Water and Life

When we moved to our new place in a sub-village of Baguio City three years ago, we had no access to any piped water. But all our neighbors had their water tapped from a nearby spring and creek and conveyed to their houses through PVC pipes. They told us not to worry and that we could also look for some spring to access about 300 to 500 meters away from where we live.

Tired of fetching water from a neighbor, I ushered in my three brothers from the neighboring town of La Trinidad to help me explore a spring to which we could connect our own PVC pipe. My three brothers and I distributed ourselves over a Y-shaped creek above our sub-village. And presto, just before noon one Saturday more than three years ago, one of my brothers discovered a small spring, which other neighbors had ignored.

As we dug a well around the spring, we found a couple of vigilant mountain crabs, which – with their claws ready -- declared to us that they were the original and rightful inhabitants of that small water system. The presence of the dominantly orange-red creatures also made us understand that the spring was a living one, part of an oasis of life.

With stones, we built a terrace around the small well, which now catches the spring oozing from the grass- and reed-covered hill where an alnus tree and an endemic water-bearing tree proudly stand. From the well, we laid out a five-meter half-inch-diameter PVC pipe connected to a more than a cubic-meter rubberized plastic drum. Just a few inches lower in elevation than the water level of the well around the spring, this drum now serves as our main tank from which a 250-meter half-inch-diameter PVC pipe conveys water right into our yard.

That spring had provided our water needs for the last more than three years. On dry months starting February to May, however, the spring would shrink. So I’ve to readjust the flow of water from the well to the plastic drum tank. Through trial and error, I discovered that the rate of water flow to the tank must be equivalent with the rate of water coming out from the foothill spring.

How do I adjust the rate of water flow? During the rainy season, I can lower the end of the pipe connected to the tank. But during summer I’ve to elevate the other end of the pipe so even if the water flowing is as small as a rat’s tail, we are still assured that water continues to flow into the tank.

But something happened just this February. A neighbor dug a well just two feet away from my own well. Since the new well my neighbor dug was lower, the water supplying my well decreased. I could have complained but I just shrugged my shoulders, fully understanding that my neighbor was also in dire need of water. In other communities, this could have led to a fist fight or even a tribal war.

In our sub-village, we feel blessed for having free water. But as our neighborhood is growing, it would not be advisable for every new neighbor to dig his own well. The wisest thing is to have one big reservoir and equally distribute the water to all households. But this needs more logistics and members of the neighborhood have to be organized. This can be a prospective community project in coordination with the Barangay (village) captain and with some government or donor agency.

In the meantime my family and I still try to conserve water as much as possible. We close our faucet when our drum is full. It is better that what overflows is the tank that catches water from the spring because what overflows also goes to the creek where farmers have tapped their irrigation source. The water used to wash dishes can be used to water the plants and the water used for laundry can be used to flush the toilet.

While others welcome summer, I dread it because this is a time of uncertainty for our water source. But thanks to a recent cold front, it has rained recently for three days, including during the World Day of Water on March 22; thus reinforcing our spring, our source of living water, and one of our intimate links to our dear Mother Earth.

Power Shift and Big If

The landed and other top economic elites, many of them in extractive industries, have lorded it over our electoral politics since after World War II. Economic wealth for a long time has been the twin of political power in this country.

Although we have seen in recent years the rise of relatively poor politicians like former Senator Juan Flavier and Sen. Joker Arroyo (now seeking reelection), political power in this country remains largely in the hands of economic elites.

So I don’t mind really if movie stars, some of whom had started small before reaching stardom, are now entering electoral politics. They could use their popularity to invade a realm, which used to be monopolized by the traditional political big guns.

By sincerely putting to heart the interests of their thousands of fans, who include the ordinary masses, these movie stars seeking electoral positions may yet make a difference. As more movie and television personalities enter politics, political power in this country may yet shift from the landed and other wealthy elites to the hands of movie and television stars-turned-politicians.

But movie stars entering politics may have to educate themselves about the sanctity of a public office as a public trust. Former president Joseph Estrada had proved that movie stardom could pave one’s way to the top electoral position. Something, however, went wrong along the way, which had something to do with violating the sanctity of a public office. He may have started with sincere, good intentions. But he became infected with the usual politician’s disease in which absolute power could absolutely corrupt even the best of intentions.

