As a researcher, I get to travel and have the opportunity to come face to face with several forms of child labor. And there are forms that the word “worst” could hardly describe a situation of a toiling child. There are haunting, nagging, sinister images of children wasting their youths away. Getting to know such deplorable existence sometimes leaves me in frustration. The family situation, which further fuels the waste, keeps me in anger.

I remember Gel, a son of a

CLOSE ENCOUNTER: The author in an intimate conversation with child laborers

wood carver in Pampanga, who, at 13, is encouraged by his father to have a swig of gin at the end of the day to melt the sawdust, adhesive agents and varnish that he inhaled while working at the furniture shop. The sight of 11-year-old Ric, drenched and shivering in the rain while tugging at a sack of potatoes being disembarked from a ship at a Cebu port, has never left my mind after all these years. His father was his gang leader. I could not munch on a carrot stick again without recalling the kumboy (‘convoy’) of boys in Benguet who balanced loads of vegetables weighing about 40 kilos on their shoulder, from the hilly farms down to the delivery trucks at least two hundred meters away. The loading was happening right in front of a barangay hall. That day, like in the case of 14-year-old Elena who had to earn her family’s dinner by ironing a week’s clothing for another household in Bacolod, was probably a no-school day.

When you come home from such encounters, you cannot help asking the question many researchers have asked at least once in their career: “How close should have I allowed myself to the subject?” As somebody who swore oath to render civil service, it can also make one feel a sense of ineptitude. As a person, well, it does a lot of things. It can damage a lot of beliefs that we hold to be true like the world is good for those who toil. On the other hand, the experience can jolt one into wakefulness and be a source of inspiration to let others know that these things happen for real. When you think you have seen worst, some incidents open your eyes. And years after mine got opened, I still get inspired to do those children some justice through my writing.

Tea Can Do That Some stories on the road, meanwhile, can leave one with a bit of a lesson on how a trained ear can be very important in fieldwork. Either that, or you are just bound for a lot of cheap laughs. Take, for example, my colleague who was not very familiar with the Visayan tongue. We were being transported from the airport to the first stop of fieldwork when a vehicle beside us swerved and made a sharp turn to the left, missing our taxi by inches.

Hitting the brakes, our driver swore in enraged Visayan candor : “_______ ka, naga-left turn!” My companion researcher later commented, “It must be the caffeine. Our driver was blaming the other one for taking too much Lipton.”

The others who took a young, playful elephant, however, were not as fortunate. Instead of a leisurely trot, the other elephant dashed through the trail with energy, shaking the carrier basket on its back and carelessly tossing the passengers while perhaps trumpeting in its wake. It always strikes me funny when my colleague recalls how the riders, one of whom happens to be a DOLE director who is known to be steadfast in the face of even the most unsettling labor cases, were suppressing their screams of terror and clinging for dear life to the basket atop the elephant.

We have this colleague who seems to be always finding herself in predicaments whenever she goes on field. Got left behind by the official vehicle with nobody missing you for about an hour’s drive? She did. Got nearly tossed into the ocean because your feet entangled with the rope of the ship’s anchor? She did. Ever entered a room, rummaged through your things but could not find what you were looking for, saw strangers on the bed and realized that you were in a room you did not rent? Well, she did.