ON THE STREET WHERE YOU POO

SOMETHING SMELLS

By Alan S. Gensoli

Come, feel the breeze, sway to the tune of an old favorite lilting in the wind…“I have often walked down the street before, but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before, and all at once I’m several stories high, knowing I’m on the street…” where you pooh, that’s where!

The Bacolod Anti-Baha Alliance (Baha) monitoring team recently shared with its members its latest discovery. Driving into the reclamation area on Burgos Street, just before you reach the entrance to SM City and to the north of the junk shop, is a community of squatters. On touring the village, our monitoring team discovered a cemented street where children were freely moving their bowels, in broad daylight (imagine a free-for-all when the sun comes down!). We have videos and photos to show the spectacle. The street is booby-trapped with these “stink bombs” like it was the most natural thing to happen in a city supposedly as clean and green as Bacolod, and in a section of town that’s just a stone’s throw from city hall. This is certainly one for the books, the Guinness book! And a once beautiful song is forever silenced for these horrible images it has come to be associated with.

Hygiene, or basic cleanliness, is at the very foundation of Solid Waste Management work. Many towns and cities in the country that have gone ahead of Bacolod in SWM implementation started their campaigns with massive cleanliness drives, to make their citizens experience cleanliness and appreciate SWM in the process. The idea is to make citizens desire cleanliness with a passion and disdain filthiness forever.

While good health is the benefit of SWM, cleanliness is the palpable representation of it. Cleanliness makes the intangible concept of good health seem tangible. Our common belief is, when something looks clean it must be healthy, although the latter may not be guaranteed by the former. Good health often remains an idea until we get very sick. In fact, we know good health because we have gotten sick before, or know someone who has gotten ill. But why wait to be sick if you can prevent it? Cleanliness will help. SWM will help us become clean and healthy.

On the road to the Beijing Games, I recall laughing at news about how China was rushing to teach its citizens how to comport themselves cleanly. They even had spit police, to stop their centuries-old habit of spitting. We don’t spit as much, but we have our share of dirty habits.

Every year I visit major cities in the country from north to south, and I am sad to admit that we seem to have one of the dirtiest public toilets. Forget about lifting the toilet seat when we pee, that’s already graduate school stuff for many. I’m talking about the basic consideration of shooting your pee in the bowl. I have seen too many men’s rooms in Bacolod with urine all over, not just on toilet seats, not just in the periphery of the toilet bowl, but all over the floor. Just last Sunday, while at church, nature called so I went to the CR. Same pee all over the floor. In church? This is juvenile delinquency. Does the owner of the pee not know that he is spreading bacteria?

This is the great challenge that the SWM campaign of Bacolod City is facing, and must face at all cost. Without meaning to generalize, we have a people who don’t give a hoot about being filthy. Let us not think the pee trivial, for it is a symptom of a social disease in metastasis. Last October 6^th I wrote here about a trisikad driver plying Lacson Street, paid to dump trash along the street at 2 a.m. by unscrupulous residents who are willing to pay for the service. Abada-Escay, the city’s relocation site, is also a victim of this. Some neighboring residents are reportedly dumping trash at Abada-Escay! Is it not enough that the resettled squatters in Abada-Escay have no drainage and electricity, we also have to dump trash on them? Whoever is guilty, may God have mercy on your souls.

On September 19, our co-columnist Agnes Jalandoni cited on this space that out of our close to 500,000 population, 300,000 more or less are squatters. I’m sure this is owed largely to our LGU’s open-arms policy to people coming into the big city for greener pasture. Mayor Bing Leonardia has always declared that he is pro-poor, and I’m sure he will go to heaven for that. But if we don’t police our growing community against people who unabashedly dirty it, we’ll all be filthy as hell long before Mayor Bing assumes to heaven. And don’t anyone dare accuse me of painting the poor a bad picture. Cleanliness does not discriminate. There are clean poor as well as dirty poor. And that holds true for those who have more in life.

Do we have to be told to shoot our pee straight? Does Mayor Bing have to tell us not to relieve ourselves on the streets, or dump our garbage in somebody else’s front yard? This is a bit much to expect out of government, isn’t it? Yet, government must deal with it.

SWM in this city cannot begin, let alone progress, if individually we do not value hygiene, or at least desire to be clean. It is no joke to educate half a million people about SWM. This is the task that now faces Mayor Bing Leonardia and Councilor Greg Gasataya, the Chairman of the Clean and Green Committee. Let’s help them. Let’s be part of the solution. Let us patrol our ranks against the shameless and the filthy among us. If SWM is legislated to start at home, and if cleanliness is a first step to SWM, then cleanliness must start in our homes, if not at the urging of our mothers, then by all means at the urging of city hall.

Writing this State of Cleanliness Address so soon after the Masskara Festival may not be fair. Logic tells, if the city looks unclean on the heels of the festival, then perhaps it has explanation to be so. What is downright unreasonable is for the city to be unclean the rest of the year; the observations of the Baha monitoring team at the reclamation area were made in mid-September and early October, in any case prior to the festival. That said, however, it should not give government excuse to delay clean-up after the Masskara. Neither does it exonerate corporate sponsors from taking down banderitas that suffocate our streets. And more importantly, dispose of them responsibly. These, after all, are made from nasty plastic.

One more thing about being clean: Our city’s image and coffers stand to gain each time we receive a clean-and-green award, and we should get it, even fight for it, if we deserve it. If we don’t deserve it, any award is a disservice, for it becomes a reason to be complacent and an alibi to justify inefficiency. Who doesn’t want an award? We all do. But let us work for it.