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Sunday, January 01, 2006
No major makeover for tourism forum: mayor
By Stella A. Estremera
CITY Mayor Rodrigo R. Duterte said the city will just be made up a bit to greet the delegates of the Asean Tourism Forum 2006 this month, but 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 with Pastor Apollo C. Quiboloy's Give Us This Day aired over ACQ-KBN, Friday night.
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 major international events past 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 the unsightly squatter shanties. There has been no such move in the city, so far, just two weeks before the grand event.
In the past week, the private sector led by the Davao Tourism Association (Data), which has volunteered their manpower and expertise for the event on January 13-21, has announced that the preparations for the ATF 2006 is already more than 90 percent complete--the remaining percentage being that of putting up the colored flowers, road curb paintings, and some other patchworks.
For Bisaya stories from Davao. Click here. (January 1, 2006 issue)
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