landslide

I remember passing by St. Bernard, Southern Leyte as I was on my way to Hinunangan and Anahawan on separate occasions to visit Jesuit Volunteers at that time. It was the usual provincial town, with its rocky roads, quaint wooden houses, as well as unpainted cement ones, men hanging out in the small sari-sari store sharing a bottle of gin, ladies with kids in tow clumped outside a house probably for their daily staple of gossip. I found the town’s name interesting since it was the only one with a foreign name. Some of the other places of Southern Leyte were called Baybay, Maasin, Liloan and Libagon. Until now, I have not discovered the reason for its odd name .

Finding out about the extent of the St.Bernard tragedy last Sunday (was on a trip Friday and Saturday) made me numb. Over 80 confirmed dead, an estimate of a thousand buried under 30 meters of mud with 200 of them elementary students, and countless left homeless.

Southern Leyte has happened before. Quezon, Aurora, Leyte, Samar, Surigao… Lives and property lost from landslides and flash floods. This has happened before and NOTHING is still being done to prevent further occurrences. Nothing. All the lousy, corrupt government has been doing is to declare a state of calamity and rush to aid once tragedies happen.

But while the weather is sun is bright and yellow, they issue environmental compliance certificates (ECC) to logging businesses, rich coconut farmers, pineapple plantations and what- have-you. Worse, they pimp entire provinces to foreign mining companies to dig up, destroy and pillage. While the sky is stunning blue, they pocket kickback for the construction of roads, dams and other infrastructure.

Southern Leyte has happened before. And it will happen again.

It IS beautiful seeing people once again unite to help these people, donations pouring in from all over the country and the world. Beautiful indeed. Yet admittedly, once the media blitz of the calamity wanes, support trickles down as well.

Maybe it is time to just go beyond just sending in donations. Maybe it is time to take in our hands preventive measures that the government should be doing. As we already know they are quite unreliable.

Let’s not wait for another tragedy to send our donations. Instead we get ahead of it. Preventive measures should be done, reforestation projects or the coconet suggestion from today’s Inquirer. If groups like Gawad Kalinga can help rebuild houses, maybe another group can help rebuild and protect forests. Or if there are such projects like Adopt-A-School, maybe there could be Adopt-a-(kalbo) Mountain.

Whatever it is, we should do something! As citizens. Ayoko nang umasa sa gobyerno dahil wala tayong mapapala. Pero kung tayo na mismo ang gagawa ng paraan para mapigilan pa ang mga pangyayari na ito, baka sakaling mas may mangyari pa.

Now… how do we go about it?