Short-cut Way

Mayor Braulio Yaranon of Baguio City, the Philippines' summer capital in the north, is still lucky. He was suspended but was reinstated. But the suspension threat may continue to hound him and, before he would know it, it would be election season again. All his efforts of defending himself would certainly get in the way of governance so before he would know it, the former judge would find himself exhausted from all the legal battles waged by his enemies.

The saga about suspension and outright removal at the top post of the Baguio City Hall is not new. It began during the time of former mayor Jun Labo, who made Baguio’s history as the first faith healer elected as chief executive. Labo was still warming his seat when somebody complained about the newly elected mayor’s foreign citizenship. It was too bad for Labo who had the penchant of acquiring the citizenships of the foreign women he fell in love with and whom he eventually married.

And it was too bad the Comelec allowed Labo to run before some people found out that he was not a citizen of the Philippines but a citizen of the world. At that time he was an Australian citizen. Ergo, he could run for an elective position in Australia but not in the Philippine summer capital. The Comelec, however, allowed him to run as mayor and Baguio’s electorate, like the star-struck and showbiz-oriented voters elsewhere in the country, voted for the guy who was almost like a movie star.

The courts finally ruled that Labo was an alien and therefore could not continue serving as mayor. Jaime Bugnosen, the vice-mayor then, was eventually sworn in as the new mayor. That was after the 1988 elections.

In 1992 Labo ran again as mayor and won. But he was again disqualified. Mauricio Domogan, the vice-mayor then, assumed office as mayor. From then on, the former barefoot boy from Patiakan village, Quirino, Ilocos Sur began a colorful uninterrupted political career that has reached the House of Congress.

Hadn’t Labo been removed from office, Domogan’s political career may have been delayed for some years – maybe as long as nine years granting that Labo would have been voted into office for three terms.

So we have a tip for those itching to be the city’s mayor. You need not gun for the mayoralty post. Aim for vice-mayor, and who knows, you are just a breath away from your goal. In Baguio, the vice-mayoralty position is proving to be the short-cut way to a politician’s career.

As vice-mayor, you should not simply act as a spare tire. Like the girl or boy scout, you must be ever-prepared because anything could happen to the mayor.

Multiple Pains

It’s painful enough to leave and be separated from one’s family. But for this country, whose number one export are its people, the pain of being separated from one’s family apparently is not factored in when our leaders report about how overseas Filipino workers have contributed to our economy.

To help our OFWs feel good, government leaders would often sing paeans to them, hailing OFWs as our “modern-day heroes” for their dollar remittances, which help sustain the Philippine economy.

Separation and the psychological impacts that children have to suffer when one or both of their parents have to work overseas are simply not considered. We have yet to learn about government studies on how children of OFWs are reeling from the impact of separation from their parents and how government is helping provide some kind of support system for these children. All we hear are reports about the rise and fall of dollar remittances from our OFWs.

The pain that OFWs and their families suffer is multiplied a hundred times over when tragedy strikes in the countries where OFWs work. The renewed violence in Israel and Lebanon, for example, is an added pain to about 30,000 OFWs there, most of them domestics. The families of OFWs in these strife-torn Middle East countries also have to suffer sleepless nights as they watch on TV how Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants exchange missile bombardments.

Adding to the anxieties of the families of our beleaguered OFWs in Israel and Lebanon is the news about our government’s lack of resources to evacuate our modern-day heroes. While other governments have evacuated their nationals as early as July 17, all our government can do is request the Vatican to offer its churches and other facilities as relocation sites for our besieged brothers and sisters. Our officials are hoping that Israeli forces won’t hit churches and other sacred places.

Our diplomats’ game plan is to first relocate our OFWs to some safe havens such as churches before evacuating them by land to Syria or by sea to Cyprus. Evacuation will begin only when the situation reaches “Alert Level 4,” which is perhaps when bombs are already raining on the heads of our OFWs.

Our foreign affairs officials and diplomats have also appealed to other governments to please let our OFWs hitch a ride with their cruise ships and aircrafts.

As an appreciation for the contribution of OFWs to our economy and as a deep concern for their lives and safety, can’t our government charter a plane or two of Philippine Airlines? It’s not enough to just sing songs of praises for our OFWs while their dollar remittances are helping nourish our ailing economy. It’s time we show we really care for our hardworking OFWs by bailing them out of Beirut and Israel! Such action can at least help ease the pain not only of the troubled OFWs but also of their families back home whose stomachs must have become acidic already from too much worrying.

