What's the DSWD doing for street urchins and sidewalk dwellers?
Is the Department of Social Welfare and Development too busy gathering signatures for the charter change, that it has apparently neglected to do its primordial mission to extend welfare and development services to the poorest of the poor? Why are thousands of half-clad children roaming the streets and why are hundreds of families residing permanently on sidewalks within the plain view of the DSWD and the whole of humanity?
Why is the Department of Tourism not setting a formal coordination conference with DSWD national, regional, provincial, and city officials precisely to discuss these very evident manifestations of government neglect, ineptitude, lack of foresight, and lack of concern?
Why are the governors, the mayors, and the local politicians who are too fixated on their wars on turfs not at all disturbed, worried, or at least affected by such sights, smells, and disturbances? Is there no councilor or even division chief in City Hall who is concerned? What have they done, are doing, or have promised to do? Where are these trapos hiding? Are they finger pointing?
Does the government at all have any coordinating committee composed perhaps of the representatives of the mayor, the city DSWD officer, the local sanitation unit, the police and the City Health Office and all the relevant agencies? Why are trapos too busy bickering with venues of religious ceremonies or festivities, while ignoring the stinking garbage, the obnoxious smell of human and animal waste, both solid and liquid, spread around the street corners, esteros and thrown into canals?
Local legislators readily approve budgets supposedly for performance bonuses to LGU employees who are not even mindful of the looks and the smell of their city. What performance are you talking about? Look around five meters away from your offices. What is happening to our country, general?
The DSWD cannot even tell us how many beggars are roaming in every nook and cranny of the metropolis. Does this department, which by the way, has been entrusted with gargantuan budgets, have any developmental strategies to help the beggars and the street urchins? Is it fixated only on dole-outs and making our people perpetual mendicants instead of helping them acquire human dignity by working in order to earn an honest peso?
Why doesn't the DSWD, in the style of the Department of Labor and Employment's TUpad program, pay wages to the sidewalk dwellers so they would clean the streets, the canals, and let these people have dignity of earning what they eat? It appears that the DOLE is more creative, more concerned, and more committed than DSWD.
Is the DSWD only for disasters, like super typhoons, earthquakes, and fires? Don't the DSWD officials and personnel see that what is happening in the streets is a continuing disaster? People dwelling in the sidewalks are mostly the ones throwing waste, garbage, and all sorts of pollutants and nuisances to the view of all the city residents.
Where are the Rotary Clubs, the Jaycees, the Lions, and the Inner Wheel Clubs? But most of all, where is the DSWD? Are they sleeping? Or busy doing what was ordered by politicians to get signatures in exchange for ayuda? I am not accusing. I am only asking.
The evidence is palpable and too glaring to be ignored. The thing speaks for itself, smells for itself, and stinks for itself. Where are the people from DSWD or from the City Hall? I challenge all of you to reply. And don't give me empty words or hollow promises. Don't attempt at finger pointing. Just do your jobs. Show the people concrete results. I dare you all.