DSWD ought to take care of those rugby boys!

For today’s Straight from the Sky Presentation, we begin our Travel series of our pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Our pilgrimage began as we hopped on the tourist bus in the Queen Alia International Airport in Jordan, where we went straight to Mt. Nebo, the very mountain where God showed Moses the Promised Land, where one can see Jericho and the Land of Judah all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.

Moses was supposed to have died and was buried in Mt. Nebo. Yet, this great leader of the Israelites does not even have a tomb for them to visit. We asked if there were other possible burial sites in Jordan, but there were none. After our visit to Mt. Nebo we went to the ancient city of Madaba where one can see a mosaic of the oldest map in the world in a Greek Orthodox Church.

The following day, we drove south of Jordan passing through the vast Desert of Moab where the Israelites must have circled around for 40 years to visit the stone City of Petra that was built by the Nabateans. This is the city that was featured in the movie “The Last Crusade”.

This is just the start of our travel series on this pilgrimage to the Holy Land sponsored by Delmar Travel and Tours, SkyCable and MyTV Channel 30. You can watch this travel series on SkyCable’s Channel 61 at 8 p.m. tonight and replayed on MyTV Channel 30 at 9 p.m. and M-W-F.

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While I do not dispute the police reports that our celebration of All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day was peaceful or uneventful…and yes, congratulations to CITOM for smooth traffic at the Cempark, though I know that they still had trouble with careless car owners who parked on the main road inside Cempark…or those thoughtless ones who parked at the mouth of the side road blocking potential parking for others to use. Perhaps next time CITOM should park their tow truck to remove those offenders.

I got at Cempark at 6 p.m. Friday night after 30 minutes in traffic from the Cebu Country Club…which is not bad at all. But while I went straight to the Avila family gravesite, after placing the flowers and lighting candles, I also had to drop by the Segura gravesite, just a couple of blocks away and dropped by the graves of friends.

Thirty minutes later I decided to return to the Avila gravesite and what greeted me were rugby kids, kneeling down on our plot… apparently getting the melted candle…as I approached them quietly they saw me and suddenly ran away. Apparently they had friends nearby numbering around seven of them. My first reaction was to catch one of them…but on the other had, it might have been a dangerous thing to do. What pissed me off was that, they also stole all our new candles that we just lit 30 minutes earlier.

I asked my good friend Junji Chiongbian if Cempark knows about those kids and he told me that they are the rugby boys hanging out under the Mahiga Bridge. This makes us wonder, what the Department of Social Welfare & Development is doing about this problem? I thought they were awash with cash from their conditional cash transfer program, yet they can’t even do something about those rugby boys getting a very cheap high. This is why they steal melted candles (and those new ones too!) so they could sell them to candle makers and use the money to buy more rugby.

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Did you know that yesterday was the start of the International Fraud Awareness Week or Fraud Week? I’m not sure whether Sen. Jinggoy Estrada flew to the US to attend one of their conferences. But there is indeed an International Fraud Awareness Week from Nov.3-9 that I got from my email from Austin, Texas, which encourages organizations of all sizes and industries to host fraud awareness training for employees, assess their standard operational procedures whether it is fraud proof or not and invites articles, newsletters to highlight the problem of fraud.

According to this report, “Organizations lose an estimated 5 percent of their annual revenues to fraud, according to a report published last year by the US based Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE). To help shine a spotlight on this global problem, more than 900 organizations worldwide are participating in Fraud Week to promote anti-fraud awareness and prevention.”

Honestly, I’m not sure if the Philippine government is even aware that Fraud Week exists. I just hope that our Commission on Audit would send representatives to attend Fraud Week. But on the other hand, even with the existence of Fraud Awareness Week, corruption in this country continues to grow and now it has even smeared Malacañang. When Pres. Benigno “PNoy” Aquino III declared, “I am not a thief!” last week, he must know that we are not accusing him of stealing. We are accusing him of using the PDAF or DAP to bribe Senators and Congressmen in order to convict former Chief Justice Renato Corona. This is what he is being accused of!

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