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Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Davao prepares for ATF 2006
DAVAO City - Mayor Rodrigo Duterte said the city will just be made up a bit to greet the delegates of the Asean Tourism Forum (ATF) 2006 this month.
There will be no major makeover nor attempt to present the city as a booming metropolis like some major Asian cities that it’s not.
“We’re running the show day to day. We hope to be cleaner and we're peaceful.
We’re trying very hard, doing our very best to secure the place, and they’re putting up the plastic flowers along the highways,” Duterte said during the live interview aired over ACQ-KBN Friday night.
Doing its best
Aside from the plastic flowers, the patching up of some roads and the minor landscaping of road islands, the city will only be presented in a spanking clean way, like a city that has been given a bath and powdered up a bit, nothing else.
The reason—the mayor wants the city to be presented as it is: a city that’s doing its best to take off, but hasn’t fully taken flight yet. Not some super-rich city, that it isn’t.
“Tourists should be allowed to view Davao as a poor community that is struggling to be rich someday,” he said, “because that’s what we are.”
“Maybe it’s starting to gain momentum, but that’s why we need the tourists here for them to help us gain that momentum,” he added.
In previous major international events in the national capital, there has been the practice of putting up colorful walls to cover slum areas, repaint the houses in settler communities along major thoroughfares, and even demolitions of unsightly squatter shanties.
There has been no such move in the city, so far, just two weeks before the grand event.
Last week, the private sector, led by the Davao Tourism Association, which has volunteered their manpower and expertise for the event on Jan. 13 to 21, has announced that the preparations for the ATF 2006 is already more than 90 percent complete. (Sun.Star Davao/Sunnex)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (January 3, 2006 issue)
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