Sunday, December 30, 2007 Mercado: Surrendered dignity By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
CHRISTMAS season dumped a P120,349,948 renovated City Council building on us, taxpayers. Wait. Our councilors will dun us P16.73- million more for an air-conditioning system.
City Hall is not Cebu City, groused Mayor Tomas Osmeña. “How can we justify this to the taxpayers?”
His Honor has been there before. His South Reclamation Project strapped every Cebuano with a debt repayment burden twice the national per capita bill. “Mauwaw ko,” he adds.
“O shame, where is thy blush?” Hamlet wondered. Vice-Mayor Michael Rama and councilors don’t blush easy. Not even when they overshot the original P65.4 million contract price by 85 percent. And that's before the aircon.
But hey, this “restores the grandeur of City Hall…(This) is not a luxury but a rightful attempt to restore the dignity in the office of men and women whom the people of Cebu elected,” Rama claimed.
Dignity isn’t anchored to building price tags. Only “edifice complex” patients say so. Ask Imelda Marcos. “Dignity consists in deserving honors, not possessing them,” Aristotle insisted.
Rooted in values, dignity can not be stripped away, only surrendered. So, when did Mike & Co. surrender? And to whom? When the Council became Mayor Osmeña’s rubber stamp? Illusions du grandeur, the French would snort.
“Grandeur” looks different from the pediatric charity ward of the crammed Cebu City Medical Center. The wife and I spend Christmas mornings there.
It has over 23 decrepit hospital beds, resembling mangers. Two, oftentimes three, sick kids are jammed into one bed. At the head of the bed-row, a crude sign reads: “Dengue Express Lane.”
On Bed 19, a gaunt boy curls in fetal position. You glimpse the pale mask of approaching death on his face.
The listlessness of tiny patients confirms the dry-as-sawdust statistic: chronic hunger stunts one out of every five in Cebu. Many whimper. “Do you hear children crying O, my brothers / ‘Ere sorrows come with the years?” Browning asked.
The malnutrition wing is half-finished. No funds. The hospital pharmacy is perennially short of medicine. No funds. Parents wordlessly clutch unfilled prescriptions.
Nor are there hospital linens. “Swaddling clothes” for patients are whatever sheets relatives muster. The shabby pocket nursery would fit into a councilor’s glistening comfort room.
“Cebu is a neo-international city” is Osmeña’s mantra. But the diseases here are those of a third world country: dengue, pneumonia and diarrhea. These are preventable. But where poverty interlocks with tainted water and poor sanitation, they spread like brushfire.
In Cebu , the poorest make do with two and a half centavos out of every peso. The affluent corner 31 centavos. Cebu has no sewers. Yet, “the sewer is the conscience of a city,” Victor Hugo wrote in “Les Miserables.”
City Hall never crafted a water policy. For murky water, Cebu slum dwellers pay peddlers 5 to 10 times the cost of piped water. Less than half of city homes have taps. And this ward shows how helpless ill children pay the extortionate cost of policy failure.
Indigent parents and volunteers, like Franciscan nuns, pitch in with thin resources and tireless service. “There’s only one terminal dignity,” Actress Helen Hayes said.
“Love.”
The councilor’s right to upholstered comfort ends where the child’s right to antibiotic begins. The vulnerable child has the most urgent call on our resources. This is a fundamental obligation, accepted by civilized men. Only in service to the weakest do we find human fulfillment.
“This shall be a sign for you. You shall find the child wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manager.”
Officials and taxpayers need this sign. For the vulnerable, under-whelming Infant of Bethlehem, reflected in those helpless patients, will be our judge.
