Extreme poverty leads 11-year-old girl to suicide

By hanging herself a day after All Saints' Day, 11-year-old Mariannet Amper of Davao City, has become the embodiment of the Filipinos' worst nightmare, a saint of poverty for a nation that continues to deny the blighted reality of its impoverishment.

As this news quickly spread around the world, the Philippines promised yesterday to investigate the apparent suicide of the 11-year-old girl due to poverty after the incident generated angry public reactions and street protests.

She wrote a letter to a television network asking for a new pair of shoes, a bag, a bicycle and better paying jobs for her parents, local newspapers said. She also left a diary narrating her family’s difficulties in sending her and a younger brother to school and how she wished her father’s health would improve and get him a good job other than doing small carpentry work.

She was in the sixth grade and eager to catch up so as to finish her elementary education. It is reported that Mariannet killed herself out of quiet desperation over her school absences and her inability to catch up with school work.

Mariannet's diary is similar to Anne Frank's: both prefigured the unyielding doom in their lives--Anne's, the holocaust of the gas chambers; Mariannet's, the holocaust of extreme poverty.

These incidents are immensely tragic and shows humanity's inability to take care of the most vulnerable in society. World Bank estimates that 40 per cent of the Phillipines population of 87 million live on less than US$2 a day. While the country's economy is currently improving and making good economic progress, the economic gap between the rich and poor is also widening thereby deepening the despondency of the poor. In most third world countries, corruption and mismanagement have made their governments the key perpetuator of poverty.