CEBU, Philippines - It has been a common practice among Filipinos to bring food and drinks to cemeteries and more often than not, trashes are being left behind after the funeral.
This prompted Mandaue City Vice Mayor Carlo Pontico Fortuna to require all applicants for burial permits to provide their own garbage receptacles during the funeral.
In a resolution approved in the recent council session, Fortuna said “it is everyone’s responsibility to dispose their garbage properly.”
“Most often these drinks and other form of packaging for the refreshments like plastic or paper bags are left strewn on the ground in the cemeteries,” he said.
Prior to the burial, as per resolution of Fortuna, caretakers or the person-in-charge of public and private cemeteries shall inform the families about the requirement in disposing of their garbage.
Fortuna also urged the administrators of public and private cemeteries within their jurisdiction to provide proper labeling where the garbage shall be properly disposed.
Meanwhile, Mayor Gabriel Luis Quisumbing said it is high time for the city to look for new sites to build a new public cemetery.
Quisumbing sounded the alarm due to the already crowded public cemetery in the city.
“It’s a small cemetery. The space in the cemetery is a big challenge to us, and that is why we are looking for a lot,” Quisumbing said. He is considering having the dead cremated and keeping their ashes in space-saving columbarium, a storage facility for cinerary urns, in order to save space.
But the mayor said he did not push through with the proposal after the Vatican issued new guidelines on cremation.
Based on records, both the Mandaue City Cemetery and St. Joseph Cemetery lie on a 11,000-square-meter lot in Barangay Guizo. It was learned that about only 200 to 300 square meters of the lot have been allotted for the public cemetery.
City planning and development officer and City Development Council secretary Arch Marlo Ocleasa told the members of the CDC that the city government needs to study other possible areas where the living, who, when they finally die, will have space for burial, not in the city’s crowded cemetery.
Ocleasa said the city is thinking of putting up an apartment-type cemetery similar to those already in use in other cities to save on space and avoid congestion.
During former mayor Jonas Cortes’ first term of office in 2007, both then city councilors Jefferson Ceniza and former ABC president Joy Ouano urged the mayor to purchase a two-hectare lot where another public cemetery could be built.
A lot in Barangay Umapad was available then, as Ceniza had proposed, but this was disapproved by the former City Council.
The public cemetery is fully-occupied and the city helps residents, especially the indigents, facilitate burials in neighboring cemeteries such as the ones in Talamban in Cebu City, in Consolacion town, and in Lapu-Lapu City. (FREEMAN)