Sidewalk Notary Office

Having been born in Cebu, and living here for most of my lifetime. I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't been to a lot of places here. And when I say places, I'm not even talking about the beaches, the tourist spots, the malls, the restaurants. No. not those kind of places, I'm talking about the heart of urban Cebu which is downtown. If you really want to experience the reality of living in one of Philippines' fastest developing cities, you really need to check out Downtown / Colon.

A few days ago, my friend and I decided to go to City Hall to look for a "lawyer" in the hope of securing a notarized affidavit of loss. It was a Saturday, so it wasn't as crowded and you can hardly find the annoying people who will ambush you and ask you for "notaryo bai?". In fact we had to go to the side of the City hall to find them there beneath an arcaded sidewalk. This is where I met Manang, a lady I think in her 60's or 70's. She was the encoder. The way their business works goes something like this; There are people who I call "pimps", these are the ones who look for clients in the street. And as soon as the "pimps" know what the client wants, they ask you to write the necessary information on a tiny piece of paper and pass it to Manang for the encoding. Manang did all the encoding in her almost antique typewriter. Just by the way she uses the knobs on her typewriter to adjust the alignment, you can already tell that she's been using it for a very long long time.

As for the Affidavit of loss, she already had a "fill in the blanks" form where all she needed to do was type the needed information and Presto, you have yourself an affidavit. At that time, Manang have used up all her affidavit forms, so she needed to to reproduce another set of copies. The problem was, she barely had any money to pay for the photocopy. She looked for her wallet on her small drawer and was fortunate to find a few folded worn out "bente" pesos and asked one of their errand boys to photocopy the forms. Our affidavit cost us 150 pesos.

It's been said that the measure of a society is how well they treat its weakest members. And these images speak for themselves how this city, with all its glory and economic growth has yet to trickle down to the most common of people.

The Futility of the Livable Cebu Movement

Photo not taken by me

It was the usual Monday morning rush. I was riding a jeepney on my way to work (late again). One of the stickers posted at the back of the driver caught my eye. It was a simple graphic with the words " Movement for a livable Cebu", an organization that is frequently featured in the newspapers nowadays. I let out a small chuckle. The usual traffic from Talamban to Ayala was severely frustrating and I figured that I have all the time in the world to think of the legitimacy of the organization as well as its sincerity. As citizens, I think it's only appropriate of us to always be skeptical especially when organizations like this start to arise, coincidentally when election season is fast approaching. But even if we do assume that these people are sincere and well intentioned, unfortunately, sincerity doesn't always translate to effectiveness and sometimes in this case, might even prolong the problem itself. 

It is not my intention to downplay their contributions to Cebu. I think they're very important especially in keeping the level of corruption at bay and have enough influence to make significant changes when dealing with environmental issues. But I wonder if they are aware that their movement only address the symptoms of a problem. Do they know that the deterioration of Cebu's environment is very much tied to the class struggle. Can we really expect to revitalize the physical environment of Cebu without first revitalizing the economic conditions of the rest of the population? From my perspective, Cebu is fast becoming like another Manila. A highly stratified society where there's a few people at the top controlling the wealth while the majority of the population are working in the "service sector", in other words servicing the affluent few. Maybe in the future, similar to what happened in Manila when an international delegate went there to ironically discuss about poverty, we'll also build walls around slums just to hide our marginalized people.

 While the rest of the world are now focusing on the  Third industrial revolution  to overhaul their outdated infrastructures, Cebu on the other hand, is still developing under the templates of outdated ideas. They're still trapped on the superficial level of progress. They associate large buildings and the saturation of super Malls in the cityscape as an indicator of progress. Therefore, we're not only lagging behind other countries technologically, but also our mentality/consciousness has to catch up as well. So the reason I question the intentions of the Movement for livable Cebu, is because I feel that they're barely scratching the surface of what's truly behind all these problems. In the words of the late George Carlin;

"I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists; these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. They don't care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me."

Welcome to Blissful Cebu.

a trisikad drives past a wall covered with a tarpaulin poster of the ongoing 45th Annual Board of Governors meeting of the Asian Development Bank at suburban Pasay city south of Manila, Philippines, Thursday May 3, 2012.