It Does Not Matter

THE DESPICABLE FATE that befell a 12-year-old girl in Davao City caused a stir among the Filipino people.

It has been first reported that Mariannet Amper took her ownlife on Nov. 2 because of her family’s destitute situation. She was young, yet she felt and realized her family’s poverty.A feeling of hopelessness clutched her into the appalling act of kicking the bucket. She felt and realized that to free herself from the chain that poverty imposed upon her, she needed to end her life.

However, suspicions arose because her father only reported the incident to the police four days after her body was discovered. Recently, a report has been released to the public by the National Bureau of Investigation stating that after examining the exhumed body of the girl, lacerations were found on her genitals, suggesting that she was sexually molested. She might have taken her own life because of the unbearable shame and feeling of being raped. Or, it might be that she was murdered after being stripped off of her dignity.

This new finding gave the girl’s story a sharp turn from an innocent suicide to a big mystery covered with an ethereal shroud—with lots of threads given that added ambiguity to her case. One of those threads could lead the way to the truth. Anyway, there can only be one truth.

Her case—be it factual or fraudulent or be it that she committed suicide out of poverty or out of indignity—greatly reflects the reality in which she, being a child, understands the cruelties that life gives and that a few people care until a mishap ensues. It does not matter whether she committed suicide or she was murdered. The point is that she lived a pauper and died a pauper—she died in desperation.

We cannot resurrect her. However, we can save more innocent souls if we act accordingly to make straight what is bent. Could we ever be saved from the harshness of destitution and the brutalities of men and women?

Let her demise not be put to waste. Let her death wake us up from our languid state of reality and slumber of equality. God gave us two eyes for a reason. Let us use them to see what others cannot and to act like Jesus Christ for others—a living miracle. If we do not act, then who do? If not now, then when?