ZAMBOANGA CITY — A poor girl who committed suicide because of extreme poverty in the southern Philippines was buried yesterday.

Mariennet Amper, 12, hanged herself on Nov. 2 inside their thatched house in the village of Maa in Davao City. Hundreds of people, many of them moved by the girl’s tragic end, came to pay their last respects. They cried as the girl’s white coffin was entombed.

Television network GMA-7 also aired a special as a tribute to the girl, who had written a letter asking the TV program “Wish Ko Lang” (I Just Wish) for a pair of school shoes and bicycle for her younger brother and goats for her unemployed parents — her father, Isabelo, a former construction worker and mother, Magdalena.

The letter was written two years ago and was never mailed for lack of money to buy a postage stamp. GMA-7 has given the family a mini-van, a dozen goats and a bicycle just as what the girl wished for.

“All her classmates are present and they cried also. We cried, but could do nothing else now,” the girl’s father said.

A government official’s statement that the girl’s suicide was an isolated incident has stirred a hornet’s nest.

“A child committing suicide because of hunger and poverty may be an isolated case, but Filipino families experiencing extreme hunger and poverty are definitely prevalent,” Alphonse Rivera, head of the child rights organization, Salinlahi Alliance for Children’s Concerns, told Arab News.

“We have already seen and heard news of adults committing suicide in desperation borne out of poverty by jumping from billboards or hanging themselves,” she said.

Rivera said the effects of poverty have been evident even during the time of previous administration, but had worsened during the Arroyo government. “Since 2005, surveys indicated rising statistics on the incidence of hunger among Filipinos yet, no decisive move to alleviate economic conditions has been done by the government,” he said.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo this week has ordered the released of 1 billion pesos to further accelerate the government’s hunger-mitigation and anti-poverty program. But Rivera said funding was “too little, too late.”

“Economic policies must be reviewed to enable the people to live a decent life. Increase wages, nationalize the oil industry, genuine land reform for the farmers — these are what the people are calling for but has remained unheeded,” he said.

Rivera also cited a recent study by the International Food Policy Research Institute that 11 million Filipinos live on less than $1 (P42) a day experienced hunger.

“Many children have stopped schooling and are forced to work to help in the family’s income. Yet after all their efforts, at the end of the day, they still go to bed hungry,” he said.

Bishops Divided

At least two Roman Catholic bishops viewed the young girl’s suicide differently, according to a report by the online publication GMA News.TV.

Bishop Leonardo Medroso, head of the CBCP’s Episcopal Commission on Canon Law, urged others to draw lessons from Amper’s tragedy by not losing hope.

“They said the reason why a person commits suicide is because the person lost hope. A Christian should never lose hope even if he is being surrounded by so many difficulties in life,” Medroso was quoted as saying.

But Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Oscar Cruz said the Catholic church could reverse its discipline on suicide victims due to the advancement of behavioral sciences.

“After years of the advancement of behavioral sciences the church is convinced that those who commit suicide are not themselves and consequently the presumption is that they lack the necessary deliberation to commit a mortal offense against the giver of life and therefore there is now a relaxation of the law of funeral blessing and burial for those who commit suicide,” Cruz, a Canon law expert, told reporters.

“If formerly they were denied of the funeral rites and even the burial in a Catholic cemetery, now those practices no longer hold true. I think all experts of psychology and psychiatry are one in saying that all those who killed themselves are not in their right mind,” he added.