Dear MetroPost,
I’m sorry that I am unable to transmit this letter by email, but I have no internet or email service now because the cables of my phone/internet provider were cut and stolen in Barangay Bagacay for the second time this week.
Perhaps unknown to many people in the downtown areas of Dumaguete, this cable pilferage has been going on for more than a year now. It has happened four times in Batinguel and five times in Bajumpandan. The cable company gave hot coffee and flashlights to the Tanods of Bajumpandan–to no avail. When the OIC Dumaguete police chief was contacted today he said he was going to organize a task force about the problem -’now’ (more than a year after these incidents began).
The culprits should not be hard to trace as they would be dealing with buyers of large amounts of molten copper wire. Not something your local neighborhood junk buyer could pay for. So there shouldn’t be hoards of traders in this category. The loss of even our telephone service is particularly worrisome since the telephone service of the major medical provider where our doctor works is on an internal phone network on the same telephone provider that we use, so we can’t contact our doctor, and we have one family member who was just released from eight days of hospitalization.
But that is not the only problem we’re facing right now. Every day between the hours of 1-4 a.m.,we have no water. That is because the water district diverts the water from a well intended to serve the areas of Silliman Heights, northern Junob and Junob to fill up the downtown reservoir. So we get 21 instead of 24 hours of water service. But do we get a discount for receiving less water? No, we do not!
I have to wonder what has happened to our city planning, or if we have any. We keep adding more schools and increasing the existing ones populations. We want more call centers and more high-rise hotels. We can’t dispose of our trash but we want to have more people to add to it. We now even have a large power-hungry mall.
And the number of private motorcycles has grown to thousands in just 2-3 years (instead of putting in a well-planned, privately owned, public transportation system for Dumaguete City). So now the functional system we used successfully for years (tricycles which carried 3 to 4 passengers) is now almost dead because they can hardly find one passenger at a time. If we had thought ahead we could have encouraged privately owned minibuses for downtown use. And now at least part of the unemployed tricycle drivers could have become minibus drivers and conductors. And then if we didn’t have these huge mobs of motorcycles to wade through, pedestrians might have a chance of safely crossing a street.
It’s sad to see that a city renowned for its concern for the preservation of the marine and forest ecology does not seem to recognize the importance of good city planning to preserve the safety, sanity and good human behavior that this city was once known for. Let’s stop this unplanned superspeed urban growth before we have massive breakdowns in our society, before we start experiencing extreme shortages of necessities like electricity and water which are already at critical levels and even fuel (the Sibulan depot can no longer meet all our needs, which is why some fuel is now trucked in from Bacolod and which is why our fuel prices are so high).
We must start the ecology of city planning now before the city we have known and loved becomes another unlovable Mega Mess like Metro Manila. Dumaguete, poor Dumaguete–where has gone the City I have known and loved. Public officils, please prevent the further destruction of this cherished place!
Name withheld upon request
