WTF? (Where’s the fund?)

Cong Corrales

NO, I won’t be discussing the latest trend in Facebook about Rodrigo Duterte’s rape joke. As much as I am tempted to join in the bashing, there really isn’t much to be said about it. I have vented my two cents on the matter on my Facebook wall already. Having said that, I would like to share what I saw (or didn’t see) in three of the upland barangays of the city on Sunday.

I, together with two journalists, went with Ms. Rhona Canoy in her campaign sortie in Pagalungan, Tuburan, and Pigsag-an. Canoy is the eldest daughter of my maninong The Reuben Canoy and is gunning for a seat in the city council as one of the representatives of the city’s first district.

I was curious how an independent candidate fare in comparison with big well-oiled machinery of a political party. We went with Canoy to document her campaign trail. The output of which I will not be discussing here. That’s for next week.

What I want to discuss here, however, is what we saw in Kasaligan village, Tuburan. Right smack (quite literally) in the middle of nowhere are 70 shelters built on a slope of a hill. The shelters are already decrepit. We asked two of the residents there and here’s what we found out.

Of the 70 houses (shelters, semantics really), which are supposed to be for Sendong survivors, only three families are residing in the little village. The three families, we learned, belong to the Higaonon tribe.

There is no running water. They have to walk about two kilometers to fetch water. So you can just imagine the hygiene and sanitation problems the children in their little village have to contend with. They have to boil the water they fetch by the river.

There is no electricity. Like I said earlier, since the little village is in the middle of nowhere, every night the entire village is plunged in darkness.

The woman we asked said they cannot leave the place because the area has been theirs since time immemorial–ancestral domain, if you will.

My question is, who is the brilliant politician who thought about building 70 houses in the middle of nowhere, with no running water and electricity for people who have been devastated by the aftermath of Sendong?

Canoy’s suggestion is to build a water tank in the village and the Bureau of Fire would schedule shifts to deliver water in the village. Methinks this is the best we can do to salvage this ill-conceived project.

Going to the mountains with Canoy that Sunday was educational as well as frustrating. In the latest census of the Philippine Statistics Authority, Tuburan has a population of 1,395; Pigsag-an has 1,256; Pagalungan has 1,806. That’s roughly 4,000 people with no running water. But that’s only three of the city’s 10 upland barangays.

Nothing is more frustrating than hearing the people there say they only see politicians visit their villages during election season.

We ended our visit in that village with Canoy sarcastically telling me: “And you thought you have problems?”