Noy hoping for peaceful Christmas

MANILA, Philippines - President Aquino is hoping for a peaceful, joyful and family-centered Christmas for Filipinos, admitting that disasters have been some of the most difficult challenges that his administration has had to deal with in the past years.

“Hopefully, I will not be attending to some emergency come Christmas season,” the President said during the annual Bulong Pulungan media forum in Pasay City on Friday.

Aquino said his goal really was to serve the Filipino people, especially at this time of the year when “you really want a united family, an opportunity to be with each other.”

The President said Christmastime was an important season for Filipino families to connect with each other and “hopefully we will be able to afford that atmosphere. This is really the time for reunions, time to bond with each other and also commune, of course, with God.”

Despite the hardships, Aquino said Filipinos would get re-energized for all of the challenges they would have to face in the coming years.

The President said he was also wishing that Filipinos would stay optimistic this “Christmas facing the new year,” noting they did not imagine some of the challenges they had to face in the more than five years they were in office.

“Who is Benigno Aquino III (now)? I was looking at the mirror the other day. I was trying to decide whether or not I had more hair now or less hair. But in all seriousness, I’d like to think I’ve also grown as a person,” Aquino said.

The President said they had to forgo a lot of Christmas celebrations the past years because the worst weather disturbances had been hitting at the time when Filipinos would have the traditional gatherings.

“I tend to be a person who prepares for the worst but hopes for the best and some of the challenges were really (difficult),” he said.

But the President said opportunities would also arise from calamities, citing the production of “Hot Pablo” or powdered chili in Davao Oriental after the area was devastated by Typhoon Pablo a few years ago and people had to look for another crop and source of livelihood.

“As far as the eye can see, there is not a single coconut tree left standing and everybody depends on coconut for their livelihood. Then the coconut…needs five to seven years to grow,” Aquino said.

But he said “Hot Pablo” had turned everything around and the province was now awash with cash.

The Chief Executive said he did have the chance to watch his mother, former President Corazon Aquino, work at a distance “so I assumed I had some knowledge of the workings of Malacañang and the demands of the presidency.”

“But having even that inkling was not enough for all of the challenges that we had to surpass,” he said.

The President cited Super Typhoon Yolanda in November of 2013, Typhoons Pablo in December 2012 and Sendong in 2011, as some of the worst situations that they had to face, not to mention the Zamboanga City siege and Bohol and Cebu earthquakes also in 2013.

Typhoon Ruby hit the country last December.

Aquino said even if they wanted to relax and enjoy the most festive season, they had to take care of 1.4 million people at that time, “feed them daily, ensure that nobody gets sick when…electricity was down, water was interrupted, transportation was at a standstill.”

“…the first responders themselves were part of the victims and… one would have hoped to do a lot more but I don’t think anybody actually saw a challenge on that scale affecting 44 of our 81 provinces,” he said.

“Now, if we look at all of these things that we’ve had to undertake, I’d like to be able to – and I’m hoping that people will say – look at the challenges that we had to undergo as a people and how we overcame them. And if there’s a future challenge, then perhaps they will be able to say we will also surmount this in the same way that we managed to surmount that which we thought was insurmountable,” Aquino said.

Personally, Aquino said that “whenever I feel that there is such a big challenge before me, I go back to the challenges before my father and my mother and I also am able to say: ‘what is this compared to what they had to do?’”

For instance, the President said his late father, former senator Benigno Aquino Jr., did not have access to the media and had very limited access to any person in the seven years, seven months that he was incarcerated, but he had to deliver the message, passing it through “mimeograph sheets, xerox sheets, word of mouth.”

“I think his efforts and his actions contributed to the point that we’d gotten to at EDSA (people power revolution in 1986). And he said something like, I think he was quoting the Bible, ‘If the time is not right, a thousand prophets do not make a difference. But if the time is right, not a single prophet is necessary.’ And when you look at the culmination, which was EDSA, you really can see that,” Aquino said.