UNTIL A fire razed the Fundacion de Damas de Filipinas Settlement House in Paco last December, the public was largely unaware that within the fringes of society there live single parents who are barely able to balance work and caring for their children.

Many had even assumed Settlement House was an orphanage. It still performed that function, but the decades-old institution had also changed with the times. This was why most of the 25 youngsters killed in the blaze were not orphans, but had in fact been left there for weeks or months at a time by their single parents.

President Joseph Estrada acted swiftly to help the nonprofit Damas rebuild the shelter. Today, just a few months after the tragedy, a brand new Settlement House has its doors open once more to children needing a temporary home.

But while that will ease the burden of childcare of a few of those who are bringing up their offspring without the aid of either a partner or relatives, it is obviously no solution to the multiplying problems of the majority of single parents. Indeed, the government is proving slow in acknowledging the apparently rising number of single mothers and fathers, even as Vice President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo describes the phenomenon of substitute parenting as a "downside of some aspects of modernization."

To be sure, there are some laws and other measures in place that address a number of issues concerning single parents. According to some social workers, however, not only are these too few, they are so underfunded and inadequately implemented that they are ultimately useless.

More often than not, they also fail to recognize that single parenting is a task that has fallen mostly on the shoulders of women. After all, it is often the father that walks out on the family, say social workers. And when it is the mother who does the leaving, she almost always brings the children along with her, partly because of the traditional thinking that it is a mother's job to care for the children.

Arroyo, who is concurrently the Secretary of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), says most DSWD programs are "biased toward women." Yet she agrees that the fact remains that while most low-income women find jobs, salaries are not usually enough to provide for a family, leaving them grasping at straws.

Elena Garay, for example, is paid P100 a day as dishwasher-maid for Beth's Palabok in the Sta. Ana Market. A battered wife, she and her two small daughters were abandoned by her common-law husband two years ago. Elena was pregnant with their third child at the time. With no one to mind her children, she found it hard to find a job and was soon falling behind the rent payments on her room in a squatter's area. Getting food on the table was another difficulty. Desperate, Elena put one-year-old Angelica and baby Andrea at the Settlement House. When youngest Amelia was born, Elena brought her to the private White Cross Orphanage.

Angelica was among those who perished in the Settlement House fire. She was all of three years old. Her two-year-old sister Andrea escaped unhurt and is now at the Reception and Study Center for Children (RSCC), which is operated by the DSWD. At certain moments of the day, Elena Garay takes a break from her chores and calls RSCC to make sure it isn't ablaze.

"They might burn that down, too)," says the 27-year-old mother in Tagalog. "I won't have any more children left)."

Elena had not seen Angelica and Andrea for more than a month before the accident because she was trying to juggle errands to run and visits to two shelters on her unpaid Sunday off-days. "I'd intended to take them to mass that Sunday," she recalls. "On my last visit, I had an apple for Angelica. She hugged me so tightly,"

Elena's emotions are a rollercoaster of hatred, denial, and paranoia. She struggles for an explanation as to why her daughter died and has taken to seeing a fortune teller. She is still visibly distraught over the loss of her eldest, but has not had access to counseling to help her deal with the death of Angelica.

That job, according to Arroyo, belongs to social workers under the Manila City government. "We're devolved already," she says. "Social work is supposed to be done by the local government. The work of DSWD is to assist them." Arroyo explains that much of DSWD's work nowadays is preventive, although institutional care is provided when the problem becomes full-blown.

Arroyo prefers devolution because it means more resources for all sorts of programs and services. But some social workers point out that the extent and quality of social work depends on the level of priority accorded to it by every local government unit (LGU).

Single parents, for example, should be among those benefiting from a law that mandates the creation of daycare facilities in every barangay. But only a handful of municipalities have complied with the measure. RSCC head Constancia Gualberto also notes that the barangay daycare centers that have been set up are open only for half a day and do not take in infants. She comments, "Parang wala rin (It's as if there weren't any)."

Arroyo says the daycare law does not have financial support. But she says the DSWD is trying to develop community care for children in lieu of substitute care or shelter. This, she says, is in line with the new Early Child Development program that is financed jointly by the government multilateral donor institutions. The program provides not just a daycare center but a "daycare mom."

"The daycare mom can be a woman who's either at home taking care of her children or whose business just keeps her home," says Arroyo. "Part of the funding is to teach her how to be a babysitter and to renovate a room in her place so the children can be there." The P2-billion program will be launched in Regions VI, VII and XII because, says Arroyo, "these were identified to have the most number of vulnerable children."

Still, there is no need to look that far from the capital to see just how serious the situation is. The ideal ratio for social worker and child is 1:25, but at the RSCC in Quezon City, the caseload has been 1:40-50. The figure includes cases involving abandoned children or those who Flores describes as having been left behind "in hospitals, canals, malls, in baskets, plastic bags, boxes, under tables, hanging from walls, on top of water closets, or inside biscuit cans."

Last year, government allotted some P193 million for the operating expenses of the DSWD's Social Protection Bureau, which operates 46 centers and institutions like the RSCC nationwide. The amount was originally pegged at P248 million but was subjected to a mandatory 25 percent reserve imposed at the height of the Asian financial crisis.

As a result, some centers operated on a scaled-down budget. The RSCC, for example, sought a budget of P12 million but was given P7 million. It managed to get donations amounting to P3 million. "If not for that, the quality of service would have really suffered," says Gualberto.

