Issues Worth Connecting With

UPOU Graduation

Newly-installed UP President Alfred Pascual was UPOU’s Guest of Honor during its graduation ceremonies on 7 May 2011.  “I hope that you have imbibed the values of UP and are ready to help us save our country with the new skills you’ve learned,” he addressed the graduates.  He emphasized that “we expect a lot from you not because we have a reputation to protect but because we have a country to save.”

Another point that President Pascual mentioned in his speech that made such address memorable to UPOU faculty, staff, and students is the importance he said he attaches to UPOU.  He declared, “this is my second visit to UPOU, a sign of the importance I put on distance education in general and the UPOU in particular.”  That was good to hear.  Another line that sounded great was, “UPOU occupies special place in the UP System because its trail blazing and innovative teaching has enabled our leaders to have access to quality education.

Access to quality education is part of UPOU’s advocacies.  Indeed, one of the graduates who were awarded their academic degrees was Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri, who graduated with the degree Master of Environment and Natural Resources Management (MENRM).  A few years back, now Vice President Jejomar Binay graduated with the degree Diploma in Environment and Natural Resources Management (DNRM).   These are people who’re making a difference in the development of the Philippines.

Serious professionals who see the need for quality education have graduated from or are students of the UPOU.  Richard Gomez, a couple of years ago, graduated with the Associate in Arts (AA) degree and he is now a student under the Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies (BAMS) program.  Sharon Cuneta, Jackie Lou Blanco, and Sarah Geronimo are students of the AA Program.  Like Goma, these guys are serious students.

The bulk of UPOU students are professionals (within or outside the country) who do not have time to go back to study in various residential campuses.  Increasingly, UPOU is host to both foreigners and foreign-based Filipino professionals.  The UPOU now has Testing Centers (Philippine Consular Offices) in more than 20 countries.

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Transmigration, Philippine Style

Buried in the inside pages of one of the dailies the other day was a news item treated as of minor importance.  It was about a mass migration plan of the government regarding informal settlers in Metro-Manila.  The program, which was announced by P-Noy before ASEAN Leaders meeting in Jakarta a few days ago, calls for the mass migration of informal settlers in Metro-Manila to the provinces.

Accordingly, 500,000 families informally settling in various government and private land in Metro-Manila shall be  relocated to the provinces.  The report also claimed that the land inventories of the Department of Agriculture and Department of Environment and Natural Resources  are enough to provide these families two (2) hectares each of farm lands in the different provinces. 

This mass migration concept is similar to Indonesia's transmigration program a couple of decades ago, which enabled the Indonesia Government to mass transfer people from crowded Java to the other islands of Indonesia.  Like the Philippines, Indonesia is a huge archipelago.  It has 17,000 islands, which is about 10,000 more than that of the Philippines.

Older students of Philippine development should recall that in the 1950s, during the Presidency of the late Ramon Magsaysay, a law was passed to resettle people who wanted to resettle in Mindanao.  I had a lot of friends who took advantage of that program called the Homestead Program.  P-Noy’s mass migration program is the same except that the beneficiaries this time are only informal settlers of Metro-Manila.  I understand that one of the requirements of this mass migration, for a family to receive two hectares of land from the government, is that the family will have to cultivate such land and at least eke out a living from it so they may ceased to be completely dependent on dole outs from the government and from other people on the streets.

I believe in and support the spirit of this program.  I hope it doesn’t end-up being a corruption-breeding program.

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RH Bill Becoming a Religious War?

I can’t believe what I’m observing.  The RH Bill has become a religious conflict, the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines on one hand, and the other religious denominations in the country on the other.  I don’t know what these people have in mind, but going back to Age of the Crusades won’t solve our problem of too many people living in a small country that can’t develop properly due to imbalances in the use of natural resources as well as due to largely corrupt government which has now come down to a corrupt society. 

The major problem seems to be the fact that a debate where on one side the debater argues from the point of view of theology and philosophy of religion, while on the other side the debater argues from the point of view of science, medicine, and economics.  This situation doesn’t have any chance of opposing parties arriving at a position of generally acceptable compromise, especially when both sides clearly don’t want to agree.

There is, however, a third side to this debate.  I’m referring to the side of the ordinary mortals, the ordinary poor Filipinos whose experience has been poverty and sickness who simply appeared in this world of nothingness not of their free will.  All their lives they have experienced being absolutely poor with no possible opportunities to improve their lives in sight.  These are the kinds of people you want to bring to this world?

Please have pity on them!  Maawa naman kayo!!

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