A subdivision's grand disservice
FIESTA COMMUNITIES was a leading residential enclave for middle income families in Mabalacat City.
At its inception, it promised prospective homeowners a wellplanned clean and orderly residential area complete with a park, well-paved streets, with names reflecting the developer's nationalist orientation, a functioning water service provider and a regular garbage collection, for a fee, of course.
After selling and disposing off the units, detached and small row houses, Fiesta Communities has acted disoriented and lukewarm to its maintenance responsibilities, especially its garbage collection duties.
As a result, garbage and other refuse materials have accumulated on almost all households, in streets and even near its access gate.
The streets are now littered with stinking garbage and no one seems to care, especially Fiesta management and the homeowners association.
The once spic-and-span community has become dirty and disorderly, despite garbage collection fees assessed each household monthly. No payment, no sticker, no collection of garbage.
Such now is the calloused attitude of Fiesta Communities visa-vis the homeowners. What a pity!
It may have been so moneyoriented that it does no longer care about keeping a clean environment and the health of residents as long as it collects. Meanwhile, adding to the misery of residents are stray dogs and noisy mufflers.
One cannot introduce improvements to his unit without getting permission from Fiesta Communities and without giving a deposit first. It's all money, money for Fiesta Communities and its greed seems to be insatiable. One cannot move without it being involved in any money activity. Mukhang pera, ika nga. Greed breeds contempt!
Fiesta Communities is Mr. Shrewd personified because it does not allow itself to get the shorter end of the bargain. In all transactions, it allegedly makes sure it gets on top.
Conversely, at Santos Ventura National High School, Tabun, the faculty headed by its principal, Mrs. Babylyn Dungca Manuel is striving for excellence, given its scarce resources and limited physical space.
In a meeting with parents sometime ago, she made an impassioned appeal to the attendees to help the school achieve its objectives of excelling both in academics and in civic and social aspects.
She has a hardworking staff and a complement of new but committed teachers.
BbyIBIBI is a hand-crafted sake named its maker Aki Ikeda after the “sound sunlight makes when hitting the water.”
Ikeda, her mother, and sister also produce in their sake brewery in Shikoku, Japan another sake that has won over the experts. Its name: Fufufu.
Since I read these lines in the February/March 2018 issue of “DestinAsian,” I have been thinking about the stories in sounds.
We attempt to render in words experiences captured by sounds. What if there is no sound? Can there really be none at all?
Ikeda’s wordplay lingers despite my having no experience with the Japanese language nor of sake nor of living in Shikoku, where, in a kelp factory converted into a brewery, three women and a “toji (master brewer)” make sake in winter with spring water harvested from the “flanks of Mount Hoshigajyo.”
I have seen, though, how sunlight bounces off water from watching the sea as a child, as a mother watching her sons lent for a moment to the sea’s embrace, as a watcher of waves returning, breaking apart, and departing again as another year turns the corner and disappears.
There is no limit to what we imagine.
At the start of this week, I walked with thousands of others to the Office of the University Registrar (OUR) at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman. The acronym is incongruous for an edifice that reminds each person approaching the building of what divides us from those within.
The OUR processes the documents of all those seeking to enter the UP System. Last July 30 underscored the difference.
On the first day of general enrolment for all UPD students from undergraduate to graduate levels, private high school students in Metro Manila also “lined up” to submit their applications for the UP College Admission Test (UPCAT) to beat their batch deadline.
Hence, there were no lines to speak of outside the OUR. I walked on T. M. Kalaw Street, sharing this with other pedestrians and motorists, because the sidewalks circling the OUR were covered by mats, tents, and trash left by people squatting on the sidewalks.
The listlessness and silence prevailing in the sidewalks contrasted with the chaos swirling outside the gates of the OUR. No matter what one’s business was, the objective to get inside the building (or leave it) directed the energies of each person in that melee.
UP is a metaphor for survival. Despite the platitudes of equity in education, struggles are omnipresent in a system that pressures, sieves, privileges.
In the middle of a queue that was not a queue, I remembered “bibibi.” The sound of light meeting liquid turning fluid for this Cebuano, though, is “kuntahay.”