The images of the recent floods in Manila reminded me of all the times my car would stall in deeply-flooded streets, and I’d be stuck for hours far from home or office, huddled with other helpless people in the streets, hoping for some public transport that still worked, or the days when I couldn’t even leave the house in Quezon City to get to work.
And a much earlier memory: my brother and I as children being driven to school from V. Mapa St. in Sta. Mesa (then a lovely dead-end street that ended in rice fields and with many large old mango trees) to our schools in Mendiola. I remember distinctly, as our old tank-like Chrysler chugged along in the deep water, seeing with astonishment a banca float by right next to us, a man jauntily paddling away.
When I moved to this Province over a decade ago, people would ask me why – did I have family, work, friends here? I didn’t. Sometimes I’d reply that I was a refugee from Metro Manila (of recent “gates of hell” fame.) And it was true.
It was mainly to escape the traffic, the air pollution, the floods, the noise, but also the sad sight of the decay and congestion of many parts of the city that I had known as a child as livable and even pleasant.
From all those decades ago when we were in elementary school to this day, flooding persists, with some saying that it has worsened.
And every commentator seems to know why: neglected basic infrastructure, built-over ground surface and lack of open spaces, rapid rise of the population caused by rural to urban migration, urban decay outside of the enclaves of wealth, waterways clogged with garbage or blocked by structures, lack of urban planning or management, not to mention climate change. Makes one wonder what governments are for.
I fear it’s too late for Metro Manila; terminal illnesses can drag on a long time but the prognosis is not good. (Who was the environment blogger who said that the time would come when abandoned coastal megacities would be rubble under the sea….)
But as the lessons are clearly there from the disasters that are Metro Manila and even Cebu, are smaller towns with as yet more manageable situations learning, correcting and planning accordingly?
One lesson is that we neglect the environment at our own peril, finally understood but still not truly acted upon. Is there for Dumaguete a working and comprehensive implementation plan for the environment? It wouldn’t seem so, moreover, it’s apparently ok to violate even the few city environment ordinances.
Another lesson, already a decades-old commonplace, is that rural folk stream into towns and cities to escape the underdevelopment, the scarcity of services, the lack of a viable future in their rural and agricultural communities.
Many officials pat themselves on the back for farm to market roads but that hasn’t been enough to pull out of poverty the population that grows our food.
An insight drawn from a very recent assembly of barangay health workers and midwives from all over the Province is that the lack of support from the local government units (supplies, transportation, decent compensation, sheer shortage of health workers) does not allow better health services specially for interior or far-flung communities.
Will LGUs make the critical link between health and poverty, and make it a priority concern and area of action? With elections over, no more medical missions either to folks in distant places.
With every news image of floods or traffic jams, I think my “escape” to this Province was a good idea, though it remains to be seen how well growth and urbanization are managed.
The hard and sad lessons of mismanaged cities are there to learn from.
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