“We were dirt poor. I had to work since the age of five, to help my mother feed my three siblings and me. Many days, I was lucky to have one full meal. On days when we had no food, I would drink lots of water just to fill my stomach. But my mind and spirit were never hungry.”
The statement came from the mouth of Senator Emmanuel “Manny” D. Pacquiao, one of the world’s famous boxers. He said those words before the Oxford Union in Great Britain last November 5.
Pacquiao has joined a group of famous people who had been invited to speak at the Oxford Union. To name a few of them: American presidents Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter; British statesman Sir Winston Churchill; Nobel peace prize laureates the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa; and British singer Elton John.
“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other,” says English poet and novelist John Berger. “It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied, but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”
The National Statistical Coordination Board describes poor as “those whose incomes fall below the threshold determined by the government, or those who cannot afford to provide in a sustained manner for their minimum basic needs for food, health, education, housing and other social amenities in life.”
But poverty does not happen only in the Philippines but also in other parts of the world. Currently, more than 8 million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive. The World Bank estimates that 1.3 billion people live in extreme poverty and Asia leads in numbers.
Extreme poverty, defined by World Bank as getting by on an income of less than US$1 a day, means that households cannot meet basic needs for survival. They are chronically hungry, unable to get health care, lack safe drinking water and sanitation, cannot afford education for their children and perhaps lack rudimentary shelter and basic articles of clothing, like shoes.
“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread,” observed Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian independence movement against British rule.
Most parents say that education is one of the ways to beat poverty. But not always, as Pacquiao has proven it. “It is a matter of record that I only had traditional formal schooling until Secondary School,” he said in his speech. “It was only recently that I reached University level through the alternative education program.”
Pacquiao learned about life the hard way. “I read anything I could get hands on. I even read the newspaper that my lunch or dinner came wrapped in. I read signs everywhere, even on moving vehicles. I learned measurements and weights by constantly reading the rates and tariffs at the warehouses where I worked as a stevedore, a docker in your parlance.
“At night, when I could not sleep because of the cold, I would read the labels on the carton boxes that served as my bed on the street pavement. The movements of the clouds, the tint of the horizon, and the clarity of the stars taught me when morning was about to come.”
But what Pacquiao had in those days was perseverance, which he has still today. “For me, the morning did come. Warm, bright and simply amazing – a lesson in what can be achieved if you have determination. If you ignore the odds against you, and as you are taught here at this magnificent institution, never, ever quit.
“Think of David and Goliath,” he continued. “Look at me. I am not very big and I never had five smooth stones to throw at any obstacles, but determination is a power tool. I won a lot of fights.”
Now, as a senator, many viewed him “as singularly ill-equipped.” He admitted: “I may not have financial acuity. I may not be historically fluent. I may not even be socially adept. But I am philosophically rooted in my personal adversities, which morally bind me to the general struggle of our people.”
As a boxer, he viewed himself as a fighter. “I am a fighter, not just because it is my profession,” he pointed out. “I was a fighter long before I first set foot in a boxing ring. All my life, I have fought to live. Every single day in my youth, I fought for survival. Now, I do it and get paid for it. Then, I was lucky to get a piece of bread for it.”
There are more than 100 million Filipinos now and most of them are living in poverty. “I believe, in all humility, that my life is just a snapshot, it is a glorified blow-up of what millions of Filipinos live through on a day-to-day basis – the hardships, the challenges, the back-breaking, hope-extinguishing despair.”
Pacquiao believed that his life would be an inspiration to average Filipinos “to fight, to rise above adversity, to conquer and defy, and to embrace life and all its difficulties.”
Miracles happened in the past. It is still happening now. “Miracles do happen,” he said. “Dreams do come true. Being poor does not mean one must die poor. Hard work and persistence will set you free from the shackles of poverty. But it is faith that will take you to the very top.”
Meanwhile, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton believed that we can overcome the scourge of poverty if, as a global family of nations, we commit to invest in people.
“Giving all men, women and children the tools of opportunity – education, health care, employment, legal rights and political freedoms – does not just serve humanitarian purposes. It is the key to economic, social and political progress,” she explained. “When individuals flourish, families flourish. And when families flourish, communities and nations will flourish as well.”