Storms of Our Lives

Typhoon Florita (international code name Bilis) literally caught us flatfooted. Thinking that the typhoon was not as strong as it was, my family and I didn’t stock on candles and batteries. At least we had food to eat. But for more than two days we were practically out of touch with the rest of the world because we were out of power. We had no batteries for our transistor radio and our mobile phones also ran out of batteries. In short, we were in the dark.

As in the good old days, we came to learn through our neighbors about some extent of damage that typhoon Florita wrought. It was through our neighbors that we came to learn about the landslides in Magsaysay Avenue and some fatalities in San Carlos Heights. So during those dark hours news came through word of mouth and not through the blow-by-blow news accounts on radio or television.

After a long summer, we welcomed the rainy season. For us who depend on a spring for our domestic water, the rains assure us of a steady supply of the universal solvent. Last summer, our water source was on the brink of drying up. But the heavens were so kind: the rains came at the right time when we needed them most.

And now typhoon Florita came and Baguio City was among those declared under a state of calamity. The strong typhoon came at a time when we were about to commemorate a major disaster that hit us 16 years ago – the July 16, 1990 killer quake.

But even with typhoon Florita’s excess rains and strong winds that caused landslides and floods, which snuffed out some lives and brought damage to property, we cannot curse the heavens. We have no right to. Like some challenges that we face in life, even storms and typhoons have a purpose. The sages say challenges or some storms in our lives help build and strengthen our character.

The same thing is true with disasters. The July 16, 1990 earthquake, for example, gave us much insights and lessons about how we should build and develop our city. The killer quake exposed some major engineering and planning errors in the way some hotels and other infrastructures were built.

After the killer quake, the general public sentiment was that it was high time to rethink about how we should rebuild our city. So there was this great enthusiasm about how we could re-engineer our city. There was this BLIST (Baguio, La Trinidad, Itogon, Sablan, Tuba) master plan, which European and local consultants helped design. One idea of the BLIST master plan was to decongest the city by “dispersing development.” New schools and commercial establishments, for example, should not be concentrated in the center of our downtown.

The idea was to also establish new schools and commercial centers in Baguio’s neighboring BLIST towns. But the BLIST idea up to now is only good on paper. New schools and new commercial establishments, including giant sari-sari (variety) stores called malls, are now added to our already crowded downtown.

It is not surprising then that each morning we all rush like crazy to catch a ride to town as we accompany our pre-school and grade school children to their schools. Like protons and neutrons, we all revolve around the nucleus that is Baguio’s central business and campus district.

Life could be more comfortable if people along Marcos Highway, for example, would rather send their children to some schools in Tuba town. The same could apply with people from Itogon and Sablan.

As part of BLIST, La Trinidad is already so congested and badly planned that it also needs some re-engineering. No wonder the town suffers from traffic jams and perennial floods.

It is time we learn from Marikina City. Floods used to be a perennial problem of the shoe capital. But the engineering genius of Bayani Fernando transformed the city into one of the models of urban development. With Singapore as its benchmark, Marikina City is one place where one can bike without fear of being sideswiped by running vehicles because bikers are safe and secured in their own lanes.

Walking along Marikina’s sidewalks is also like a stroll in the park after the city government legislated that sidewalks must be “returned to the people.” Marikina’s slogan is that “sidewalks are for people” so private individuals have no right appropriating portions or whole sidewalks as part of their talyer (auto repair shop), vulcanizing shop, or parking lot.

From a flood-prune town, Marikina City now aspires to become Metro Manila’s Singapore, and it is apparently moving into this direction as its leaders are matching their words with concrete actions.

But in years past, Marikina was always in the news each time a super typhoon hits Metro Manila. Choppers had to rescue people who had to climb to their rooftops as floods invaded their living rooms.

We can also learn from our brother and sister Ivatans in Batanes who learned to live with the storms and typhoons that batter them each rainy season. We are told the Ivatans’ houses are so designed in such a way that these can weather super-typhoons and storms.

As we pick up the pieces again after and learn our lessons from typhoon Florita, the typhoon reminds us that life is not 100 percent summer. Storms also come into our lives from time to time to strengthen and build our character as individuals and as a community and to add a thing or two to our individual and collective wisdom.

Random Thoughts on Dreams

Tomorrow, John Denver sings, is yesterday’s dreams.

Each of us has dreams, and our dreams are always for something better than the situation in which we are now. For those of us parents who don’t have wealth to hand down to our children, we labor hard so our children can get to and finish school. Our dream is that one day after they finish college, our children can finally stand on their own toes.

So we may be taxi drivers, masons or carpenters, farmers or simple office workers, but we share a common dream -- to see our children become independent and responsible for their own lives later on. By the time our children get to become independent, we can breathe a sigh of relief as we thank the heavens for giving us all the strength and the love to help make the dreams of our children come true.

