Now I know the bitter tears,
The dull despair, the frantic rages,
The sleep-destroying hopes and fears
Of fish in bowls and birds in cages.

After Two Months in Prison,
by Fr. Horacio dela Costa, S.J.


They warned me early enough. No matter what I may think, they told me, it was still a prison that I was visiting. Sure, they were children, many still in their teens. But they had committed crimes, and they had to be punished for it— student of law that I was, I understood exactly what they meant. But coming to the National Youth Receiving Center that Sunday morning, I felt that the warnings were hardly necessary, because everything around me, even the very air I breathed, told me that I was in a prison. And the fact that there were children behind bars only made the experience all the more poignant.

It began with an invitation from a Jesuit friend, who had been assigned to work with the children confined at the Center as part of their apostolate work and formation. Wanting to do something different (and perhaps more meaningful) this Christmas, I accepted the offer and decided to involve my students at the law school with me. Why not hold a Christmas party for the children at the Center, I suggested. Why not spend an afternoon with them?

Initially, I was concerned about the security of my students. The children at the Center were, after all, not “harmless” orphans or abandoned toddlers— they were, for all intents and purposes, detention prisoners, charged for the commission of crimes, some even involving rape, homicide or murder.

I understand now, of course, that it was an unfounded and exaggerated fear, a product more of my overactive imagination and over-zealous sense of protectiveness. They can take care of themselves, a fellow faculty member told me. Don’t be too Atenean to the Ateneans, some even said, referring to the Ateneo’s penchant for “sheltering” too much its students. Ivory towers have no place in the true practice of law, they chided.

And so, brushing these concerns aside, we began preparations in earnest. Pleasantly, these were not at all complicated: I simply divided the class into committees and assigned them specific tasks for the event: a group would take care of the entertainment, another for preparing the food, another to purchase and package the Christmas give-aways, and finally, another to gather old clothes. Following some meetings and a flurry of e-mail messages over the span of two weeks, all preparations were completed in time for the Sunday morning activity.

We departed from the Ateneo Rockwell campus at around eight o’clock in the morning, in a convoy of vehicles, to the Center located a short distance from the City Hall of Manila. The children were hearing Mass when we arrived; and from the receiving area, I could see them seated neatly in rows of monoblock chairs.

It was not until almost an hour later, when we were allowed to assemble at the hall where mass was previously celebrated. At first, I was surprised at the small number of children waiting: we were told there were at least one hundred and fifty children who would participate in the activity; there were only around fifty seated along one side of the room. I was told, however, that many more would come; they were merely being taken out of their cells on the first floor of the Center (we were on the second).

Out of the window, I could see the rest of the children being prepared for the activity, squatting in long straight lines, like a scene out of a movie. From the second floor hall where we were waiting, I could make out their cells surrounding the central courtyard, and I could see that some children remained inside (some were not allowed to participate as punishment for previous infractions). It was not until later when I would finally get to see the cells first-hand.

Through a spiral staircase ascending from the courtyard, through a barred and locked steel door, they were herded into the hall, where they bunched with those already in the room. Looking at them all, I had to consciously tell myself that these children are now being prosecuted for the commission of various crimes; that some of them had raped and even killed. This uncomfortable realization, however, was short-lived, because from the moment they were split up into groups and interacted with their ates and kuyas from the Ateneo, they became what, I suppose, they really are, notwithstanding the prison bars: they became, quite simply, kids.

All through the morning, they talked and laughed and even danced. They made cheers, played games, and joked with each other and with their ates and kuyas. Watching on the sidelines, I wondered how these children dealt with this dichotomy of their existence, this polarity between prison and childhood. It was an existence that few of us, hopefully, will ever get to experience, yet it was a reality that, hopefully also, would disturb us in our comfort zones.

And so, after distributing lunch and their Christmas give-aways, it was time for the children to leave and return to their cells. Free time, I suppose, was over. They left as they had arrived, in long straight lines, down through the spiral staircase, onto the courtyard below.

We waited a few minutes for the children to be herded back to their cells, and we were given the chance to see them where they were at: inside their cells, before we said good-bye. Thus, in a crude line of our own, we were guided to the first floor of the Center, into the gut of the building, where the children were kept.

There were four or five cells around that courtyard, and into them, were crammed the child-detainees. The cells were bare save for native cots and the smell of the nearby latrine. Fans whirred idly in each of the cell’s ceilings, while bars, old and rusty, marked their expanse of freedom. Some children were seated on the floor, others standing with arms hanging out the bars. I know of no other way to describe the sight, except by saying that the children looked like animals in cages. You could hardly tell that these were the same kids who, moments earlier, were laughing and joking and playing. You could not even tell this from their faces, which were now blank and expressionless, borne, perhaps of the boredom that marked their nights and days. The distinction, it appears, has become blurred even to them. I noted that not a few called out to their kuyas and ates filing past, greeting them good-bye, as though it was the most normal thing in the world.

And then, we left.

I am not sure what my students took home with them that afternoon following our visit to the Center. Perhaps some were glad to have been able to perform a good deed for Christmas. It was, after all, what Christ himself prescribed: when I was in prison, you visited me. Others, perhaps, were disturbed at the condition of the children’s detention, or the dissonance between the lofty provisions of law and the reality beyond it. Or others still may have felt the stirrings of that dark and unnamable discomfort deep down in the gut, the same one that characterizes the beginning of passion or action: that something is wrong and that something has to be done.

As for me, it was not these things that I thought of as I left the Center that afternoon. Rather, it was the awareness of, and the appreciation for, the simple pleasure of being able to walk out of an open door. Perhaps this realization is a bit too simplistic, if not even a bit selfish. But, indeed, it is an act too often taken for granted: the ability to leave when one wishes; the ability to go where one chooses. As I was leaving the Center, I felt many things, some unarticulated and others still nascent. But one sure thing I felt was this: that I was glad that I could walk back out into the world again, and that I was not one of those who would need to be left behind.