TACLOBAN CITY- Mayor Alfred Romualdez of this city presented to the public his plan converting Tacloban into a “resilient, vibrant and livable city” after being pummeled by supertyphoon Yolanda last year.
Speaking to about 2,000 plus stakeholders comprising business sector, academe, people’s organizations and other national and international relief groups on March 21 at the Tacloban Convention Center, Romualdez maintained the city is focus now on “bringing people to safer area, with planned urban expansion.”
“We’re working on a plan for a new Tacloban in the northern part. The working figure is being worked out now because we have to determine also the pledges that will be realized. We will see how we will come up also,” he said.
Romualdez projected that it would need P3 billion or more to realize the program contain under the master rehabilitation plan with the bulk of the needed funds would come from the private sectors as donors.
He added the new housing project in the northern part of Tacloban would result into a “township.”
Asked if the plan will be realized until 2016 (the term limit of Romualdez), he answered, “I hope so.”
After the presentation of the city’s mechanism for a new city, the plan will be presented again to the various government agencies and private groups and individuals for possible financing.
“Even in the beginning, this is what the donors are asking. This is just a mechanism, but what we have now are areas being approved and determined already to be a hazard area and safe,” Romualdez stressed on the importance of the plan.
Ma. Adelaida Cea of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, who helped presenting the over strategic framework of the plan, maintained that the city can “bounce back” given its many opportunities and potentials.
The short-term plan includes construction, trading and agri-diversification; while in medium term, covers industrial development, tourism, business outsourcing, economic infrastructure and development.
The proponent has divided its development districts to north covering satellite urban center; mid-coast is for urban expansion and trading area; south coast is for redevelopment with urban expansion in risk inland areas; and upland for conservation and protected area.
The city government owns 86 hectares lot ready for shelter needs in the northern part.
For its shelter projects, the city is targeting about 10,000 permanent housing (now with total donor housing commitments of 6,661); target of about 3,000 for Community Mortgage Program in Diit, Bagacay and Cabalawan; and acquisition of additional land (30 to 50 hectares) for new housing.
The Eastern Visayas Regional Medical Center (EVRMC) would also be relocated in the northern part as well as the University of the Philippines-Tacloban. (RONALD O. REYES)
Cruising the digital world
This highly technological world introduces us to a virtual environment that is like a super-superhighway with much heavier and more complicated traffic than what we experience in our busiest thoroughfares. Its range and scope is not local but global, and it touches on practically all aspects of our life.
If in our transport systems, we need regulations like registration of vehicles, licensing of drivers with their respective periodic renewals, and other things like traffic road signs and traffic aides, etc., we have to realize that we need more or less the same set of regulations in our digital world.
Obviously, the regulations here would be more extensive and comprehensive than what we have in our transport systems. They should cover not only considerations of practicality and convenience in our needs of knowledge and communication, but also and more importantly, considerations of appropriateness, morality and spirituality.
Everyone knows that the digital world can have two effects. It is good to those who are good, and in fact, it will improve them. But it is bad also to those who are bad or weak, and it tends to worsen them.
Digital citizens and users should therefore be clear about their identity and dignity as persons and children of God who are supposed to be ruled by truth and love, and all their consequences of justice, mercy, compassion, and of concern for one another and for strengthening our relation with God, etc.
The ideal would be that every time they are in the digital environment, they should learn to see God there and to be motivated only by love for God and for others. They should ask themselves after using the Internet, “Am I now a better person and child of God with what I have seen and done in the Internet?”
Unless this basic requirement is met, one would enter into a highway that is a slippery slope toward all forms of self-seeking with their usual company of greed, envy, vanity, lust, gluttony, sloth, etc. Conflict and contention would not be remote in this arena. Unrestrained competition and rivalry would surge.
That is why, this identity of the digital citizens as persons and children of God who are necessarily connected with everybody else and governed by truth and love should always be protected, maintained and strengthened.
Toward this end, it stands to reason that digital citizens and users should be men and women of prayer, of virtues, of clear criteria based on sound human and Christian moral principles. They should know the true nature and meaning of freedom, avoiding using freedom as “a cloak for malice,” as St. Peter said in his first letter. (2,16)
Otherwise, they would be confused and lost, and an easy prey to the many subtle conditionings all of us are exposed to—physical, emotional, psychological, social, cultural, historical, economic, political, etc.
And since many young people are very much involved in the digital world, the elders and others of authority and influence should do everything to inculcate in them very deeply this proper identity and dignity of being persons and children of God, brothers and sisters with one another, ruled by truth and love.
These youngsters are typically highly driven by their curiosities, but with curiosities that spring and are maintained usually by unpurified impulses and peer pressure. They really need to be taken care of, but in an appropriate way, since they also do not like to be treated like babies.
If before a youngster is allowed to drive a car in our public road system, he has to have the proper age requirement, the appropriate physical and health condition, and has to be trained and tested, then it stands to reason that this youngster all the more would need a similar kind of requirements before he is allowed to cruise in the more dangerous digital thoroughfares.
This attitude toward the digital world should be developed first of all in the family, then in churches and schools, and then in other public places like offices, hospitals, etc.
We should understand that the digital world is not a free-for-all world. It would be a deadly understanding of freedom if that is how we understand the freedom we enjoy in our digital world.
It has to be properly regulated so we can cruise it safely and fruitfully.