Family news: feeding the poor, immigration problems

Joy is still coughing, but her internist thinks that she will be okay for her surgery after two more weeks.

She's reading all the side effects on the internet and looking for an excuse not to have surgery, but most of that information is for younger women. One problem: the internet page lists side effects but not the actual risk or risk/ benefit ratio of both the surgery or NOT having surgery.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and often the crazies don't put things into context, or think we docs went into medicine to get rich. Heh. Study 8 years, do 3-6 years post graduate training be stuck with a 100K dollar debt and then you have to work 80 hour weeks. What's not to like?

But we do it because most of us have a calling to heal.

Ruby has been working in an outreach to feed the street kids in Manila. She says many of them are orphans due to their fathers being shot as drug runners. Actually this is partly true, but the problem long predates the drug war. So I pointed out that the problem of missing fathers (mainly by desertion, but also drug/alcohol abuse or accidental deaths) and alas often the moms take a new "husband" who doesn't want the kids so they end up raised by poor relatives or on the street.

The problem of street kids is not new: blame the industrial revolution that brought out of work rural families to the big city.

Maybe I should have her read "Oliver Twist", or maybe the biography of St John Bosco...

However, it does show the need for a type of welfare/ social security for these single moms/widows/deserted spouses. The problem? Fraud, corruption, and encouraging men to desert their families so the wives can get the money.

Ruby says the most sucessful type of outreach in the slums is ordinary folks helping: i.e. the working class and middle class folks who often are just a generation from dire poverty and know what it is like.

This includes many outreaches by the churches, both Protestant (like Ruby's church) and Catholic churches. I should add that Joy, who runs one of our rice businesses in nearby Bulacan and is working with farmers to grow organic rice so they can get a better price for their crops, is also involved with local authorities in feeding programs.

Ruby has worked with her mom and also with her small Protestant church's program with the kids of the poor farmers here, so is used to working with children.

In contrast, the upper class SJW aren't used to slum conditions (the smell, the dirt, the naughty kids) so find it easier and more ego gratifying to virtue signal by tweeting than to actually have to feed and touch street kids and their families.

The government here does subsidize rice for the poor. If you have a card, you can buy it at a lower price. The problem of course is corruption. The Manila Bulletin says there are still problems of targeting the right people, and that there is "leakage". (rice diverted by businessmen and/or politicians to sell for a higher price).

Sigh.

As for me: I'm still in the midst of visa problems: My permanent visa was because Lolo was supporting me, and now the family supports me by letting me live here, while I support them by helping with Ruby's school fees.

 But since my permanent visa was approved, my husband died, and then later they passed a regulation saying that non blood relatives don't count so I am essentially illegal. And no one noticed the problem in when I updated the visa for the last 5 years. Well, duh.

But since the Philippines honors the elderly, and since I do have a pension, it is just a matter or resubmitting the paper work. Joy is good at that type of thing (she used to work for the government and knows the ins and outs of paperwork).

This is why I feel sympathetic to the "immigrants" who miss their court appointments and paper work. It is bad enough for Americans to cope with faceless government bureaucrats (e.g. the DMV to get a driver's license) so you can see how they would prefer to avoid the hassle.

My son's Catholic church in Florida has an outreach to help people there do this, plus other help for immigrants (many of whom are from Central America or Haiti).

The Catholic church's immigration policies predates Trumpie boy: The dirty little secret is that Obama deported hundreds of thousands in his time... but then felt sorry for them and made loopholes "for the innocent children" aka "Dreamers".

Big problem: This move helped the "dreamers" but encouraged people to bring their kids on the long, dangerous trip. And not just their kids, but often they "borrow" a kid to bypass regulations.

Trumpieboy is less sympathetic, because his "base" knows  employers prefer illegal immigrants who work for lower wages, so there are fewer jobs for them. (This is especially true for the black community, something that a lot of people haven't realized or don't want to point out for fear of being called "racist".).

Ironically, if the Democrats had agreed to the wall and more money to process the "incoming", he would probably have agreed to give the dreamers an amnesty. But politics/hatred got in the way.

And now the "squad" of radicals are crying tears over immigrants while refusing to vote for funding to process the immigrants. Huh? what do they want: Dump them on the streets?

I do agree Trumpieboy's tweet: "go back to your old country" (and then solve the problems and then come back here to solve ours) sounds bad, since some of those who were implied in the criticism were born in the USA, but hey, maybe AOC should go back to NYCity and solve their problems before messing up the entire USA.

This type of left wing manufactured/"astroturf" hysteria happened before:

Reminds me of McGovern and 1968, with Pelosi as Hubert Humphrey. Sigh. That was how you got Nixon and now it will probably get you 4 more years of Trump.

The people smuggling business is a world wide multi million dollar business, often run by the same cartels that smuggle drugs.

It's a world wide problem, and until you manage to stop the big shots behind drugs and the banks that launder the money it won't stop.

Duterte is doing his best (but the crooked politicians are fighting back in the name of "human rights").

Everyone laments murders here, including the murder of some priest activists, and points fingers at Duterte (even when it is local politicians ordering the deed).

well, quite a few Mexican priests have been killed by the drug cartels too. And these priests are killed so the cartels can be in power: some because they criticized the drug cartels' violence, but some because they helped migrants escape the violence of the smugglers.

UKGuardian article from Sept 2016: (i.e. before Trump)

Before last week’s murders, Mexico’s Catholic Media Centre had tallied the killings of 28 priests since 2006, most of them in states where criminal groups are powerful, such Michoacán, Guerrero and Veracruz...

So do you play nice and let the cartels make you into a narco state, or start shooting? (It can be done, but it's long and bloody. Colombia did it, but no body noticed. But Duterte is trying to stop things before they get that bad).

You have to figure out a "cost/benefit" ration in these things.

The  number of people killed here varies (whether or not you consider all the dead bodies, including "amoks", pay back murders, political murders, and murders by gangs). But Wikiepedia says our murder rate is 11 per 100 thousand people.

In contrast Time Magazine said Mexico's reported murders in 2018 were 33000;  Wikipedia quotes Mexico's murder rate as 19 out of 100 thousands people.

StrategyPage has this background on Mexico: Ironically their economy has improved thanks to NAFTA forcing them to modernize their economy.

Most of the present wave of immigrants, however, come from Central America, and you can see why:

Wikipedia reports the murder rate in Honduras is 56 and in El Salvador is 61, some of the highest in the world.

and waiting in the wings: Refugees from the wars, disease, and corruption problems of Central Africa, who now that Europe is trying to slow down their refugee flow, are finding their way to the southern border of the USA.

Sigh.