COMMUNITY BILLBOARD

Outstanding barangay kagawads honored

BAGUIO CITY  -  The top ten outstanding barangay kagawads were recently recognized and awarded here at the Baguio Convention Center. 

Outstanding barangay kagawads were: Eduardo Emmanuel Cayetano and Julie Datayan of Loakan Proper, Jose Cawiding of Hillside, Larry Datayan of Middle Quirino Hill, TeresitaEllamil of City Camp Proper, Brenda Lasala of Upper Q.M., EladioOrtenero of Kabayanihan, Glory Taclawan of Pinget, Faustino Wayas of Pacdal, and CarlitoZordilla of Irisan.

A total of 35 nominees from 23 barangays were screened and validated by the Association of Barangay Kagawads, said ABK president Grace Mayos of Gibraltar barangay.

After the screening and validation, the nominees were trimmed down to 20 nominees for the final judging, added Mayos.

The board of judges for the said search were University of the Philippines Chancellor, Dr. Raymundo Rovillos, Vice President for Administration of the University of the Cordilleras Dr. Leonarda Aguinalde, Civil Service Commission Director Atty. Allyson Locano, and Legal Executive Officer of the Department of Labor and Employment Emmanuel Barcellano.

The top 10 outstanding barangay kagawads were given plaques of recognition and P1,000 cash each.  The 11th to 20th placer received certificates of recognition and P500 each. -- JhoArranz

Baguio inks sisterhood ties with San Fernando, Barlig

BAGUIO CITY – Baguio has declared sisterhood ties with San Fernando City in Pampanga and with Barlig town in Mt. Province.

The city council approved resolutions accepting the offers of said places for kinship.         

In Resolution No. 241, the body noted commonalities with San Fernando City, which is regarded as the Christmas Capital of the country and the regional center of Central Luzon while Baguio is the summer capital and also the seat of national line agencies in the Cordillera Administrative Region.

“As of 2010, the City of San Fernando has a population of 285,000 which is not quite far from the City of baguio’s population of 310,000.  In both cases, the growth of population was due not only to natural increase but also to in-migration,” the resolution noted.

“While the city of Baguio is known as the Center of Education, the City of San Fernando continues to strengthen its role as the education center of the Province of Pampanga.  Both have highly educated manpower reserved and highly qualified labor force.”

“With the foregoing commonalities, it is but proper to reciprocate the declaration by the City of San Fernando, Pampanga by likewise declaring a twinning/sisterhood ties in order to strengthen and to develop our relationship and to further foster our cultural, social, tourism, economic, professional, scientific and technical expertise and mutual understanding on matters where advantages or privileges are granted by each local government unit to the constituents of the other,” the resolution said.

 In Resolution No. 240, the city also agreed to pair up with Barlig town noting the town’s attributes.

“Barlig is a fifth-class municipality of Mt. Province with a population 6,168 divided in 11 barangays.  Its residents are predominantly of Igorot descent but despite living in a single town, the people speak different languages,” the resolution noted.

“The town boasts of its own rice terraces, the Barlig Rice terraces near the center of the town and Lias Rice Terraces in Lias.”

            

The body said the sisterhood ties would “strengthen and to develop the city-town relationship and promote exchange of best practices.”

            

The body asked the Philippine International Sisterhood and Twinning Association Baguio City Chapter (PHISTA-BCC) committee to prepare the necessary documents for the establishment of the twinning relationship with said areas.

Woman loses 2 kids, struggles to survive
BAGUIO CITY -- Grace Dupingay Bango had been a mother twice, but only for seven days in each instance. Two years back, she gave birth to a baby boy. Last September, she had a baby girl.

Both infants came two months early. Both went prematurely, too.

Each survived by their mother’s side for only seven days. She remembers their birthdays: May 25, 2011 and Sept. 2, 2012.

Most likely, the losses had something to do with her being a diabetic. The metabolic malady was diagnosed in 2003.

To try to keep her blood sugar at normal levels, Grace, now 32, is on daily insulin injection.  

The insulin maintenance is something Isagani, her 32-year old husband, can sustain, even with his meager earnings as a pocket mining hand depending on luck. 

What the young, still childless couple can’t cope with on their own is Grace’s other condition. Last Christmas, doctors told her her she had  end-stage renal failure. It meant both her kidneys were dead. 

Kidney failure, like heart ailment, high blood pressure and going blind, is  a long-term complication of diabetes. 

Before her thrice-a-week hemodialyis treatment last Monday, Grace walked to the city hall.

She needed to know when the budget allocations of the city councilors for support to indigent patients like her would be available. 

“The nurse at the (renal) treatment room  told me I have only two more dialysis sessions I can charge to Philhealth,” she said with a sense of urgency,  referring to the government health insurance agency.