So here’s an unsolicited advice to Goma, Cesar Montano and other movie idols entering politics: learn legislation and governance not from the usual traditional politicians, but from other models. Japanese politicians may yet offer some tips. Because the values of honor, accountability and integrity are part of Japanese political behavior, some Japanese politicians would rather commit hara-kiri if they could not stomach a wrongdoing they committed.

Not in the Philippines. Many Filipino politicians are known, if not perceived, as the most thick-skinned species in the animal kingdom. They can go around town promising the moon and the stars when they are courting for our votes but continue rob us dry when they get elected.

With the proper moral formation coupled with sufficient capacity-building in governance, movie stars turned politicians, as they do on screen, may yet help rescue the suffering and downtrodden from the villains who, with forked tongues, have long deceived us.

And if the new breed of politicians from the movie world really put the general interests of their lowly fans above theirs, the process of a shift of political power from the usual traditional political dynasties to this new breed may have begun. Be cautioned, however, that this is still a BIG IF.

Making Decisions

Two major sections of our population have to make major decisions at this point. They are our graduating high school students and our voting population.

Many graduating high school students already may have made up their minds in choosing what to pursue in college. They may have based their choices on aptitude tests or college entrance examinations they have already taken. Or they may have based their choices on what they, as children, have long dreamed of doing during the rest of their lives. But there still are many who have yet to decide on what to pursue.

Under our current situation, one major factor that influences the choice of young people is the global job market. The growing job market for nurses, for example, in recent years has led to the rise in enrolment of those taking up nursing. Like herds of animals lured by the scent of greener grazing land, hordes of our young people have been enrolling in nursing schools, prompting many colleges and universities to open up new departments for nursing students. This herd does not include physicians, lawyers, and other professionals who had enrolled and continue to enroll in nursing schools.

I don’t know if the job market should be the overlying force to help young people choose what to pursue. But given our current situation in which young people are left with few choices, choosing a college course that will most likely enable them to land a job in the future is probably the most practical to consider.

Ideally, young people should choose a career path in which they can fully develop their potentials as total persons, and not simply as an employee or OFW. One, for example, can opt to become a farmer who at the same time can teach others about farm and business management and who can promote his products through his own website and who, on the side, can sing songs he himself composed to the accompaniment of a violin or bamboo instrument.

To enable young people to be able to have wider choices may yet need a rethinking of our educational system. For a long time, our educational system has been geared towards producing employees and workers. We have yet to have schools that train young people to become employers and business tycoons. And most of those who get to become business magnates did not learn the ropes of managing businesses in school. Many of these successful entrepreneurs were those who learned what it meant to “get out of the box.”

We had cited before Narda Capuyan who would jokingly say she learned her trade from the non-existent University of Besao. Another is Jack Dulnuan, a successful businessman, whose secrets of success didn’t come from a university but from experience and sheer hard work.

Amidst the limited choices and opportunities we have for our young people in this country of our hopes and dreams, we now have politicians bombarding us with advertised promises to help fulfill our dreams once they get elected. This brings us to another major decision, which we have to make through our ballots on May 14.

In choosing whom to vote for in May, Adrian Cristobal’s advice that the biblical Ten Commandments should be the practical guide for voters may yet work. The first commandment, for example, forbids idolatry. But even candidates who claim to be “pro-God” are relying on the idolatry of machinery and money to win the elections. So we must be wary of those who make machinery and money their idols as they court us for our votes.

The other commandments that forbid killing, stealing, coveting your neighbor’s wife and goods can also guide us in choosing whom to vote for. Killing does not only mean extra-judicially snuffing out lives through the barrels of guns. Killing is also making life harder for some people so much so that they die from the slow death of poverty or from the murderous threats of environmental destruction as a result of legal or illegal logging or other destructive extractive industries. The impact of these destructive industries is magnified during the typhoon season when flashfloods and mudflows bury whole communities. And the culprits conveniently blame nature for the tragedies in which they actually have blood in their hands.

So beware of those who promise to fulfill our dreams. The multi-million funds for a sweet-talking politician’s campaign may have come not from blood diamonds (because obviously diamonds are found in abundance only in Sierra Leone and other parts of Africa), but from blood logs and blood gold.

Another challenge, however, to our decision-making process as citizens is that there actually are a few candidates to choose from. If the Ten Commandments are strictly followed as guide for voters, there might be no one to choose at all. So we have to settle for the choosing-the-lesser-evil formula.

But let’s hope whoever we choose to write on our ballot gets counted correctly by the election commission, which, upon the manipulation of some top guns, has become notorious for not knowing how to count.