By Lee Lagda
Guest Writer
A few years ago, I wrote to Professor Patricia Callasan of Pamantasan Ng Lungsod Ng Maynila (literally, University of Manila) and a University of the Philippines classmate of mine. She is a very good friend who now calls France home. I wrote her of both bitter and sweet memories “that somehow I hope will sustain me in the winter of my life”. One of those memories reads in one sentence: “Walking near the river where I grew up and mourning the loss of the bamboo trees along its banks, unknowing of my tears”. After the recent floods in Manila and vicinities, I felt I should put more meat on that skeletal statement. Elucidate and explain why the loss of bamboo trees caused the tears to flow.
In 1984 I went back to the Philippines thirty years after I first left the islands. I wanted to find out first-hand what was happening to the mother country after the assassination of Benigno Aquino. I also wanted to spend more time in Kawit, Cavite where I spent the first nineteen years of my life. The last thirty years had only seen me spending no more than a couple of weeks every four years or so in the little barrio (village) of Putol where I first saw light and where I spent some of the happiest years of my life.
Before I went back home to Kawit, I had to visit all my old haunts in Manila. We lived in Sampaloc and Singalong when my father worked as a motorcycle policeman in Manila before he passed away in1946. I also spent two high school and three college years in the city before I joined the U.S. Navy in 1954.
The changes to Manila were disturbing, dismal and depressing to the senses and to the soul. Shanties proliferated on public lands and on the banks of esteros, the Pasig river and even Manila’s shoreline. The streets were littered with plastic bags and had gotten narrower as stalls and vendors occupied sidewalks and even parts of the streets. A mountain of stinking garbage rose like a smoking Vesuvius in Tondo. An elevated rail traversed most of Avenida Rizal and Taft Avenue and put a noisy shadow above these familiar thoroughfares.
Heavy downpours, not tropical storms, caused flooding in streets like Espana and Azcarraga. There were more beggars and prostitutes plying their trades on the streets. I wondered if all these changes were wrought by man or caused by nature? I retreated from that scene by going home to Putol, hoping that the little barrio escaped that fate by staying more pristine.
Putol is the last barrio south before the next town of Noveleta and the smallest of the twelve barrios of the town of Kawit. I am guessing that when I left in 1954, the population of the little barrio was no more than 400. I based this on the number of families who lived there at the time – about 50. The houses were mostly situated near the national road – then the only road from Manila to Cavite towns south and to Cavite City.
All the houses were fenced with gumamela (hibiscus) bush or kakawati (from the Spanish cacaoati) trees. I remember big backyards planted with fruiting trees like banana, mango, atis, guyabano, lukban, guava, star apple and other tropical fruits native to the area. There were stretches of farmlands planted with rice during the rainy season and sweet potatoes, tomatoes, melons, beans, eggplants, okra and other vegetables during the summer months.
A river flowed nearby in the barrio of San Juan in the town of Noveleta. My mother was born in San Juan or Tabing-Ilog (literally riverside), as it was familiarly known to us. There was a sluiceway that ran from Putol to the San Juan river which helped drain excess rainwater from the farmlands and residential areas of Putol. Bamboos lined the riverbanks that shaded the dirt roads which paralleled the river. People bathed and washed clothes in the river and for those reasons kept the river clean. I spent many hours fishing on that river and catching bakuli (catfish-like without the whiskers) and ulang (a bigger version of a crawfish). It overflowed once or twice a year but we didn’t mind because the resulting floods were not destructive and they cleaned the river.
I knew that changes were inevitable but I wasn’t ready for that shock in 1984. I didn’t realize I was crying as I walked near the river where I grew up with its banks cemented and shorn of the bamboo trees. Shanties were built practically on top of the cemented riverbanks, with the roads on both sides of the river now narrow alleys. To make things worse, people had made the river into a garbage dump. The river we boys used as our swimming pool was now overflowing with garbage and plastic bags.
I complained about the state of the river to an older friend who told me that the week before, a newborn baby wrapped in plastic was found dead floating on the river. A glaring example of how base our morality had gone down – no respect for human life and no respect for the environment! Yes, it was enough to make a grown man cry!
