Sincere, aggressive, collective efforts, a necessary ingredient in development

Waste segregation in Basey, Samar goes up Wednesday (August 8) when the local government unit formally launches this young program, hopefully with a morning parade. Waste management coordinators in the different barrios are expected to join the launch which at the same time officially starts the town’s strict enforcem ent of the government’s regulations on proper waste disposal and management. Beginning on that day, the LGU will not anymore collect trash or garbage that is not segregated. During the past several days, the LGU’s municipal manager for this local program had been going around the different rural and urban communities to make the people aware of the waste segregation necessity. Mayor Igmedio Junji E. Ponferrada is hopeful that the tonwspeople can comply with this requirement. It’s a matter of disciplining one’s self to get this program going through a desirable level of success. It wouldn’t be difficult for Basaynon since sometime last year, the LGU had already been into the needed information campaign. Most barrios have in fact already responded. Besides educating the constituents, the barrio officials had begun studying how to tailor waste management ordinance for their own villages and people. Meanwhile, these past days, too, garbage collection had been a regular sight in the town proper. Garbage collectors and trucks have been doing the rounds to clean up the streets. Many private citizens salute mayor Junji for the effective implementation of this program.

About a month earlier, the townspeople stood witness to women of Palaypay working in equal strength and enthusiams as their male counterpartys just to ensure that the household in this fast-progressing poblacion village would have its own water-sealed toilets. The women power shoveled the piles of fresh sand that had been stocked just outside the 2-storey (now going 3 storeys) barrio hall, and even helped carry hollow blocks and other materials for use in the construction of the toilets.

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If prayers are heard, at least four farm-to-market roads in this same town would see concreting towards the end of this year. Prayers actually began as early as September, 2006 when the barrio people themselves, through the leadership of their respective barrio officials, agreed among themselves that it was high time now that they plan and manage their own community needs and concerns vis-à-vis the reality that absence of funds from government was too hard to corner, so to speak. In years past, only the barrio leaders were relied on for presenting the vilage needs to higher officials. Most often, the requests, often verbalized reached only the ears of elected town officials. Because indeed there were no funds available for the construction of farm-to-market or access and linkage roads, everyone knew then that they were to be knocking, like in any past year, on “deaf ears”. One informatioin campaign via a barrio consultative assembly swept through such interior barrios as Mabini, Manlilinab, Baloog, and Cancaiyas, including their then inhabited sitios (some were abandone due to armed conflicts between the military and rebels, with the population that had been to an exodus to other safer barrios, including some sections in the town proper of Basey and in the town of Sta. Rita) and rallied the poor folks to a new ambitious course of action. It was the first time that they heard the campaign line “THINK BIG”, and the required descriptors of their desired level of development – BRAVE, AGGRESSIVE, SINCERE, ENLIGHTENED, YOUTHFUL (the first letters of these descriptors incidentally stood for the word BASEY. They worked along those slogans. Their guidance: DON’T GIVE UP, JUST INSIST, ASK AND FOLLOW UP UNTIL YOUR COLLECTIVE ENTREATING VOICE SOFTENS THE HEART OF THOSE IN GOVERNMENT. That was followed by the passage of resolutions by the barangay officials, personal ventilation of their concerns in several fora, the formation of the CASA (Council for the Accelerated Development of Samar Settlement-Basey), and finally the formal organization of the Baktas Kabub’wason Rural Workers Association. From year 2007 thru this year, it was the Baktas that had been meeting with the barrio people, empowering them on the sense of giving life form to the government’s policy on bottom-up planning, especially already under the administration of President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino. The Baktas officers had learned to link up with various government agencies and officials, including non-government organizations (NGOs) and private individuals, calling on them to extend whatever they could to respond to those needs. Baktas President Teodorico D. Porbus sent a long letter to President Aquino in July, 2010. Pictures of the sad state in the barrios, including how barrio people strive to get up with a desirable level of socio-economic progress at their own doorsteps, accompanied the detailed letter. By October, 2010, and until February, 2011, Baktas had been receiving letters from Cabinet Secretaries. It was made clear that those Secretaries had been given instructions by the Office of the President to do something fast to the needs of Basaynons. Since then, a life-giving inspiration has been sweeping across the poor barrios.

Unknown perhaps to many Basaynons, an additional concreting work would soon reach at least that section of the Basey-Guirang-Sohoton national road, if not Manilaay, that partly borders the campus (which often goes under water) of the Old San Agustin National High School. It will connect to the end of the concrete highway that had last been worked on several weeks ago. Some 32 million pesos has been committed for the additional concreting from that end of the highway. Former OSA punong barangay Calixtro Ocier (who is himself the CASA president) may soon rejoice when he walks out of his home in OSA to step on a conrcrete highway right in front of his house entrance. A good guy from a barrio along the Golden River had pleaded for the continuation of the concreting of this highway section, hopefully before the heavy rains start flooding again Old San Agustin. The Department of Public Works and Highways regional official had responded favorably. Another concreting will soon take place, maybe by October this year, if not earlier, from part of Magallanes to Panugmonon then to at least the entrance to Dawa. That too is expected to come as a blessing from DPWH. Thanks again to this apolitical baryhohanon of Basey.

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‘The development of an objective process is full of contradictions and struggles, and so is the development of the movement of human knowledge. All the dialectical movements of the objective world can sooner or later be reflected in human knowledge. In social practice, the process of coming into being, developing and passing away is infinite, and so is the process of coming into being, developing and passing away in human knowledge. As man’s practice which changes objective reality in accordance with given ideas, theories, plans or programmes, advances further and further, his knowledge of objective reality likewise becomes deeper and deeper. The movement of change in the world of objective reality is never-ending and so is man’s cognition of truth through practice. Marxism-Leninism has in no way exhausted truth but ceaselessly opens up roads to the knowledge of truth in the course of practice. Our conclusion is the concrete, historical unity of the subjective and the objective, of theory and practice, of knowing ant doing, and we are opposed to all erroneous ideologies, whether “Left” or Right, which depart from concrete history.’ – Mao Tse Tung

By: Chito Dela Torre

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