
there for them. They treasure that,” Nerja says, as he dispenses
sweets to the children tugging at his legs.
“I can live and die with the thought I have
helped,” he says.
A plump looking woman shyly smiles at Nerja and
grasps his hands to press on her forehead, a sign of respect in this
Roman Catholic country. The woman used to be under Nerja’ care,
but now has a family of her own.
On another city block, Nerja finds a 10-year-old
wearing an oversized t-shirt, his eyes empty and cheeks hollowed out
from days of hunger and scrounging the mound of rotting garbage
nearby.
“Tatay Butch, please take me to a shelter now.
I no longer take drugs, and I promise to behave,” the boy pleads.
Nerja hugs him.
Nerja promises to come back for the boy, who
says he does not remember his parents’ names or where he is from.
“That is my payback. When they finally say
they are ready to leave the streets. It’s a long process, but we
get there slowly,” Nerja says.
“If a child changes his ways, that’s very
rewarding for me.”
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