I spent most of the day last Monday with my mom and my brother in Sta. Maria. Since it was the last of the long break holiday, an offshoot from Holy Week, my mom asked my brother and I to accompany her and look after our grocery store before my brother starts attending his summer classes in UST and I start attending my internship duties in Makati.
I was able to catch the third installment of GMA Network’s Philippine Agenda series last night. Below is a portion of the episode which tackled the serious problem of political and bureaucratic corruption in the Philippines.
The clip below specifically tackles the issue of the severe over-pricing of lamp posts acquired for the ASEAN Summit in Cebu months ago. Individual lamp posts were acquired by the government at 200+ thousand pesos EACH, jacked up scandalously from an original 11 thousand a unit. It’s really maddening and frustrating. Even Mike Enriquez, amusingly at times, exhibited such frustrations on screen.
[Links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4]
We didn’t do a Visita Iglesia this Maundy Thursday, as we usually do almost every year. We just visited my grandfather and other relatives in Amadeo, Cavite. And since we were in upland Cavite anyway, my parents, against all odds, decided that we spend a night at Tagaytay in one of its numerous hotels and lodges. As expected, however, traffic in Tagaytay was severe, and since it was nearing sunset and we were still on the road, we all decided to just go back home to Quezon City.
The rest of the days were spent lazily at home.
A few nights ago, I came across the second episode of GMA Network’s Philippine Agenda. It was a tragic and morbid episode that tackled the public health services situation in the country. Tragic, obviously because the whole health sector situation is tragic in the first place, and morbid because two of the program’s subjects, after being shown struggling with their conditions, eventually die on screen. They couldn’t afford check-ups, nor the medicines, nor the other hospital fees. [Part of the documentary can be watched here].
When asked why public hospitals, which should ideally render much of its services for free, extract fees from things as minute as a patient’s use of a hospital bed, a government doctor said, “The government’s not giving us enough. We are being told to generate our own income.”
What an all too familiar line, even in the University of the Philippines.
From tuition increases in UP to fee increases in government hospitals, these have to be seen as part of a real and ongoing state policy of slowly abandoning social services. These has to be seen as a real and ongoing state policy of following dictations from foreign financial institutions. They are not unrelated situations.
Before I headed off to the Philippine Blog Awards awarding ceremonies in Makati last night, I spent most of the day with my orgmates in UP MCO in what was supposed to be our semender activity. Turned out only a handful of us came, but it was all fine. We all went to the La Mesa Eco Park in Fairview and had a dandy time with the greeneries. Hehe. But damn, it was scorching hot that day (duh, so will the rest of the days to come this summer). We laid out a mat (a bed sheet, actually, hehe) and had a picnic lunch, then we braved the scorching afternoon sun to row around some small man made lagoon within the park.
I attended the first Philippine Blog Awards awarding ceremonies last night at the RCBC Plaza in Makati. As a finalist, I am allowed to bring along a guest so I asked Ayeen to come with me, right after our semender ‘picnic’ at the La Mesa Dam ecopark.
It was my first time to attend any bloggers’ event, convention or gathering. I felt quite uneasy at first, especially since everyone else seem to have already acquainted themselves well with each other. It’s quite an insecurity of mine. Unlike many of the notable and well-linked bloggers now, I’m probably one of the few who barely gets to comment on other people’s blogs. And it’s not because I’m a snob, as I’ve heard somewhere, I do lurk around all your blogs, but my lack of online correspondence is really just a function of me being very very preoccupied with various things offline. Hehe.
