Painted roofs can't hide the squalor

It's quite amusing that Imeldific's cosmetic skill of then trying to hide Metro Manila's slums and their squalid ugliness from foreign dignitaries coming for Manila visits during FM's heyday, is now being replicated by Mandaue City's copycats for the ASEAN Summit come December.

During the martial law past, the decrepit areas along the Pasay airport road from the MIA up to the Roxas Boulevard junction used to be shielded - as in "salimbong" in Cebuano - by put up white painted, high-tiered plywood sheets to cover the non-affluent dwellings, makeshift huts, card board lean-tos, etc., obviously from foreign visitors' eyes. Other slum congestions all over Metro Manila also underwent vain "make-up" jobs to keep poverty and its squalor under wraps. They always spilled out, and could not stay hidden.

For how could arriving dignitaries and tourists miss from the air the "eyesores", while planing in for landing, such initial impact of hovels along the rivers and esteros, or along the old railway, or under the bridges, or the "ghettos"? Former Mandaue City Mayor Demetrio "Boy" Cortes used to joke when asked how to hide the "unhidable": "That's easy, let the visitors wear horse blinders in their stay in Manila, except in posh or plushy places".

Indeed, whatever and however painting job or cosmetics hatched up by LGUs of Lapulapu, Mandaue, and Cebu City to hide the proverbial dirty slips and other unmentionables that spell ugliness, and whatsoever nauseating to other human senses, they are all useless and illusory. For one thing, the visiting ASEAN Summit bigwigs had briefings beforehand that ours is a nation wallowing in typical third world penury, but pretending to aspire for highly developed status in 2020, so gabs GMA in vain stab at splendor.

For another, while many of the ASEAN countries are much better in economic status than the Philippines, they and the rest of the aggrupation have the ubiquitously unavoidable "dregs of mankind", replete with hovels, huts, and their squalid slums and ghettos in their own countries.

And so, why should Cebuano leaders go artificial and be dishonest about the Cebuano poor? Hospitable and gracious hosts as Metro Cebu LGUs should strive to be, but by gracious, why should they hide or paint over the stark reality of penury? Why can't they accept the inevitable truth of our being and, for once be honest at least to ourselves, if they can't be bravely honest to our ASEAN visitors of our adversity?

Besides, it's a useless exercise to cover all the squalor that the Metro Cebu landscape is littered with, just as other ASEAN cities and countries are also having theirs. Who are we trying to fool, but ourselves? Like a boomerang that strikes us in the mouth in shame, to quote a Cebuano mantra: "Ang atong kabuang mosumbalik ra sad nato".

No amount of vain external ostentation, yeah, no green painting of the roofs of poor men's congested hovels in Looc, Mandaue or elsewhere, can hide the many ugly faces of the slums. In stark contrast, daubing the roofs uniformly with green paint will only invite curiosity and attention to a defining focus against the background landscape of eyesores.

As ASEAN dignitaries, visitors, and media people plane in, and hover in fly-over maneuver before touching the Mactan airport, those with window seats and the plane's crew will surely be taking in the view of the Metro Cebu landscape. So, unless landing at night, ASEAN visitors will see the seaboard dwellings from Cebu City to Subangdaku, Tipolo, Guizo, Tribunal, Looc, Opao, down to Paknaan and Labogon, Mandaue City, with all their decrepit imperfections.

And, while some of them may be crossing over the first Mandaue-Mactan bridge, our ASEAN visitors will get a full view, just at a spitting distance, of the squalor of Looc's misnamed sitio Paradise. No, siree, green painting of the roofs can never hide the many ugly faces of poverty. Our ASEAN visitors are no fools to get fooled by such tawdry and amateurish cosmetic job.

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