Tracking the Growth of a City

Some20 years ago, the former administrations of Cotabato City were concerned with the physical characteristics of the city which was difficult to plan for. First of all, the city is located in a delta, an ecosystem which even the sophisticated government of Mexico City found a challenge to plan for. Second, its population is not homogeneous, but is a mixture of several indigenous tribes residing around the city. Third, after the second world war, the region where it is located had a separatist problem which many found to be a barrier to its peaceful development.

Having resided in the city for so long, I witnessed the countless times that the city government tried to come up with an acceptable City Masterplan. The National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) was privy to the acceptance, rejection, revisions, of a masterplan which would fit the aspirations of its residents/ citizens. Whatever the final plan is, which keep on changing, parts can already be seen in the improved infrastructure of the city. At present, the fringes of the city which were feared to be impenetrable before are now even groomed to be tourist attractions. From the scenic Timako Hiil to the swamps of Kakar, residents can move around for the easiest entertainment or commercial targets that they can avail of.

The city, which was virtually separated from its neighboring towns by a number of rivers, can now be reached via three bridges (although the first one is due for repair after damaged by the 1976 earthquake). I remember during my younger days that the major river – the Pulangi or more popularly known as the Rio Grande –was a winding stream compared to a chicken’s entrails, that must be navigated for hours from the wharf at the city to the mouth of the river called the Bukana. At the Bukana are anchored the vessels that cannot navigate the shallow and small waterways that can carry only the flat tow boats that are used by the passengers. The project of dredging the Rio Grande to allow easier access to the Bukana hastened the travel time, although people point to the project as having caused flooding in the city. I’m not sure if this is due to wrong planning or wrong implementation. But it sure is a result of interfering with nature and its environmental design.

With the new administration at present, it is high time to review the masterplan so that revisions can be introduced. We have to accept the fact that with the Bangsamoro government in place, they would require changes that would fit their aspirations. Hopefully, the city’s multi cultural, multi religious character will be maintained by the new government, so that we can proudly say that stability and peace still reigns. MC

Amosque in Indonesia is reported to have successfully encouraged communities to manage waste and use the profit gained to support the mosque and congregation’s activities through what is known as GRADASI or Gerakan Sedekah Sampah Indonesia, the Indonesian Waste Charity Movement.

LiCas News, a Catholic church news agency based in Bangkok and staffed entirely by lay-people across Asia, reports that GRADASI was initiated in 2021 through the efforts of the Coordinating Ministry for Maritime Affairs and Investment, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, the Secretariat for the National Coordination Team for Marine Debris Handling, United Nations Development Programme Indonesia, and the Indonesian Ulema Council. It aims to reduce plastic pollution in communities by “donating” household waste in mosques.

According to the LICas report, data from Indonesia’s National Waste Management Information System showed the country produced 19 million tons of waste in 2022, of which 18.2 percent was plastic. “Plastic waste has caused many problems in the archipelago such as unsightly landscapes, polluted marine ecosystems, and potentially, health issues due to the leaching of microplastic,” the report added.

A religious approach like GRADASI can be successful in Indonesia, where an overwhelming majority of citizens – 87 percent – identify themselves as Muslims, the LiCas report said. If implemented widely, this movement has a strong potential to change the mindset of 280 million Indonesians, and lead to wiser plastic use and better plastic waste management.

We are told that in the Qur’an, God calls Adam, the first man he created, his Khalifah, a steward or someone who looks after something for someone else. This means God entrusted Adam and all future generations of people to look after the world. This idea of stewardship is very important within Islam.

The same thought, humanity’s stewardship of God’s natural creation, is similarly emphasized in the 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ of Pope Francis where he reminds not only members of the Catholic church but all humanity, all people of faith, should not only respect the Earth but also praise and honor God through their engagement with creation.

ITwas only after his death last week in Cebu City that we learned that little known Miconeilo B. Draper from Magindanao had been covertly commissioned to ghost-write for some “experts” in the formulation of questionnaire (from the actual evolution of the practice-to-theory process) randomly selected for the biannual ECE Board Exams in the country.

Miconeilo or Manong Nonong as he was affectionately called, was born and raised in Barangay Timbangan in Old Maganoy (part of the modern-day Maguindanao del Sur), and up to his dying years he could speak Magindanaon very fluently. He had a half-Muslim mother (Maria Dumpao, grandniece of Shariff Ampatuan). His social and cultural environs were heavily influenced by Moro neighborhoods.

