Soldiers, beauty queens join hands to clean Estero de Paco

MANILA, Philippines - Armed with rakes, shovels and pick axes, more than 600 volunteers recently marched to Estero de Paco, a major tributary of the Pasig River.

The volunteer contingents came from the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Miss Earth, University of Santo Tomas, Adamson University, Concordia College, and the local community.

Valuable assistance also came from the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) and the Manila City government’s department of public services, helping provide labor and trucks to haul the sludge and solid waste from the estero.

ABS-CBN Foundation managing director Gina Lopez pointed out the importance of cleaning this vein of the Pasig River. “Feeding into the Pasig River are 48 tributaries. At the end of the day, you can’t clean the Pasig River if you don’t clean the tributaries. So to make a mark, we chose one really, really dirty tributary, which is Estero de Paco,” Lopez said.

Kapit Bisig para sa Ilog Pasig (KBPIP), a project between ABS-CBN Foundation and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources through the Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission, has taken on the challenge of rehabilitating the Pasig River one waterway at a time.

KBPIP has made headway in their Estero de Paco efforts after just a year of operations – relocating more than a thousand informal settlers that used to live along the waterway, dredging the estero, and strengthening 80 percent of the easements along the three-kilometer tributary.

Twenty-one Miss Earth candidates and reigning queens helped remove solid waste from the estero. Miss Earth Foundation executive director Cathy Untalan brought the beauty queens to the estero to expose them to the environmental status of the Philippines.

“All of us can do something… We brought in different candidates from all over the Philippines and even Filipino communities abroad, for them to experience and for them to realize that they themselves can do something, they themselves can be the agents of change,” she said.

Navy, Air Force, and Army personnel, as well as 80 reservists-in-training, came in full force to help in the cleanup.

“This [estero] needs a lot of work, and needs a lot of manpower to actually remove the obstructions and to keep the water flowing. But we are here to help and we take pride in actually helping the community,” said Lt. Col. Araus Musico, commander of the 1st Air Force Reserve.