An ethical way to survive, that’s what Marjorie and Tasyana do, two single

mothers who live in one of the poorest slums in Tondo and make a living by digging
through McDonald's leftovers, recooking and selling what is known locally as
"Pagpag," a dish created from scraps of meat found in the garbage. They both
endure the everyday hardship and doing their best to educate their children while
also trying to survive in their one-room little home.

We all do different things to survive; parents must make sacrifices just to

provide for their children's day-to-day needs, and I believe that what these two
mothers do is ethical, but there are some concerns about the health and nutrition of
the people who eat and sell these leftover foods. According to Robert Wainer (2017),
"despite a rigorous self-disciplined process of repeated cleansing and deep-frying,
consuming Pagpag remains a critically dangerous and nutritionally insufficient
practice." Eating and selling Pagpag was caused by the challenges of hunger that
resulted from extreme poverty; Poverty is considered as one of the ethical issues
that need to be addressed and reduced. An industrialized nation like ours has the
obligation to reduce extreme poverty because it is a problem that consumes people’s
morality; some people do things that violate the quality of being moral due to
circumstances like poverty that encouraged them to do so. There is a lot of
devastating effects like for example a dilemma of stealing from the rich to feed the
poor, this leads an individual to choose one moral action that will result in violating
another; or, doing one thing could bring positive results but is morally wrong.

Eradicating poverty sounds simple but to accomplish this goal has never been
easy, what Marjorie and Tasyana do to send their children to school, I think is one of
the stepping stone to eradicate poverty. Education can be the solution, we firmly
believe in the saying that “knowledge is the key to success” it is indeed the key to
help us out from the dilemma that keeps dragging us down. As stated by the two
hardworking mothers, what they want is to provide their children with an education
so when they are no longer here, they will at least have the foundations of
knowledge to hopefully leave “Happyland” that symbolizes poverty behind. Life can
be challenging and difficult, but the most important thing to do is to always choose to
be in the greater good, and always look for the brighter side of every dark situation.