I played jueteng only once in my entire life, and that was when I was five years old.

I still remember my numbers (10 and 15) and the amount of my bet (ten centavos). I was excited all morning, waiting for the hour of draw (which was after lunch; a second draw was scheduled in the early evening).

And when the time came, I couldn’t wait anymore so I followed my kubrador to the place where they drew the lots.

There I was, my tiny body squeezed among a crowd of adults, my ten centavos bearing all the hopes and yearnings of my five years of existence on earth.

And when my two numbers were announced, I yelled so loud I was almost kicked out of the place. After I collected my winnings, I ran all the way home to my mother to hand her the first money I ever made in my life: forty pesos that felt like 40 million at the time.

She took it but she scolded me and told me that next time I made money, I’d better make sure I earned it.

About 15 years later, I earned my first salary. I felt I had also earned the right to gamble.

Mahjong was my choice of game. To describe it as fun would be a gross understatement and an injustice to a game that has given millions, maybe billions, of people, from emperors to slaves, a kind of pleasure that’s unlike any other.

I think mahjong actually prolongs people’s lives. Players get up early in the morning already feeling giddy about the prospect of playing later in the day. No religion, ideology or philosophy can make people feel that way.

There’s also research that shows that all the calculating and strategizing involved in mahjong can actually cure dementia and ease cognitive memory difficulties.

I got hooked in mahjong for one summer, about 25 years ago. You’d think I turned into a pale, skinny addict with bleary eyes and hollow cheeks, for playing mahjong from early morning to the wee hours of the next day, but actually, it was nothing but exhilaration and exuberance, and also that wonderful feeling of being glad to be alive, and of being grateful to God for another day, another chance to play mahjong.

Even in my sleep I kept saying “Pong!” “Cang!” “Todas!” and my dreams were filled with constant rearranging of mahjong tiles—sticks, characters and balls—until I could declare “Bunot! Escalera! Seven pairs before the fifth!” and then open my eyes and wake up with a wide grin on my face.

Part of the fun of mahjong is the banter and gossip that take place during the long hours, and of course the surprise of combinations every time you open your deck of tiles at the start of each round.

But mahjong, like jueteng, is gambling, no matter how much I glamorize it or how much I justify my playing it. What saved me from turning into a gambler was that I knew when to stop and I stopped when I thought it was time to stop.

Most other people never do, and as a result, they lose not just their life’s savings but also their job, their reputation, and most tragic of all, the love of their family.

Don’t think that only those who play big lose big. I’ve been to poor neighborhoods where every man, woman and child gambles, and where the stakes could be as high as those in big casinos in the city.

This is where pre-school kids learn to recognize sotang bastos and kabayong kopas laid out on the table before they learn the multiplication table, and where little children skip classes to play Lucky 9 in a classmate’s backyard.

In these villages, most women hide from the social workers so they can play cuajo and sacla all day; they’re not afraid of their husbands because all menfolk are also busy playing tongking, monte and winner-take-all.

These are the people who complain to God and government everyday about how poor and miserable they are, and yet they magically always have money to lose in a card game. That’s because they save whatever little money they have or they know exactly where to get it: children forego recess so they have enough coins to bring to the next blackjack; young girls and boys resort to prostitution and the adults to thievery and drug pushing.

Jueteng lives on in Pampanga; all you need to do is ask and people will tell you it just goes by another name and has just mutated a little bit (for example, instead of 37 numbers, there are now 40).

But jueteng is only one of the many forms of gambling. Even if we eradicate it, we will not lessen the number of people who gamble every day.

If we really want to solve this social and moral disease, we should probably do less politics and really go to the root causes, which are poverty and unemployment.

When people are stricken with the indignity of poverty, they gamble because being able to throw away money gives them an affinity to the rich people whom they envy.

When they are unemployed, they get bored. We who have jobs don’t know what bored really means. It means you have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do from sunup to sundown. Many people in many villages in Pampanga are like this: they wake up, stay in bed for hours, until they decide to rise and sit in front of their house watching people pass by. Then they take an afternoon nap that lasts until the sun begins to set, and then it’s a whole stretch of evening with more hours of nothing to do.

I may be able to survive one day with nothing to do. Two days, I’ll already be irritable. Three days, I’m crazy and crawling up the wall. Four, five days, I’ll be running amok.

The only reason these poor, unemployed villagers still have their sanity intact is they have found a cure for boredom, and that’s gambling. The reason they’re still smiling is that they have something to look forward to every single morning that they wake up.

We’re making a mistake if we think that by slaying the dragon of jueteng, all the poor, bored people will suddenly have something better to do.

They will only shift to sacla and tongking and cuajo, as they actually already have.

Copyright © 2009 The Sun.Star

More info about jueting on Wikipedia