This year's budget of P243 million is no longer subject to a 25 percent reserve, but some DSWD officials say not all of the money will go to the centers; P12.5 million or five percent has been alloted under a general heading of "other projects," and P7.5 million was given to the Ahon Batang Lansangan project recently launched by Arroyo.

DSWD officials give conflicting claims on whether or not money was indeed taken away from the centers to finance the streetchildren project. Arroyo does not deny the report but bristles at the question. "Well, don't you think the streetchildren are also a priority?" she retorts. "There was zero budget for streetchildren before. These centers have a P300-million budget, you cannot get P7 million for the streetchildren?"

DSWD Assistant Secretary Ruth Layug, instructed by Arroyo to clarify the issue, later says Arroyo had generated the money from "external sources" or donations. She adds that there was already an existing P24 million for the project that came from the Congressional Initiative Allocation of former Senator (now Bohol Rep.) Ernesto Herrera in 1997.

The subject is a touchy one for Arroyo, who has been criticized by some DSWD officials over her high-profile streetchildren project. They say it is "nothing more than a publicity stunt" since there are other similar programs already in place. Moreover, they say, the money could be used to take in more children in shelters.

"That is, of course, from my enemies," says Arroyo in response. "They question my motive because they can't question the action itself. They can't question the value of attending to the streetchildren at last. Mabuti nga this mothers who abandon their children in homes. But for every mother who's abandoning them in shelters, how many abandon them to the streets? And I don't need publicity. I have an 81 percent net approval rating and I've been number one in the survey for the last five years."

Arroyo also disagrees with assessments made by some DSWD officials and social workers that government needs to pour in more money into social welfare. Some officials have questioned why despite the pro-poor pronouncements of the Estrada administration and its predecessors, DSWD has consistently received a low budget. Comments one official who declines to be named: "Over 60 percent of the population is poor. Government says it's pro-poor, but ever since our budget has been at the bottom. That's what we can't reconcile."

But Arroyo maintains that the DSWD's P1.5 billion budget—60 percent of which goes to the payment of salaries—is enough. "It's not a question of having more," she says. "Everybody thinks it should be more. On the other hand, there's also the Asian crisis and the budget deficit where if we don't allow it to go down, we will just expand poverty and increase our clientele."

Arroyo says the DSWD has even done its "own share in alleviating" poverty. She has continued her predecessor's three-year program of providing an "integrated delivery of social services for minimum basic needs" for poor municipalities..

"This is a program where the communities are organized and a minimum basic needs survey is conducted," says Arroyo. "There's a minimum of 33 basic needs and they try to determine what's most unmet and usually what comes out are livelihood, potable water, and core shelter." Based on the survey, the community comes up with project proposals for national and local government funding.

Arroyo says such programs can indirectly help address the issues of marital violence and abandonment. In communities that submitted proposals, she says, "family violence was reduced drastically, so there's really a connection between poverty and domestic violence." But just for good measure, the DSWD will also have a national family violence prevention program.

Even as preventive programs are in place, there seems to be little being done for families that have already broken down and for mothers who now have to cope with bringing up children on their own. There are no laws or mechanisms, for instance, that compel deadbeat parents to pay child support; there are no tax breaks for solo parents, no free health insurance. "We are not," says Arroyo, "a welfare state."

There is a mandated free health insurance program for indigents, but the LGUs that fund this say they do not have the money to inform their constituents about it. Some LGUs at least provide economic assistance in the form of food and cash for single-parent families. But these are often not enough.

Some mothers are also averse to dole-outs fearing lifelong dependency. A single mother of two puts her needs thus: "Bigyan n'yo ako ng trabaho at mag-aalaga ng mga anak ko. Sanay naman ako sa kayod kalabaw (Give me work and someone to care for my children. I'm used to working like a carabao)."

On top of all their worries, single mothers also have to endure a societal stigma. They say say that somehow they are made to feel as if they had done something wrong and therefore deserve hardship. Those who have more than one child are often thought of as sexually promiscuous and irresponsible.

Angeli, a widowed mother of two, says she has had to endure scathing remarks by one of her daughter's social workers who claims Angeli has been unable to visit her child because she has remarried. But Angeli says she was only trying to save on fare and can only afford to visit her children one at a time.

A more helpful approach, says Remia Capispisan of the Women's Crisis Center, is to to make single mothers "focus on the positive side, that they need to help themselves, to strive and not lose hope that they can stand on their own and care for their children."

Yet social workers admit that unless government recognizes the feminization of poverty and the phenomenon of single parenthood, the coming years will not only see a rise in the number of children being left in institutions but the creation of a permanent dependent underclass.

Observes Violeta Cruz of the DSWD Social Protection Bureau: "Some of those who don't have a place to go may end up institution hopping, up to Golden Acres, the home for indigent elderly."

Meanwhile, the likes of Elena Garay plod on, unsure when they can finally bring their children home to live with them. Elena says while her dream of finishing a course in computer science is already dead, she still hopes that her two remaining daughters will someday do her proud and graduate from college. And despite the odds against her, she remains firm about getting her children back. Amid the squalor of a wet market kitchenette, the determined Elena says, "Sa aking kamay lalaki ang mga anak ko (My children will grow up in my care)."