Community Pantries – A Silent Revolution?
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The Maginhawa Community Pantry (Photo by Nino Jesus Orbeta/Inquirer.net)
One day in mid-April, a woman in her twenties, a fine arts graduate, someone whom her friends described as “Miss Congeniality,” decided to put a flimsy bamboo cart by the roadside with food that people can take for their needs for free and also to serve as an outpost where people can leave food donations. Magbigay ayon sa kakayahan, kumuha batay sa pangangailangan. Give what you can, take what you need. The line grew longer. The sight could make your heart swell, or make you cry.
It was called a “Community Pantry,” an idea so simple in its spirit of volunteerism – to help tide over hunger, to ease the burden of those who have lost their jobs, to feed the needy with healthy fruits and vegetables instead of just tinned sardines that government had distributed. Ana Patricia Non, the young woman, who had the heart to serve her neighbors, didn’t think it would snowball into a national issue.
Maginhawa Community Pantry founder Ana Patricia Non opening another community pantry. They currently supply 18 neighboring baranggays (Source: AP Non’s facebook)
A week into it, the police came, inquiring what this was all about, checking out the assembly of lines with their sleek M-4 carbines. Before she knew it, Ms. Non had become the target of red-tagging, branded a communist in the police website. She became news and had to announce that she was stopping for personal safety reasons. Too late. Her endearing gesture had caught fire, and before the country knew it, community pantries were being set up anywhere and everywhere, from obscure neighborhoods to village halls, not only in the cities, but also in rural areas. [Ed note: The Maginhawa Community Pantry has since resumed after a few days of closure.]
The humble phenomenon spread, with some people comparing it to the biblical miracle of multiplying fish and loaves. The National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict wasn’t happy about that. Its spokesman compared Ms. Non to Satan who tempted Eve, meaning that the evil of communism was secretly behind her do-good action. “You know, that’s just one person, Ana Patricia isn’t it? Satan gave an apple to Eve, that’s how it started,” said Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade, Jr.
Fishermen from Binangonan, RIzal donate their excess catch to a community pantry in Quezon CIty (Source: Rappler facebook)
The three-star general raised such a nonsensical idea that betrayed the current administration’s fear of a growing informal movement, of a looming new social order yet undefined. Parlade so failed to win people’s hearts and minds that even soldiers in uniform were seen dropping off sacks of vegetables at the Maginhawa community pantry. Police stations, such as one in rice-growing Nueva Ecija province, set up similar pantries.
From the plain symbol of a bamboo cart, a dual picture emerged amid the current Covid-19 pandemic -- of a rekindled old Filipino tradition called bayanihan, or people helping one another in hard times, and of a mute condemnation of the government’s neglect and mismanagement of a health crisis going out of control.
“This is the question that explains why they’re so afraid of community pantries: If a community can do so much with so little, how can our government do so little with so much?” Filipino anthropologist Gideon Lasco tweeted.
Some senators threatened to withdraw funds from the National Task Force’s 19 billion-peso budget supposedly meant for infrastructure projects in former communist-influenced areas. Enough of the task force’s foolishness, they say, the money should go to people’s welfare instead. Many local mayors in the metropolis’ 16 satellite cities that includes Quezon City, the former capital where Maginhawa Street is located, have given the pantries the signal to go ahead without permits.
A taho vendor donates his products to the hungry at the Project Starfish community pantry in Kawit, Cavite (Source: Explained PH facebook)
Senator Ralph Recto quipped: “The only thing red in the community pantries are the ripe tomatoes. Those who see red in the bayanihan projects should have their hearts examined. Community pantries need more food bags, not red tags, nor red tape.” The bigger question coming out of this is, how could government put down the very essence of kindness? How much further will it respond with just quarantines and lockdowns?
American historian Joseph Scalice, who studied President Rodrigo Duterte’s earlier alliance with the Philippines’ Communist Party before it soured, describes red-tagging’s targets as “anyone in oppositional perspective.” Meaning, anyone who runs afoul of Duterte’s predilection for undue punishment and impunity could be called a communist, and be exposed to the threat of extrajudicial killing, which Ms. Non fears.
Virtually imprisoned in their homes since March last year, Filipinos have endured one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. Late last month, cases surged and hospitals were filled to capacity, forcing the government to put the capital and outlying provinces in the most severe level of a lockdown once again. All this time there was hardly any contact tracing or mass testing. Vaccination, which began in March, has been slow. People have been forced to behave based not so much on the wisdom of health experts but on police or military control.
Japanese ethnographer Wataru Kusaka said Filipinos eventually “created their own social order for everyday necessities because the state does not guarantee even the subsistence of the people.” Some say the community pantries are a crash course in anarchism. Kusaka said it is some kind of a “vernacular order” an exercise in disobedience that shows government where it has failed, but which also provides public support that “nurtures people’s dignity and autonomy.”
I lived in Maginhawa Street during my university years in the 1980s, the neighborhood so deserted that it became, some years later, a noisy race track for drivers of pedicabs. It was intended to be a housing village for professors who taught in the university; my grandfather was one of them. In the past decade, traffic had become a nuisance as food parks sprouted here and there, livening up the street with restaurants, cafes, hole-in-the-wall eateries. There were second-hand bookstores, a cinema showing rare and independent films, some exhibits of social art. It was getting trendy and popular for the young crowd. Kusaka had spent time living among informal settlers in a colony just off Maginhawa Street. It was where he saw how streets became a “public space” in a deeper sense, not merely like a park, but where life thrived for those who needed to make a living.
At the start of the lockdown, I saw it go back to its previous emptiness; everything shut down and was quiet. There were vendors selling fruits and vegetables cheaper and fresher than those found at supermarkets, pushing their wooden carts up and down the street. It probably was not that unusual that Ms. Non had thought of the community pantry idea, but because of the fact that she went to the same University of the Philippines that the defense establishment early this year labeled as a breeding ground for communists, she got red-tagged.
Her spontaneous goodwill that sparked hope in others had been missing in the country for quite some time, a country that has been bitterly polarizing under President Duterte. Allegorically, what Ms. Non did was light a candle in the darkness, on a street whose name in Tagalog means relief, the easing into comfort. She said she owed no explanation for her action: People were starving, they needed food.
Criselda Yabes
Criselda Yabes is a writer and journalist based in Manila. Her most recent books include Crying Mountain (Penguin SEA) on the 1970s rebellion in Mindanao and Broken Islands (Ateneo de Manila University Press) set in the Visayas in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.
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