Making Cebu better
Settling in Cebu, I think, is one of the most important legacies my late father left our family. You see, his struggle to find his place in a city far from his home in northern Mindanao was a great personal achievement for him.
Father often regaled me with tales of his time as a struggling college student here. From his stories, it appeared to me that his family was not exactly poor, food and crop products were always available from the bounty of the land and the sea back in his coastal village of Talisayan.
But, like many Visayan migrant families at around the 1950s who were enjoying the incentive of owning generous tracts of land to entice them to settle in Mindanao, good college education was not a top priority in their household.
Yet he was able to convince his parents to send him to a private university in Cebu to study commerce. But travelling back home to Mindanao during school vacation was hard. His frugal allowance only allowed him, as his parents then wished, to spend weekends and vacations with relatives in Catmon, Cebu, the hometown of his mother. For a bargain he managed to squeeze himself into the cargo hold of a wooden-hulled ship plying the Cebu-Cagayan de Oro route. That's just so he could spend vacation at home and then be able to go back to Cebu.
Eventually, he was able to make Cebu his new home where he met new friends, earned his degree, found work, built professional connections, and grew a family of his own.
I never got to ask him why he chose Cebu as his base but one reason I'm writing this is to thank him for it. As a kid, I lived with my father and mother in a household with six of us siblings, and a steady stream of relatives staying or visiting our house in Casals Village, Mabolo. I woke up to a world not exactly of privilege, but one where life's essentials have already been figured out for me.
I knew Cebu was home but along the way, there were things I learned that opened my eyes to the reality of a community in a developing country -poverty in the rural areas spilling to the city as informal settlements, rising cost of living, poor infrastructure, traffic, garbage, and many others.
Nevertheless, Cebu has always been about opportunities to create a good and well-balanced life through hard work and enterprise. Just ask any of the 25,000 Koreans (and growing) who have made Cebu their second home. They now even have a vibrant newspaper and magazine industry within their community here.
The presence of many foreign investors and local enterprises here ensures shelter and food on the table for those willing to put in the hours of work. The quality and standard of work vis-à-vis qualification (underemployment), though, is another story.
Cebu has a rich history of trading and is blessed with a good harbor in a perfect location and an excellent geographical symmetry between white beaches and mountain resorts. We do not suffer natural disasters and instability as much as other areas in the country. We also have a rich history and a culture that we can be proud to share to the world.
But we have only scratched the surface of what we are capable of achieving. Public infrastructure-wise, for example, we are lagging behind from the point of view of a growing metropolis. We can only boast of the Mactan airport, Mactan bridges, and the north and south reclamation properties in our arsenal.
The other day, I was stuck in traffic trying to avoid flood-prone areas, towards main avenues linked by potholed secondary roads. If my father were alive and of my age today, perhaps he would think twice about settling in Cebu.
I wouldn't. But to borrow a cliché: There is work cut out for us all.
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