Pinatubo Revisited Luid ka Pampanga!

A family unit intact in a sardine can existence with fellow villagers transplanted to an open field evacuation center.

Distraught housewives wait under the scorching sun for their turn to pump water in a swallow artesian well.

People lining up like war internees before hired a truck bearing relief goods at the relocation site inside a former army depot at Clark Field.

That was survival.

The dour-faced men, now out of their farms, huddled all day in places remote from home, if not in hostile surroundings, helpless but undaunted by their pathetic plight, who talked of going back to rebuild their buried homes.

It was hope.

Now resettled in a new community remote from their roots, the lahar victims strike out at odd jobs, doing menial work, peddling; the women as laundry workers, the boys driving pedicabs as the young tots vend boiled corn, barbequed bananas and cheap popsicles.

It was enterprise.

That was the general scene in Pampanga relocation sites after the Pinatubo eruption in 1991. Gradually, the primeval instinct to endure awakened our capacity to rise after each disaster. We rebuild after every natural destruction.

Kapampangan residents realized then, as now, that they alone are the principal beneficiaries as well as determinants of their future. Community leaders agreed that government is not the main provider to impel human development after the Pinatubo calamity but only as a partner kindling and summoning the spirit to start reconstruction work.

It was the private sector will ultimately led the efforts in uplifting the socio-economic conditions of the victims of a rare catastrophe.

The reconstruction and development initiatives following stubborn struggle of the province to a rebirth had been attributed to the great and indomitable Kampangan spirit.

“A land without heritage is a place without a spirit” says an ancient Chinese proverb. Our ancestors had long invested in our own sense of history.

The dreadful June 15th eruption will always be remembered by the living in memory of the dead. It is a spiritual legacy for the future generation to emulate in times of calamities.

In so short a period, the desolation and squalor of lahar-devastated areas had been replaced by thriving human activities.

The farmlands have come back to life, the villages are alive with normal enterprices, and optimism and hope shines in the faces of the poor.

The transformation did not just happen by chance, but was the result of a congruence of forces. The strongest of these was the exceptional courage and leadership of concerned Pampangos who led the grinding campaign and struggle to get things moving. To rebuild, to reconstruct, and restore normal life- that was the goal.

Today Pampanga is enjoying an economic boom untouched by political turbulence. With major economic activities inside the Clark Special Econaomic Zone, the bigger engines of growth are based in the cities of Mabalacat, Angeles, and San Fernando, with the “twin cities” springing vibrantly active in their runaway momentum to speedy progress and prosperity

AN eye-catching detail surfaced in one of our stories last week, on the Capitol’s decision to pay for doctors who will visit 28 southern towns in Cebu to provide mental health services, as well as the medicines of those they will treat.

Sought for comment, one of the mayors welcomed the program and said he expected it to help the eight persons in his town who suffer from a mental illness. How he came up with eight, the story didn’t say. If his number is correct, that would mean less than a percent of the town’s population (31,130 as of 2015) lives with a mental illness.

One of the challenges of providing mental health is that it’s underreported. That’s why the mayor’s specific number stands out. That’s also why one of the responsibilities of the Department of Health (DOH) under the Comprehensive Mental Health Act will be to include mental health in the routine health information system, gathering for instance “data on completed and attempted suicides.” Congress, which passed this law last February, provided that five percent of excise taxes from alcohol and cigarettes shall be set aside to implement the law.

The signing last week of an agreement between Cebu Province and the Philippine