Draining the city: Then and now

Mayor Michael Rama’s desire to have the drainage master plan for Cebu City finally implemented is not a first in Cebu’s history. In 1938, his grandfather, assemblyman (later senator) Vicente Rama, fought tooth and nail at the National Assembly (the Commonwealth-era Congress) to appropriate a million pesos for a citywide sewerage system.

At that time, the tiny young city ended south at barangay Mambaling, north at barangay Mabolo and west at Fuente Osmeña rotunda. Then as now, it was an uphill climb that ended in defeat. Thus did Cebu City lose its opportunity to have a drainage network akin to those found in many large and modern cities worldwide. From then on, Cebu City had nothing but piecemeal, disconnected, disjointed canals here and there.

Now comes the grandson with a much bigger, more flood-prone city so badly in need of a network of sewers that now cost 100 times more than it did in 1938.

If only Vicente Rama’s sewer system did not succumb to political maneuvering, the flooding in Colon and Sanciangko Streets that we experience today would have been solved already then.

Alas, unlike the province of Cebu, which continues to bask in its debt-free status—once again boasted of by Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia in her latest State of the Province Address—the city is strapped for cash and made poorer by the sudden yanking of a high performer in the person of the city treasurer Ofelia Oliva.

I would not be surprised if I will later learn (after perusing through these voluminous Vicente Rama papers at Museo Sugbo) that it was Tomas Osmeña’s grandfather, Don Sergio, then vice president of the Commonwealth, who blocked Vicente Rama’s much-needed sewerage system.

You see, history has a way of getting us back to where we came from. That is, of course, unless we fight more than tooth and nail to change it.

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Cebu Archbishop Jose Palma recently met with the Archdiocesan Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church led by its chairman, Msgr. Carlito Pono.

The late-afternoon meeting, scheduled some months ago, finally happened last week amid the continuing hectic schedule of the new archbishop of the large Archdiocese of Cebu. When I asked him how different his load has been between his last posting—the Archdiocese of Palo—and Cebu, he batted no eyelash and replied quickly, “Oh, four times more busy and hectic. In Palo, the farthest parish was only two hours away.”

After our meeting, the archbishop’s workload may have just been increased further as we went home ecstatic that he will soon exercise the full authority of his office and issue an order to protect the nearly 100 heritage churches, convents and cemeteries that managed to survive in Cebu.

Furthermore, Archbishop Palma is also open to inviting the provincial government to help in conserving and protecting these proud remnants of the past, many of which are becoming tourist attractions in the towns and cities where they lord over plazas. Like Ricardo Cardinal Vidal before him, the new Archbishop of Cebu is keenly aware that he leads a flock so blessed with numerous Spanish-era properties—some in various stages of preservation, others in utter disrepair—that need the immediate caring attention of their pastors and not ill-advised renovation or outright destruction.

So few, he lamented to us, were left of these in Leyte and Samar after the destruction wrought by the 1944 to 1945 Liberation bombings. These two islands, after all, bore the brunt of the initial reclaiming of the Philippines by the Unites States from the Japanese.

Having come from Dingle, Iloilo, where he grew in the faith amid the coral stone walls of the church there, His Excellency is no stranger to the wealth left by the long-gone missionaries of the Catholic faith. It was those ancient fathers his immediate predecessor used to warn hard-headed parish priests in one retreat stating, “I pray the souls of the ancient priests who acquired these things in the past will haunt you in your sleep!”