It is also this dream of a better tomorrow for our families, which drives many of us to seek jobs overseas. Unfortunately, we are born in a country where we are uncertain of what tomorrow will bring for us. Jobs are still elusive. Government can’t provide these for us. We try to apply for a government position and we discover that there are hundreds vying for that single position. And more often than not, the lucky one is the one endorsed by some top politician.

In applying for jobs overseas, we have to seek for those that are in demand in the global job market. Highly in demand now are nurses. As a result even pastors, physicians, accountants or office workers are now enrolling in nursing schools.

The demand for nurses created some multiplier effect in the home front. Universities and colleges, which didn’t offer nursing courses before, have opened nursing departments. In fact, new nursing schools have also mushroomed. So do review centers, which have sprouted like flea market stalls and videoke bars. Problem is that one review center has allegedly been implicated in leaking some answers to a board examination last June.

With the possibility of nullifying the results of the recent board exams as a result of the alleged leakage, hundreds of examinees who honestly passed the exams would be unnecessarily affected. This would disrupt the dreams of many young people who were aspiring to make the nursing board exam as a passport to jobs overseas. That’s what dishonesty can do – it can destroy dreams.

The review center, which reportedly leaked some answers to the board exams, might as well start learning that honesty is still the best policy. The review center reportedly leaked answers to the board exams in order to ensure a big percentage of board passers and thus raise its reputation over the other competing review centers. With such motive, this review center should be closed down because it has disrupted the dreams of many young people.

By leaking some answers, the review center is also teaching a wrong value, which just adds to the various scams in both high and low places now tearing apart this nation. These scams make this country of our dreams a land of our nightmares. We can do better than this as a people by reviewing our GMRC (good manners and right conduct) or refreshing ourselves with the values and qualities we learned as Boy and Girl Scouts.

Papal Blessing and God’s Will

Ms. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her spokespersons in Malacañang were happy to report that she was given a pat in the back by Pope Benedict XVI during her recent visit to the Vatican because of her role in repealing the death penalty.

Malacañang apparently made sure the death penalty was repealed before the scheduled presidential visit to the Vatican and other European countries, which have long been lobbying the Philippine government to abolish the death penalty.

A presidential spokesperson also reported that the Pope has given a “vote of confidence” for Ms Arroyo’s government, including the Malacañang-led drive to change the Constitution.

Still discredited as a result of the “Hello Garci” scandal, Ms. Arroyo needs all the vote of approval or diplomatic pat in the back she gets during her European state visits. These are also the breaks that Malacañang’s spin doctors can put to good use. For a presidency that suffers from a credibility crisis, all the right spin fed to media helps Ms Arroyo to stay in power. Her government standing on quicksand and not on solid rock, Ms Arroyo needs all the right spin to help her survive.

We must appreciate Ms Arroyo for helping abolish the death penalty. Every human being who values and reveres life would also pat Ms Arroyo’s back for her role in repealing the death penalty. But we must be scared by a government that cannot stop the killings of activists and journalists in the same way that we dread the killings of people by any other group, vigilante or rebel.

On Charter Change, we can cha-cha with Malacañang if we can see that we are not being taken for a ride. Those in the know have warned us that changing the constitution before the 2007 elections will create a powerful Interim Parliament composed of incumbent politicians who will decide whether the 2007 elections will be held or not. Changing the constitution according to Malacanang’s framework, we are also warned, will create a super-power President with additional Prime Minister powers, open the door for those in power to stay on indefinitely, and will weaken the Supreme Court as a check against martial law, abuse of power and violation of human rights.

If anything, Ms Arroyo and her spin doctors were able to divert public attention from the “Hello Garci” fiasco to the cha-cha debate. Their line: this country cannot move forward because of a defective constitution. Ergo, change the Constitution and lo and behold a paradise.

So it is important for Malacanang’s spokespersons to tell us that the Pope has given a vote of confidence for Ms Arroyo’s political reforms via Charter-change. Ms Arroyo needs all the papal blessing to help her push what’s on her agenda. She needs the Pope’s pat in the back to also bolster her claim that it was God’s will for her to be the country’s president. She had said that it was God’s will for her to rule the country, remember?

The problem was that earlier in December 2002, she swore before the statue of Rizal below the Baguio City Hall that it was God’s will for her not to run for president for the sake of the country’s unity. That earlier decision should have been the more correct move and the real will of God. But like an unpredictable twist in a story of fiction or an unpredictable weather as a result of global warming, God’s will also changes, at least according to Ms Arroyo.