The policy of non-interference

published 17 August 2007, MST

Saturday night, the 28th of July, was our fourth in our new apartment. I was particularly wiped out that evening, having supervised the physical transfer of the bigger pieces of furniture and spent hours of storytelling with my big kids (that’s how I usually refer to Beatrice and Joshua, who are 13 and 11, respectively), aunt and sisters, and even my close friend from high school, Bates, who had come over to help out. We decided to go to nearby SM, for dinner at our favorite stand-up kiosk but more importantly to get a shoe rack to house my prized possessions, which were one of the first things I smuggled into the new house —even before the traditional rice and salt duo. In the end though, it rained, and since we outnumbered the umbrellas we brought, we tried—but failed—to run for cover sufficiently so that after a few hours, we all found ourselves sniffing with a trace of a headache.

So I was grateful to lie down to sleep. I had been looking forward to a quiet Sunday morning as well as start of another workweek. Imagine thus my surprise when I was jolted awake by the sound of children—toddlers, actually—talking in very loud voices. They were laughing, giggling even. I groped in the dark for my bag and fished my cell phone out of it to check the time: It was 12:30 a.m. What kind of children would be awake at this hour?

I tried to sleep but couldn’t. The talking grew louder. I got up and looked out the window. The streetlights made it possible for me to make out what looked like two pairs of little legs outside the gate of our compound. Apparently, the voices belonged to the owners of those legs.

I rubbed my hands over my eyes and shook my head. It couldn’t be possible. I hauled myself back to bed and concluded that I was just worried about my small kids (that’s how I refer to my second pair of kids, Sophia and Elmo, who are 7 and 5). I reminded myself that at that moment they were safe and sound asleep in their comfortable bedrooms. With that thought, I dozed off.

But not for long. The sound of the buzzer startled me. Now there were separate buttons for units A, B, C and D. I wondered whether the people—and by then there were a lot, perhaps 10 or 12 milled outside the gate—really intended to press the button for A, where we were.

The buzzer sounded again, and I had no choice but to go down and check what the matter was. I crossed my fingers and muttered that I could forgive any kind of mix-up, as long as it remained that precisely, a mix-up, and not some imminent danger concerning anybody I knew.

There was a man who introduced himself as “Tanod.” He was shouting to me from outside…“taga rito ho ba itong mga bata na ito? [Are these children really from here?] Kanina pa ho nasa kalye, mabuti hindi nasagasaan at walang dumadampot. [They’ve been out here a long time, it’s a good thing they didn’t get run over or taken by anybody].”

I opened the gate after I heard the children’s voices again. “We live there…” the older one, a girl of about three, said. When we asked her where her mom was, she said “sakay [boarded] airplane…” Okay, I thought, we had a serious problem.

They were pointing to the unit next to ours. “That’s our house,” she said… and true enough, the screen door was wide open, the TV was turned on and the electric fan was whirring. “Kilala nyo ho ba ang mga nakatira dyan? [Do you know the people living there?]” Mang Tanod asked me. I told him we were new in the compound and had not had the chance to get to know our neighbors yet.

“Pasok ka,” the girl was now telling me. She had her baby brother, a boy of about one-and-a-half, by the hand. But I didn’t want to go in. Actually, I was afraid lest I find anything there that was out of the ordinary… such as a lifeless body, drenched in a pool of blood?

Mang Tanod himself did not want to go in, lest he be accused of trespassing. Exasperated, my sister let herself into the unit. She pointed to pictures of the kids with their parents in a series of frames. The father was Caucasian. The mother was Pinay all right, and she was very pretty. No wonder the kids looked like dolls. “Yan mommy namen,” said the girl again. Where could the parents be?

At that instant, a tricycle stopped in front of the gate and a man and a woman, each holding a plastic cup of Slurpee (frozen cola), alighted. They went to the gate and appeared perplexed at the crowd that had gathered at the door. “Tita…” the girl exclaimed. “Tita ko....”

The woman, who had frizzy hair and who in no way looked like the kids’ mother, took the children by the hand and dragged them into the house. We heard her telling them, “Kayo talaga, bakit kayo lumabas? [Why did you go out?]”

It was the man who led Tanod out of the gate with a brisk “pasensya na sa abala… [sorry for the bother].” As an afterthought, he also thanked me.

Most questions remained unanswered until the following morning, when I chatted up the helper from Unit D. I learned that the woman was the children’s mother’s cousin, whom she had tasked to live with them while she was with her husband, the children’s father, in Bali, where the Caucasian man was a chef. And who was the man who came with the woman last night, I asked.

“Oh, that’s the boyfriend of the woman. He sleeps there every Saturday. They must have gone off to 7-11 again and left the kids alone. They’ve done that once before…”

My jaw nearly dropped. What kind of person would leave two little kids at midnight, alone in the house just so she could satisfy a craving for some frozen drink? Why did not one of them at least stay behind? Should we talk to the woman and remind her that kids were not pets you could leave in the middle of the night? What if the kids were indeed run over by a car that evening? Should we not have called an institution to report a grossly neglectful practice? Did the children’s mother know her cousin was not only irresponsible but crazy? Should we even tell her?

The helper told me, “That’s true. Pero mahirap makialam, buhay nila yan [It’s difficult to meddle. It’s their life]…”

And I realized I could not argue any further. In most occasions, outsiders can only look in and, at best, comment or make suggestions. That’s the same principle that goes by when neighbors know some bozo is beating up his wife but don’t dare barge into the house, saying it is a domestic situation. That’s perhaps we just talk but hardly do anything about the ills we see everyday.

But should it be a principle to live by? Must we leave the fate of innocents to chance, just because they had the misfortune to be born under the jurisdiction of these less discerning people? Non-interference may be the norm, but there are some extremes when it is incumbent upon others to get involved. Not doing anything would be wrong.

The following Saturday, I deliberately stayed up late to find out whether the boyfriend would come over and whether there would be any repeat of the Slurpee incident.

There was nothing out of the ordinary. I fell into a peaceful sleep. The next day, the helper told me, “Umalis na sila ah, alam nyo ba? [They left already, did you know?]”

No, I didn’t know. One part of me was relieved I won’t ever have to challenge the unspoken policy of non-interference among neighbors. I’m not typically meddlesome, you know, and I revere privacy and individual space. But I know there are some things that should not be tolerated. And that in some drastic instances, one must do away with long-time norms.

The other part was scared at the thought that somewhere else, in some other compound, the same ills will happen, and people will just sit back, watch and refrain from interfering—as is customary.