IT began in a small village: a table was loaded with vegetables and other food items and with the instruction to get what was needed. Free. An additional marker also said: give if you have something to give. In more ways than one, that was the beginning of a personal initiative that is now known as “community pantry.”
Not everyone knew, I suppose, what a pantry was. But the picture spoke more than any project proposal; the image was well understood. In a household where some people had surplus to throw or enough to go around or give around, why not systematically organize a site of redistribution.
Soon, other pantries were set up following the same guideline: take only what you need and, for those who do not need anything from the cart or table, why not give some. The photos of the original community pantry went viral online. It became very popular. Each time, another pantry was set up, the same excitement was felt. Some felt emotional over the fact that charity in all its rawness still existed in the city.
It was a feel-good event. It was unusual in its uncomplicated position. For many, the project was a bit naïve.
For the community organizers bred in the 70s and 80s, the pantry had all the making of an initiative doomed to failure. It did not ask the basic question: do people need this? Would not this act encourage dependency?
Indeed, a few days after the pantry was up, there were individuals in the neighborhood complaining how the crowd could be a major spreader of the virus. Then followed the complaint that some were getting more than what were needed. Hoarders, they were dubbed.
But the kindness, for lack of a better word for the action, went unabated. One easily recalled that old adage, give till it hurts. Is there truth in this recollection?
Online, groups that saw in the community pantries an indictment of a government, which failed in providing the most basic help to people began articulating their thoughts about the phenomenon. It reached a point that the name of the project itself was twisted from Community Pantry into Communist Party. All for fun. That was enough for individuals and organizations connected to the government to begin questioning the motive for the community pantry.
Motive for kindness?
In a country where charity is suspect, a community coming together to help each other is ironically and increasingly demonized. The media have joined in asking the preposterous question if these tables and carts have something to do with a feared political organization.
Of course, a community pantry is political, but not in the sense of those putting their heads together and declaring, let us politicize kindness and surplus. That is the dumbest scenario a paid critic of the brave critics of this administration can ever conjure. Even if intelligence has not always been an attribute of the many bureaucrats of the present dispensation.
Every conscious act that pushes people to come together and enact events that will show what this government has not done is political. Every vitality poured into a gap in the humanity of communities being eroded by the unmitigated disrespect for the rights and dignity of the said communities is political.
If a humble pantry is now scaring the soul, or what is left of it, of those who continue to believe that our bureaucracies are still doing well, thank you and good day, that reaction is proceeding from the humility of that endeavor. It brings us back to those development theories where, when dependency has been over-articulated and where modernization has failed, there is the framework of the basic needs. Focus on that and the rest shall follow.
What is regenerated by the community pantry is the belief that there is something left working in (many) Filipino people. That we may have been quiet or cowered into silence by the pandemic, but we still have it in ourselves to work.
The red-tagging has been initiated. I do not believe though that it will be the end of this program. What will kill the community pantries is when politicians begin to step in, use the notion of vegetables and canned goods for free, to marshal their sordid capacity to manipulate people.
Leadership should be more than pantries and free products. Leadership is working on structures to create space so that people tapping into their natural sense of neighborliness can be free from harassment and exploitation. When this happens, as it will happen, politicians will build their own carts and tables. Let them call their project Political Pantries.
If there is something potent and powerful in the carts and tables offering sustenance at no cost and with no strings attached, it is the fact that they come from the people. And all those talks about the government as emanating from the people ceases to be fiction and becomes a reality.
Soon, these community pantries may go slow or diminish. That is natural. This project depends on surplus. But the kindness will be there, and this sense—long buried—that we are strong and we can help each other, with or without these politicians whose dreams and lives depend not on foresight or another kind of kindness, but on an enthronement through vile elections.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
1 comment
“If there is something potent and powerful in the carts and tables offering sustenance at no cost and with no strings attached, it is the fact that they come from the people. And all those talks about the government as emanating from the people ceases to be fiction and becomes a reality.”…. Eloquently said. Your thoughts on the community pantry can be a warning to politicians who may in fact be conjuring their respective “political pantry” by now, brazen as they are. At least these rogues will know that their minds have been read and if they had a remaining iota of shame in their veins, they would rather not expose themselves. Great article, as always!