"It began to speak back to me," painter Joselito Velasco recalls. He meant the oil painting: Hapag ng Pagasa ("Table of Hope").It depicts the Master, breaking bread, on a slum home table of broken wooden slats, surrounded by 12 street kids that he'd picked at random.

Since then, "Hapag" exploded into art discussions, columns, homilies, - and billboards along major highways. "I could not get out of my mind that Pasong Tamo billboard," admits a Makati policeman known for brutality. He's now stopped beating arrested street children. He has stopped now.

"This painting disturbed and excited me," Gawad Kalinga's Tony Meloto wrote. "Is it because I forgot . . . the many left behind?"

After the photo sessions, the 12 kids sank back into slum anonymity. But Don Bosco graduate Velasco found that "the picture took a life of its own." Who really were these 12 kids? Armed with crumpled oil-stained photos, Velasco searched for them in Metro Manila warrens of unbelievable stench and filth a year later.

"It was like spiraling into Dante's Inferno," he recalls. But he found all 12. That included Nene of who lives in cemetery niches but will never become a doctor to treat her insane mother. Michael cooks stew from scraps in garbage dump for his grandfather.

And "kalkal boy" Emong peddles empty bottles and cartons yet could say of the "Hapag" painting: the children invited the Master for dinner, not vice versa.

By crossing from painter to friend, "I began to know gradually who (they) were," Velasco recalls. They're the "tip of a hovering mountain of muck. Greed of the privileged few, glorified by society and media as competition, (condemns) them to being treated like mosquitoes or stray cats. (This) calcified into all facets of society."

The post-painting interviews resonate with whimpers "of children drifting in the dark," Velasco writes." (Their) tiny dreams are shattered before they take form. And their voices are often unheard."

Here are the voices of three: Christina clinging to a battered doll; Buknoy with his wilting sampaguita leis and Jun and Roselle in their shack of collaged cigarette boxes.

In the painting, five-year "Tinay" is the only person looking at the Master. Tinay's mother works as a maid abroad. Her elder married sisters have no time for Tinay. And her drug addict father is now in jail, for raping her.

"Even if his bones were crushed and made into vetsin, that'd not be enough," erupts the aunt who visits Tinay, now and then. "She cries all the time. She doesn't speak.

Kaya po lagging malungkot at malayo ang tingin n'yang bata ("She's always sad and has this far away look").

The withdrawn Tinay rarely speaks. She doesn't smile and trembles when elder men approach. Velasco and the aunt show Tinay the painting. Not a word comes from her dry lips. "Does God really love us?" the aunt mutters through clenched teeth. "Then, why are there evil people who destroy children?"

Seven-year old Buknoy also had a far away look when his photo was taken. Why?

Velasco asked. He had painted that distant look into the canvas. Buknoy recalls he was thinking then of his father who'd beat him up, on return from the photo session, for failing to bring home food from selling sampaguita flower leis.

"My father has no job. And my mother abandoned us,"

Buknoy explains. He collects empty cans, mineral water bottles, wires which are sold. Minsan po wala akong tubo. ("Sometimes, we earn nothing."). But I try to help my three siblings."

"He eats only once a day," Buknoy's cousin, 16-year old Jenny tells Velasco.

"Sometimes, he just holds a pinch of rice. He puts soy sauce on it. And now and then, he gets a boiled banana. Once in a while, I give him something. But then we don't have enough at home too."

Thinking back, Velasco notes that Buknoy has face of "a weary 40-year old breadwinner." Two scars on his head came from boiling water splashed on him for using the tricycle sidecar of his brother. "He never smiled. And he acknowledged my greeting only by a slow lifting of the eyes that had odd shadows in them." Constant hunger interlocks with having no one to turn to.

Then there's the squatter's shack, made of collaged cigarette boxes, where Jun and Roselle live. In the painting, they sit together facing the Master. "Both were clad in the same clothes they wore when I took their photo a year back." They scavenge for cartoons, drums, etc. to earn their bacon.

They have nothing yet see a God as a compassionate, loving father. "Nabubuhay kami sa awa ng Diyos." They begin and end their sentence with: 'kung may awa ang Poon' . 'If God will have mercy on us.' They inherited this phrase from their old people - from past generations. "These are words not merely spoken," Velasco notes. "But this is their real life."

At a coffee shop, Velasco beside a lady whose remote clearly lacked a few buttons.

"She spoke to Edgar Allan Poe and Leo Tolstoy. We were not alone. She squinted at 'Hapag' and said: 'This strikes me as a poor kids' last supper. But they're not actually poor because they have Jesus."

And that's where the title of this 237-page Kenosis Publication book came from: "They Have Jesus: Stories of the Children of Hapag." Ask your favorite bookstore. It's a good read. "But these stories," Velasco writes, "are not to be read on a full stomach."

(E-mail: juan_mercado@boholchronicle.com)