Grace’s schedule for the four-hour blood-cleansing sessions is on the third shift (between 3 to 4 p.m.) every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center. 

That meant she would have used her second-to-the-last Philhealth card last week No more since Sept. 14.

Like many other hemodialysis patients – 185 of them at the BGHMC-, Grace knows for quite sometime now  how expensive it was – and is – to be poor.

Poverty gnaws deep even for the normal poor who, unlike her,  never lost a child and, despite the occasional pangs of hunger, are, on the average, considered healthy. 

For hemodialysis patients, however,  there’s no relief in sight. Dialysis treatment is for life, done at least twice-a-week,  with dire consequences for those who skip a treatment or two.

For Grace and many others similarly situated, the saving grace is their undiminished will to live against the odds. 

That’s why she started knocking on doors last. Like others before her, she signed a paper that permits her story to be written, “for publication and airing in any media outlet, with the hope that readers/listeners would be able to extend their help to enable me to sustain my treatment”.

Grace is the youngest of three children of a marginal rice farming couple in Lagawe. Ifugao. Her brother Fernando, 37, is an off-and-on jeepney driver plying the Plaza-Trancoville route here while her sister Eva, 40, married with seven children, is into pine needle craft with her husband. 

Grace married Isagani Bango, a  provincemate. After their wedding, the couple came to Baguio in search of opportunity to raise a family. Isagani, now also 32, found work with a pocket-mining labor crew in Antamok, Itogon.

In a social case study report, social welfare officer CoralieDulnuan noted: “(Grace and Isgani) expressed their financial difficulty because their financial resources were already exhausted since the death of their baby (in) September, 2013 and her maintenance medication.”

The couple live at No. 37, Purok 23, San Carlos Heights, Irisan, Baguio City. Because Isagani has to work in the dog-dole, Grace is often left alone.
Those who can help may ring up Grace’s number (09129542490) or that of Isagani (09308914266). – Ramon Dacawi

German karate students help Cordillera patients
Traditional martial arts students in southern Germany  recently pooled and sent P88,000 for four gravely ill patients in the Cordillera, including two toddlers stricken with hydrocephalus that had left their young parents emotionally and financially drained.

The amount, sent in two remittances in less than a month, was the latest from the adherents of Shoshin (A Beginner’s Mind), one of the biggest martial arts school in southern Germany founded by former world champion Julian Chees and affiliated with the Japan Karate Association.

Renate Doth, secretary of Shoshin Kinderhilfe Foundation, established in 2004 as the humanitarian arm of the karate school, made the cash transfes after the members’ regular monitoring of news dispatches on the plight of indigent patients in the Cordillera.  

The first tranche amounting to P43,500 was split into P12,000 to support Louise Dane Maggongey Martinez, a five-m onth old girl who has been in and out of hospitals for hydrocephaly, and P41,500 for the second chemotherapy session of Barbara Fagcayang, a 43-year old fighting breast cancer. 

The second tranche of P44,500 was equally divided to boost the chances of two-year old hydrocephalus patient Dhea Rose Kitongan and for the maintenance medication of  a farmer who was hospitalized due to a stroke. 

“Please tell those Samaritans in Germany that what they sent is pure relief,” said Roger Kitongan, Dhea Rose’s father requested when he received the P22,250 fund support early evening the other Saturday. 

“My  daughter has been suffering since birth,”  “Roger said. She has been fighting since then. I guess no parent , or anyone who knows,  can give up on a baby with such determination to live.”

For the traditional martial arts students in Germany, the continuing out-reach program allows them to live out a basic tenet of karate laid out by Gichin Funakoshi, the Okinawan master and recognized by many as the founder of the shotokan : “Karate ne sentenashi” (Karate has no offense).

Shoshin began reaching out to the Cordillera in Christmas, 2004 when Chees, the first ever non-German by birth to have been drafted into the German national karate team, traveled to Banaue, Ifugao and delivered P70,000 to two mothers who each lost a daughter when their common house was buried by a landslide at the height of a typhoon.

As of last year, Shoshin had extended over P2 million support to needy patients in the Cordillera region.

Over in La Trinidad, Benguet,  businessman-sportsman  Gilbert Tanding  also recently established a  fund to also enable him to extend assistance to indigent patients.

Tanding so far had shelled out P9,000 used for the a session of hemodialysis treatment for kidney patients Jocelyn Singson, a kagawad of barangay Bahong, and 19-year old DharrenGawili of barangay Balili and Belinda Allosa of Pinsao, Baguio City,  aside from P2,000 cash support to kidney patient Ruben Tomayan and P1,000 worth of medicines for Ruben Lalan, a former jeepney driver plying the Baguio-Acupan (Itogon) route who suffered a heart attack early this year. – Ramon Dacawi