After lunch, I texted my two remaining close friends who shared the same sympathies as mine with regards to the debauchery that is slowly creeping up Palawan from its southern tip.
I was adamant in attending the UPAA forum scheduled for the afternoon. For what could be a more incongruous topic for a fora than "responsible mining"? I told my two friends, since nobody at our house (my mom studied in UP Diliman in the early 50s, while her four boys studied hard sciences in Diliman and Los Banos later on) got invited for the gathering, I've already told my mom not to attend. We were in a boycott mode at the house so to speak.
But my two friends texted me back to attend. I previously texted them, what the heck is the organization of UP alumni doing with the responsible mining bandwagon?
Turned out one my two close friends was scheduled to speak. Upon their urging, I changed my mind and decided to attend the forum. I told one of my friends, am only going there because of you. She was asked to deliver the mining situation in Palawan from the anti-mining side.
First to draw his sword in the forum was Engr. Fuji Rodriguez, who is with the Narra Nickel. Probably the longest and most parched talk of the day. As parched as the mountain sides they have razored off in the south. The engineer was boasting that he is in the company of what is probably the most intelligent group of men in Palawan during his time in the mining industry. Duh! (Let's compare our Stanford-Binnet's Mr.) After a rather hyper-extended (just like men trying to augment their sexual inadequacy with huge, loud, shiny cars) introduction to his talk (f__k me, you've been introduced by the forum host already!), the mining engineer dived into the kernel of his talk about responsible mining: the reforestation blah, and the alternative livelihood blah for the affected communities. He was talking about the gulayans for the community.
This was followed by a very raunchy (I hope you're intelligent enough to understand what I mean by this) deconstruction of the current Mining Act delivered by a witty old professor from Baguio. My friend delivered her talk after the witty deconstruction that elicited a series of guffaws from the audience.
Everything was almost going fine (it was an intellectual discourse among UP alumni anyway), but the vice governor decided to react.
One of the informations brought out by my friend to the afternoon audience was the fact that as of now, there are 315 applications for mining in different parts of Palawan.
The vice governor said, based on his fact checking with the secretariat of the provincial board, there are only around 15 mining applications in the board.
Faced with the two incongruous numbers, he could not engage the intellectual discussion and asked where did my friend from Palawan NGO Network Inc (PNNI) get the data. He was like a child appealing to the audience, this cannot be true. This girl has taken my candy. Although somewhere in the hyper-extended (Too! They seem to share the same preponderance for boring the audience) reaction he issued a disclaimer that he was not lawyering (well, that's what he is, a lawyer) for the mining sector, his demeanor late in the afternoon was like he was the one worst hit by my friend's statements during the forum than the mining advocates.
Even the presentation of pictures of indigents near Rio Tuba (site of the Rio Tuba Nickel Mines) suffering from skin diseases right after an unloading of sulfuric acid was questioned. The vice governor must have thought the audience composed of men and women who have TAKEN THEIR UNDERGRADUATE studies in the fertile rooms of UP are so delicate, they cannot be allowed to get exposed to such horrifying images.
But the vice governor should be aware that we, as the best and the brightest minds of the Philippines living and toiling in this corner of the country, have been trained for the horrors of work and society. Matters of visual taste and "but we have tried our best" apologia are poor defenses in such intellectual exchange among the brilliant minds who have walked the holy halls of UP.
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