Child's Play

A few months ago, I went with my mother, my son and yaya to SM City Cebu to attend the opening of an art exhibit. My mom took some time entering through the doors and when we went back to the entrance to see what was holding her up, we saw, through the glass doors, that she was still outside the entrance talking to a young boy—perhaps about 8 or 9 years old—thin, dark, wearing tattered clothes and wearing only one slipper on his foot. His appearance was not the most unusual thing about him; it was the fact that he was crying as if his heart were breaking and his chest and shoulders were heaving every so often, his thin frame wracked with sobs as he recounted to my mom whatever it was that upset him greatly.

As I drew nearer to see what was happening, I saw my mom reach into her bag, take out a bill and give it to the boy. The boy looked at the money in confusion, as if he didn’t know what to do with it. Then the two mall security guards, who had also been listening to the boy, urged him to take the money and go. They opened the door for him to enter the mall and one of the guards even accompanied the boy inside.

When my mom joined us, she told us the young boy’s story. The young boy, who apparently lived in the squatter area around SM City, went inside the mall to that area in the lower ground floor near where the arcade games were located. He said that he was just playing with friends when a man suddenly grabbed him by the arm and forcibly dragged him all the way past the exit and pushed him outside. He was crying with indignation by the entrance when my mom espied him.

She said that the boy kept on saying “I didn’t do anything, we were just playing. (Wala man koy gibuhat, nag duwa raman mi).” A bystander, who had witnessed the entire incident, told my mom that the boy was treated like an animal (“gi baboy siya”). When my mom asked the boy if he knew who his assailant was, the boy said he didn’t even know the person. What broke the boy’s heart was, apparently, the fact that he lost one of his slippers when he was being dragged from where he was playing to the exit, a distance of a few hundred yards. No one really knew the man’s reasons for dragging the boy bodily out of the mall but we surmised that because the boy was dressed in tattered clothes, he was perceived to be a thief or troublemaker.

The boy told my mother that he lived nearby and said, with a hint of pride, that his family owned a store (which my mom understood to be a sari-sari store). The boy, although he was in tattered clothes, was most probably not a mendicant either because when my mother gave him money, he looked at the money she was proffering bewildered, as if he didn’t understand why she was doing this. It was only upon the security guard’s urging that he took the money. And the reason why Mom gave him money was that she wanted him to buy himself a new pair of slippers to replace the one he lost and a new t-shirt so that he would not be treated badly again.

That night, a young boy learned in a most painful way that some people do make assumptions about a person by the way they look. We can only hope that life will be kinder to him after that.