11.15.07 kulturnatib

Nikel

This story from a colleague with this paper.

Late one night, as she was coming down from the newspaper's building, she saw another colleague outside chatting with the guard.

She also saw that there was a small boy, a street child, who was hiding behind one of those dead and mocking ASEAN street lamps. She thought that the boy was somehow playing with the colleague. Throwing pebbles at him then, perhaps, hiding to confuse the colleague, she theorized.

So, she called this colleague's attention to the fact of the boy who was behind them. The guard also looks towards the direction of the street lamp, a few of which decorate the sidewalk outside the office, something of a continuing dare to the press to expose the utter vapidity of this non-project.

The guard somehow had a different theory as to why the boy was there. He called the boy's attention and approached the boy.

The guard's theory turned out to be the more accurate one. As with most theories that mostly non-theorist guards have, his theory one was born of experience.

The boy instead of playing, was busy working, though disguising it as play. He was busy pulling out the electrical wiring in the lamp. In between pulls, he would prance around. An ingenious way to pull the wool over the eyes of otherwise observant journalists and other passersby.

Such is the education of the streets and the producing of street smart, if criminally inclined, kids.

So, the guard confiscates the already considerable roll of wire the boy had already managed to pull out. He then proceeds with his own brand of values formation for the boy. This constitutes of appealing to the boy's sense of class identification.

The guard says they are not so different, the only difference is that he has a job to help keep poverty at bay. So, the boy, and others like him who abound in that part of town and all over town in fact, should not threaten his job that because of what they are doing makes it look like he isn't doing it. He will turn the roll of wire over to the police. That is within the purview of his job. Guess what the police will do with it?

The boy responds by saying, but sir, that is only nikel. It is worthless.

That is no typographical error. Nikel is different from nickel. Nikel is the short of nikelado, which is chrome-electroplated metal, and which is close to worthless compared to copper that the guard said these boys could easily make P200 from from whatever they could pull out from those lamps as they sell these to junk shops.

The boy was merely and ingeniously making his own feint in claiming copper to be mere nikel. I bet my college educated nephews would not be able to make such a feint should they be caught in the same bind.

In any case, as Raymund Fernandez has been writing about the Golden Shopping Bag Awards that he says should otherwise now be the Doggie Bag Awards, ordinary citizens like this boy are already submitting their entries, not in the way that the awards stipulate. But, in the way that allows them to win instant prizes, even if, every time they do so, they run the risk of running afoul of the law, or conscientious, if forgiving and sympathetic, security guards.

And this, apparently as the security guard further theorized, is happening in a widespread way across the city or cities of Cebu, Mandaue and Lapu-lapu. He says that most of these lamps would no longer function. Not because they were never really meant to function. How will these cities fund their operation when such operation is not part of their budgets?

Besides, why will the mayors care if they function at all? They did for a while, right? It was meant to make us look good before the ASEAN delegates and it did, right? At least, until the stink of corruption in the cities of Mandaue and Lapu-lapu exposed the terrible irony of these 'beautification lamps.' But, by then the delegates were already gone. And they couldn't really care less, anyway.

So between the 'beauty' of a corrupt project, with the responsible mayors still laughing all the way to the bank, their chances of prosecution getting dimmer by the day and the 'beauty' of necessity that boys all over the city resort to in order to eke out a living, a dim proposition to begin with, is the middle-class 'beauty' of the Golden Shopping Bag or now Doggie Bag awards.

Who wants to bet whose 'beauty' will prevail?