Depriving kids of trust and belief

BENCHWARMER

Ramon Dacawi

Sometime last July, I reiterated before a meeting of the Baguio Regreening Movement (BRM) a request repeated now and then over the years. The oft-and-on plea was for the Baguio Water District, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the city forestry to coordinate with volunteers of the Eco-walk children’s program before assigning any tree-planting area at the Busol Watershed, one of the city’s few remaining watersheds.

BRM chair and city councilor Erdolfo Balajadia saw the point and immediately called a coordination meeting, during which representatives of BRM, DENR, BWD and Eco-walk agreed to finally harmonize activities within the watershed.

 It was to prevent overlapping or undue taking over by Johnny-come-latelys of planting  areas long assigned to and maintained for years by groups, especially children who have been involved in the Eco-walk program since its inception in Busol 20 years ago. The kids’ program, inspired by indigenous knowledge, was conceptualized by members of the Baguio media and supported by the BRM, the city, the city schools and others.

 Anchored on indigenous knowledge, particularly the Ifugaos’ “muyong” system of watershed management, Eco-walk won for the children of Baguio the Global 500 award for outstanding environmental achievement bestowed by the United Nations Environment Programme during the  World Environment Day rites in Shenzhen, China in June, 2002.  

Councilor Balajadia’s “coordination meeting” was triggered by a letter of a teacher of the Seventh Day Adventist School who expressed his young wards’ dismay when, during their last visit to their adopted area, they found recently installed billboards proclaiming it has been adopted by a government agency.

I advised the teacher to remove the billboards, if only  to restore his kids’ “ownership” over the seedlings, saplings and poles that they have been nurturing for years. With that and the coordination meeting, I thought the issue would be put to rest.

Last week-end, we guided members of St. Louis Boys High Batch ’91 and their young kids to a walk-through of Busol. As it was no longer the rainy season, they didn’t do any tree planting. Unless you come water what you plant two times a week until they survive, we told them. Together with city councilor Peter Fianza,  we led  them to a walk-through that brought us to where the program began 20 years ago.   

That’s when we learned that, two weeks back, an employee of the BWD had guided well-meaning students of a public high school, to a tree-planting in Busol. Well and good, it would have been, even if it’s no longer the planting season.

Problem was, and is, that he led them to planting and overlapping, without their knowledge, portions of two adjoining sites adopted 19 and 20 years ago. Parts of the areas he assigned were originally adopted by pupils of Rizal Elementary School who pioneered the Eco-walk in July, 1992 and by the Timpuyog ti Ili, the volunteer group of barangay leaders who established their own planting site in 1993, the year they volunteered to support the program as guides.

 Members of the Timpuyog may shrug off the recent intrusion. Despite their being grown-ups now, the kids who planted since 20 years back the growing pine trees may find their sense of collective ownership as pioneers of the program truly violated by a guide’s disregard for propriety and sense of fair play. So would the high school students who were misled last month feel cheated if informed of this complication, their pure intention to do something for the environment dented by a single adult’s lapse.   

 For the nth time, and for the kids who passed through and will pass through the environmental program that runs on volunteerism, we appeal anew for harmony in the assignment of planting and maintenance sites in Busol, with due respect to the chronology of things.

 Otherwise the kids won’t believe us, adults, anymore.

                                                             *****

We dedicate a parody, by Ogden Nash,  of Joyce Kilmer’s poem about trees to adult groups who have installed permanent billboards inside Busol. The forest definitely does not need any of these intrusive signs that, in the eyes of children who were working there years earlier but hardly put up their own signs, degrade, rather than exalt the names and reputations of their companies:

 “I think that I shall never see/A billboard lovely as a tree/ And if those billboards do not fall/ I shall never see the trees at all.”

                                                            ****

My command of the written word  gets spotty each time my blood pressure shoots up, as it did over the BWD guide’s amnesia over an agreement.  To fill space while I calm down, here’s my parody about all those diggings on roads and streets, the latest of which wasobliteration of a sidewalk along Leonard Wood Road to give greater room for cars to maneuver on a road already spacious even before pedestrians were robbed of their space (and dignity) in this eastern part of the urban landscape.    

 It’s a redo of “Mountains of Mourne”, an Irish ballad written by the 19^th century musician Percy French, revived by Don Mclean as centerpiece of one of his records. I wish folksinger and weekly paper editor Alfred “Pacyay” Dizon would belt it out one of these nights:

 “Oh, Alfred this road is a terrible sight/ With people all working by day and by night/Sure they don’t sow potatoes, nor cabbage, nor beet/ But there’s gangs of them digging in (pipes) in the street.

 “At least when I asked them that’s what I was told/ So I just took a look at this repairing of road/ But for all that I find there, I might as well be/ Where the dug-up gravel don’t sweep down to the sea.

 “I believe that when writing a wish you expressed/ As to know how the contractor would have it pressed/ Well, if you’ll believe me, when asked to a “bull” (session, that is)/ They don’t put enough blacktops to press at all.

 “Oh I’ve seen them meself and you could not in truth/Say they were bound to their timetables and all/Do write a column or editorial piece, Alfred dear/ About their diggings being swept down to the sea.” (e-mail: mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments).