Peasant Women, Coping on the Fringes Published on July 10, 2010

Peasant Women, Coping on the Fringes

Published on July 10, 2010

With their small parcels of land no longer producing enough for their families, peasant women and men try to make do with odd jobs. 

By LYN V. RAMO
Bulatlat.com
RIZAL PROVINCE — To Nanay Ceding, 62, a mother of eight, and her neighbors in a suburban peasant village, coping up with extreme poverty and the erratic climate meant leaving the family and the farms for at least six hours every day.

Nanay Ceding is a woman peasant of Rizal province, near Metro Manila. Her husband, Carding, was also a farmer, but since his death in 1999, Nanay Ceding had to care and provide for the family alone. She also provides for her eldest son who has married and has a growing family of four. (Nanay Ceding that her full name as well as that of her family members be withheld.)

They came from Aklan in the early ’70s to look for greener pastures in Manila but were forced to settle in Rizal for lack of qualifications to land a decent job in the city. Some of her neighbors are Ilonggos, who had settled earlier in a piece of land entrusted to their uncle who came from Iloilo in 1950. He is now 94 years old.

Like many other peasant women in her neighborhood, Nanay Ceding has to go out of the village to do household chores for middle-income families, mostly professionals and businessmen, government employees and office workers who find it hard to do the laundry and housekeeping while they work the whole day.
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Source:  Bulatlat.com

URL: http://www.bulatlat.com/main/2010/07/10/peasant-women-coping-on-the-fringes/