Very much like our ASEAN neighbor Indonesia, the Philippines, a majority Christian country, is also beset with a plastic waste problem. A recent Washington Post report has described us as a nation swallowed by plastic waste. Our population of 114 million people, the report said, produces over one-third of all oceanic plastic waste in the world. A staggering 2.7 million tons of plastic waste are generated in the Philippines each year, and an estimated 20 percent ends up in the ocean, according to a World Bank study.

During this year’s Earth Day celebration, Greenpeace Philippines pushed for a cap on production, an immediately planned phaseout of single-use plastics, and an urgent transition to zero-waste reuse models to spare the youth and future generations from the dire impacts of plastic pollution and climate emergency. As individuals and communities, we also have a share in reducing the menace of plastic-waste by living simply, minimizing consumption, and actively promoting ecological awareness and action.

What the Baitul Makmur Mosque in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia is doing can be replicated in faith-based communities in the Philippines: the congregation donates waste such as glass, metal cans, paperboard, and plastic, and the collected waste is taken to recyclers where it is shredded into smaller pieces that are then sold as a material to manufacture new products.

We are all stewards of the earth, our common home, and we should learn from each other and work hand in hand to save our planet in fulfillment of our common role as stewards of God’s creation.

Fr. Rogelio Tabuada, OMI, Chief-Executive-Officer

Eva Kimpo - Tan, Editor-in-Chief

Edwin O. Fernandez, News Editor

Gemma A. Peñaflor, Administration and Marketing Executive

Julito P. Torres, Circulation Officer

Karl John B. Daniel, Graphic-Layout Artist

COTABATO CITY / ARMM CORRESPONDENTS

John M. Unson, Ferdinandh B. Cabrera, Charlie C. Señase

Nash B. Maulana

NORTH / SOUTH COTABATO CORRESPONDENTS

Williamor Magbanua, Romer “Bong” Sarmiento, Roel Osano & Drema Quitayen Bravo CARTOONIST

Lourd Jim Diazon

He was colloquially called the “scientist” by contemporaries and members of his family, many of whom are into traditional-technology works, industrial mechanics and motor shop owners. But because his potentials in science and technology were hardly noticed in Muslim Mindanao, Nonong had to move decades ago to Luzon and eventually to Cebu where he met some of his paternal relatives and new friends who helped him acquire formal training in the field of his technological interests-- from TESDA.

It is said that being mechanics is in the genes of the Drapers of Datu Piang and Shariff Aguak. And Nonong was no exception; he was a creative worker of the traditional technology (Trad-Tech) who would have been an asset to Muslim Mindanao. Indeed, he was an inventor. He turned asthmatic as he aged when the coronavirus19 first struck in the country in 2020. Curiously, Nonong had developed a device to help him breath. It was made of manual air pump and a compressor tank with a built-in system denitrating or separating the Nitrogen gas content and retaining in the process only the pressurized oxygen of the compressed pumped air.

Friends and relatives in Cebu helped Nonong earn his TESDA NC4 as he needed to learn more of the technological terms of the chips and communications sets and systems that he had worked on and learned by experience in almost his entire lifetime.

Nonong’s father, Antonio Draper was a guerrilla who once went “missing” during World War II. But as it turned out, Antonio hid from the war enemy-seekers, because of his skills in reviving dead or dysfunctional military communications gadgets and equipment from recoveries of the ruins of war.

His uncle Jose “Hadji Pitong” Draper worked for my father as a machinist-mechanic of a U.S.-Made 4cylinder GMC they had converted from land transport use, into a propeller-shaft-coupled boat engine in the mid-1950’s. They went up- and downstream from Dulawan to Timbangan (Maganoy) via the Kabulnan River (which was then navigable); and to Cotabato City and vice-versa.

Simply put: Nonong’s potentials were never noticed, much less discovered in Muslim Mindanao. On the other side of the plane, his skills were discovered and appreciated and other people put them to good use. Ironically, Muslim Mindanao would bump into those experts who made good use of the skills of Nonong who was from Muslim Mindanao. I met Nonong when I was a child, sometime in the late 1960’s, when he resided briefly in Datu Piang at the house of his sister who was married to my uncle. But like Sir Isaac Newton, Manong “Nonong” never married and neither did he have a child, according to Ma. Leofe Draper (daughter of the late Judge Felix B. Draper), our high school class valedictorian, and a much younger cousin of Manong Nonong.

As a child, I was fond of the wooden toy trucks that Nonong made when he was in Datu Piang, living next door to my grandma’s old house by the riverside. As a product of a broken family, Nonong hardly finished high school when we met, probably in 1968.

Nonong would have been effectively sent to school in BARMM’s time when the Ministry of Basic, Higher and Technical Education (MBHTE) ensures that “NO Bangsamoro child shall be left behind in a common quest for the right to quality education.”