The summer heat was almost unbearable. I understood that global warming was a factor in the worldwide rise in temperature. But in the case of the little hamlet where I grew up, it was more the loss of the shade trees that dramatically raised the temperature. The gumamela bushes and kakawati trees that bordered houses were now replaced with hollow-block fences. Houses, for lack of space, were now built close to each other and backyard trees disappeared.
The rice fields were now subdivisions with cookie-cutter houses next to each other also without enough space between them to plant trees. We didn’t have a park in Putol when I lived there but the whole barrio was a park with hundreds and hundreds of trees growing all over the place. Acacia trees were planted along the national road. Bamboos grew wild! I would say that 70% of those trees were gone by 1984.
Without the tree roots to sop up the rainwater, floods became bigger and an annual problem to barrio Putol, now called barangay Magdalo. But the loss of the trees was not the only reason for the bigger flood problem. It was the canal, the sluiceway that ran from Putol to San Juan river, that caused most of the problem.
The canal was filled with dirt and rocks, leveled and shanties were built where the waterway used to be! With the sluiceway gone and the rice fields paved over and made into housing subdivisions, the floodwaters had no place to drain and stayed for days and sometimes weeks after the frequent heavy rains. The floodwaters were also higher than I had ever seen it in my years growing up in Putol.
Our local government is inutile in enforcing building and subdivision codes, in preventing people from squatting on public lands and in protecting our environment from pollution and degradation. The elected officials of our local and national government are chosen by popularity contests and not through democratic elections by a mature political body.
That is the reason we have actors and actresses, tv personalities and radio broadcasters and even athletes in key elected positions. Election frauds predominate also. Do they cause floods? I think so. Lack of good governance. Lack of compassion for the hungry masses. Greed. Corruption. Without a strong and informed middle class, the masses vote for Lito Lapid and Bong Revilla and Vilma Santos and Noli De Castro and Manny Pacquiao. All these factors come together to cause more pollution and poverty and prostitution and …
The population of Putol of about 400 in 1954 grew to about 2000 in 1984 and still growing with the opening of the Export Processing Zone Area (EPZA) inTanza, a nearby town. EPZA housed foreign companies producing goods for export. Workers from the Visayas, the Ilocos and Bicolandia were coming in droves to work at EPZA. The population density of towns close by became urban like, no different from that of greater Manila.
Twenty-eight years later in 2012, the population of Putol is probably around 5000 or more. The coastal road from Manila now extends all the way to barangay Marulas in Kawit, about three kilometers from Putol. The coastal connection to Kawit makes it almost a suburb of greater Manila and invites more people to come. The population is growing geometrically (echoes of Adam Smith) while the land area is shrinking, eaten up by new highways and subdivisions.
The rape of Putol is now complete. The little sleepy barrio where I grew up had been totally erased from the face of the earth. It is gone! Replaced by a dirty and congested replica of a little city with bars open all night and karaoke joints blaring out-of-tune songs all hours of the day and night. Young women smelling of cheap perfume come out at night from their shanties to go somewhere to ply their trade. I’m not one to judge these women because I understand that they do what they have to do to survive. Progress? I don’t know? There seems to be more people going to bed hungry at night than when I lived there almost sixty years ago. I could swallow the changes if, at least, they erased the grinding poverty of many of my town mates.
The media rates us as a third-world country. I call it Dante’s inferno or even an image of a Hieronymus Bosch painting of hell. But it is our hell! And it is up to us Filipinos to try to solve the problems that we ourselves created. Be less greedy! Be more caring and compassionate to those in need! Be less greedy and spare the trees that, even with the logging ban, you cut to sell to Japan. Be less greedy and use the money from the public coffers for the betterment of the country and not to enrich yourselves. Open the tinted windows of your Mercedes Benzes and your BMWs and look around you and see the beggars, young and old. Look at the hell around you and make it into a purgatory, something a littlemore liveable than what it is now.
The story of the little barrio of Putol is a microcosm of the much bigger Manila and the Philippines in general. #