Filipino girl, 11, hangs herself in despair because family were poor By RICHARD SHEARS - More by this author » Last updated at 12:57pm on 8th November 2007 Comments (16)
Filled with despair at her poverty-stricken life in a shack, an 11- year-old girl wrote in a diary how she wished for new shoes and jobs for her parents then slipped a rope around her neck and hanged herself. Little Mariannet Amper left the diary and a letter under her pillow, discovered when her shocked parents found her dangling on a thin nylon rope from a beam in their plywood shack near Davao City, 600 miles south of the Philippines capital of Manila. The sad case of the schoolgirl who could no longer face the shame and deprivation of life in the slums has highlighted the millions who live in squalor on less than 50p a day in the northern Pacific nation. In the letter, Mariannet said she wished only for a bicycle, bag, new shoes and jobs for her parents so she could finish primary school. And in her diary the girl, whose family live in a flimsy hut that has no running water or electricity, told how she missed school and did not even have the money to go to church. Her grief-stricken father, Isabelo Amper, 49, a jobless construction worker, said Mariannet had asked him for 100 pesos (£1) which she needed for school projects. "I told her I did not have the money, but I would ask my wife if she could get it for her," he said. "The next morning I was able to get a small cash advance but by the time I got home Mariannet was dead." As he and his stunned wife, Magdalena, went through their daughter's pathetic belongings they came across the letter and the diary. In an entry for October 5, she wrote, in a reference to school: "It feels as if we've been absent for a month. They're not counting my absences any more. I just realised that Christmas is just around the corner." Isabelo recalled that in that week Mariannet skipped school as they did not have money for her food and transport. "We didn't have any money and I didn't want Mariannet and her younger brother, Reynald, to walk to school," he said. On October 14, Marianet wrote: "We were not able to hear mass because we did not have fare money and my dad was sick with fever. So, my mom and I just washed clothes." In the letter she left, Mariannet wrote a "wish list". "I wish for new shoes, a bag and jobs for my mother and father. My dad does not have a job and my mom just gets laundry jobs. "I would like to finish my schooling and I would like very much to buy a new bike." Fighting back tears, Isabelo said: "We never knew that our daughter had dreams for us." His wife, he said, worked only part-time, earning just 25p a day packing noodles, supported by a further 50p earned doing laundry jobs. "As for me, I can't get work," said Isabelo. "I'm already old. No- one would want to hire me." The couple, who live in a hillside shanty town, are now left with only their young son Reynald. Five other children are in their teens and twenties and have started families of their own again in slum areas. A neighbour said of them: "The Amper family are always being discriminated against. They're poor, the kids are dirty and the other kids don't want to play with them. Because they're very poor, they've been rejected by their neighbours." The tragic case came to light on the day President Gloria Arroyo told a business forum that her economic changes were bearing fruit. "The common people are now feeling the benefits of a growing economy," she said. But the Social Weather Stations institute, which monitors the poor, said that some nine million Filipino families rated themselves poor and many of those experienced "severe hunger" in recent months. And for a shamed little girl who hanged herself with a nylon rope in a shack, government assurances meant nothing. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html? in_article_id=492472&in_page_id=1811 Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
