Sunday, July 27, 2008 Malilong: Quick response to a complaint By Frank Malilong The Other Side
FIVE public high school students who had a good time while their classmates were sweating inside the classroom have been ordered suspended. Two of them had earlier admitted that they had sex with an out-of-school girl. The others didn’t have as much fun but they nevertheless got the same penalty for cutting classes, drinking and kissing.
Too bad for them, there is yet no law that prescribes sex education as part of the high school curriculum. Otherwise, they would probably have been able to get themselves off the hook by claiming that they were only practicing what they had been taught.
I’m sure there are many other teenagers who have done far worse but have not been similarly punished or exposed to as much shame because they haven’t been caught. The five Argao students must be cursing the nosy policeman, who found them at the most inconvenient time, for their misfortune. If any lesson has been learned by the five, aside from the discovery of the pleasures of alcohol and the body, it is that when you play hooky, make sure that all peepholes are covered.
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It was Cebu City Councilor Jack Jakosalem who informed me by text message that the manager of the Cebu City Sports Center (CCSC) is none other than my good friend, Ricky Ballesteros. In this corner last Wednesday, I wondered aloud who’s keeping watch of the CCSC, a once-upon-time modern sports complex that has all but become the symbol of government neglect as well as of the public’s irresponsibility.
To Ricky’s credit, the CCSC looked a lot cleaner the following day. The grass was cut and the plastic bottles, bags and wrappers that used to clutter the oval were no longer as many.
Yesterday, Ricky took one step farther: he closed the oval’s main gate and rerouted the users through the passageway in the basement of the grandstand. The users’ reaction to the rerouting was evident in the look on the faces of members of the Walk Talk and Eat friendship club when they saw me yesterday. I couldn’t find the words to describe it except that it must have been how the other disciples looked when they saw Judas the Iscariot after he had sold out Jesus.
I am not sure if the gate’s closure is going to be permanent but I’d like to believe that it is part of a plan to restore the grandeur of the CCSC or at least make it a little cleaner and more presentable. Trust management, I told my walker friends.
In any case, Cebu City Councilor Edgar Labella has promised to raise the matter of the CCSC’s upkeep with the City Council. Edgar regularly runs an average 20 laps around the oval at least five days a week so that he knows what he will be talking to his colleagues in the Council about.
I gathered that Edgar has already prepared a resolution that calls for sound management---“in terms of cleanliness and sanitation”--–of the sports center. While noting that keeping the complex clean isn’t only the responsibility of government but also of the CCSC’s users, Labella saw an urgent need to beef up the number of personnel assigned to clean the facility. He proposed tapping the manpower of the Department of Public Services for the purpose.
I thank Ricky and Edgar for their quick response and look forward to a CCSC with an oval that is free of litter, comfort rooms that do not smell and a parking lot that has not been converted into a private garage by some car owners.
