Jobers Bersales
The National Museum of the Philippines (NMP) is conducting a three-day Museology Training-Workshop today until Saturday at Museo Sugbo, the Cebu Provincial Museum. It is jointly hosted by NMP, together with the Visayas Association of Museums and Galleries, Inc (Vamgi) and the Province of Cebu in celebration of February as Cebu Arts and Culture Month. For those interested to attend, please contact Vamgi President Audrey Dawn Tomada of Halad Museum or drop by Museo Sugbo and look for one of its curators, Ma. Cecilia Cabañes, also the Vamgi secretary. Registration fee is P1,500 which covers a training kit from NMP as well as lunch and snacks for the three-day event. I would like to welcome back to Cebu the head of the training team, Dr. Ma. Anna Labrador, the deputy director of NMP, and wish everyone overwhelming success.
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Last Tuesday, Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama brought along with him what he referred to as his family, officials and department heads of the city government to the third “interactive forum” with members of the Cebu media. The two-hour meeting was held for the first time in the new social hall of the Cebu City Hall which the mayor proudly pointed out was the first of its kind in the history of the edifice.
I sat at the back of the forum ostensibly to see the mayor from afar and watch his gestures and demeanor closely as he answered questions ranging from the future of the South Reclamation Project to his timetable on his flagship projects and the “fiscalizing” role of the City Council. I immediately sensed a difference compared to the last time I saw him up close about eight months back. The mayor was visibly ebullient, full of enthusiasm. Gone was the frustration at the gridlock he faced with the City Council over his budget. The mayor was clearly at home in City Hall.
Let me hazard a guess as to this burst of boundless energy and optimism that I would like to think I saw in Mayor Mike. One of these is clearly the landslide victory of his hand-picked allies in the elections of Association of Barangay Councils (ABC) that saw an unexpected transfer of allegiance of barangay chairmen who ran, given the color of their posters and the shirts they wore with the unmistakable backing of the Bando Osmeña Pundok Kauswagan (BO-PK). Is this a portent of things to come? The second is the mayor’s tact at accepting whatever budget morsels the BO-PK-dominated council throws at him, effectively laying whatever failures in the implementation of basic services right at the doorstep of a “fiscalizing” council. After all, one cannot pursue a grand plan for a massive drainage and sewage system, for one, when your budget is not sufficient. This, amid the clear signs of its overwhelming necessity against the backdrop of this undebatable climate change phenomena in which old ideas that Cebu would only go through a supertyphoon once every hundred years or so are now, well, old and outdated.
A third one is that a confident Mayor Mike is the result of patience, which he oft-repeated when asked about his timetable for the plans and programs he had for the city. His response, “It took me 18 years to become mayor” alluded to his uncharacteristic patience, the same one we all espied as he was bullied day in and day out during his term of office in 2010.
I may be wrong, of course, but I could not help but see the symbolism when he spoke of restoring Freedom Park as it was in the past, the so-called Plaza Miranda of Cebu City where politicians presented their cause to a varied audience days before every election. In his bid to restore Freedom Park to its old glory, the mayor was himself announcing his very own freedom from the adversity that his patience all these years has allowed him to survive.
What better thing then than to cap it with a slew of political will in the restoration of the old Spanish-era Cuartel del Infanteria, later Warwick Barracks, the old Carbon Market and a brewing fight to preserve and get the Compania Maritima and the once-beautifully preserved Malacañang sa Sugbo. Between now and the time of the International Eucharistic Congress or IEC in January 2016 and the 500th anniversary of the Magellan expedition in March 2021, there is as yet so much to be done. And I can only wish the mayor and his “family” all the best with the hope that the light at the end of the tunnel is nigh.