MRT Fare Hike: Use this to solve problems

One early morning while preparing for an appointment in Makati, I was arguing with myself whether to take the bus or the Manila Rail Transit (MRT). I was trying to decide which is the type of transport that will provide better convenience and comfort, if at all these two words can be used when referring to transportation in Metro Manila. I was coming from Quezon City and the traffic along EDSA in the morning is just unimaginable. There are air-conditioned buses which is a relief considering the Manila heat. But these buses, aside from being stuck in heavy traffic, stop at every corner loading and unloading passengers, and it takes between 1 hour to 2 hours to get to Makati from Quezon City – a distance that on a traffic-free hour can be traversed in 20 minutes. These buses would often overload, taking in passengers even if the bus is full, and making extra passengers balance themselves and hang on to rails or hooks while standing along the aisle. Taking the MRT is much worse. While it takes the MRT probably 30-40 minutes from its first station at SM North to Ayala station in Makati, the difficulty that one has to go through to get into the MRT and the situation the one has to bear while inside the MRT, is implausible. Taking the MRT is like joining thousands of ant colonies elbowing each other for space, squeezing themselves to fit into small spaces, and smelling each other’s arm pits while the train goes chug chug chug to the next station. But with the recent issue on MRT fare hike, I decided to take the MRT to see if there is basis for the increase.

MRT Commuters at North Station

I took the MRT from its first station at North EDSA. The queues spilled over to EDSA and it was moving at a snail’s pace up to the third floor. The escalators were not working. The elevator has a very long queue. The station was teeming with thousands of morning travellers. The MRT, which comes at intervals of 20-30 minutes, gets filled up so fast and it leaves the first station jam-packed with passengers. Despite this, it stops at every station to take in more passengers until it is almost bursting with people inside. At every station, thousands of passengers await their opportunity to squeeze into full trains. Most of the time, they have to wait for the next one in the hope that it is less full. But the next train is the same as the previous one and so is the train after that. Passengers have no choice but to force themselves into trains so they can get to their destination. Never mind that they have to cling on to nothing to keep their balance, or smell other people’s armpits and feel other people’s butts behind or in front them, as long as they don't run in late to their works or classes, or appointments.

The MRT fare hike should address this basic problem and provide more convenience and comfort to the riding public. Even if the fare is increased, if the riding public had to go through the same hell like experiences everyday, then the MRT management is not delivering well on its mandate. How can MRT possibly address this everyday dilemma? Certainly, the MRT can devise means like:

1.              But more trains to cater to the growing number of the riding public. This will justify the fare hike.

2.              Use 2-story trains to accommodate more people.  One might argue that the present infrastructure of the MRT line cannot accommodate a 2-story train. However, if we can lose 10 Billion pesos in pork barrel scam, certainly the government has enough money to fix the structure so that 2-story trains can be accommodated.

3.              Each train should have limited stops so that not every train will stop at every station. This will lessen passengers on each train.

The MRT is raking in millions of pesos everyday. It has no excuse to implement practical solutions to address issues especially the decongestion of the trains and provision of better convenience to the riding public.

Farewell, Artus....

 

The revolution has lost a petal

But more will bloom in your stead.

You are now one with our ancestors,

United with our skies

Joined with the moon, the sun, the stars.

Will you continue to stand

On the looming mountains?

Be in every first light of dawn

And in every dancing cloud?

 

Adieu my brother, my comrade,

You are now the fire that forever burns

And now forever roam our lands

Forever, your spirit, we shall seek

In every prayer we make.

Manja, Sri Lanka, 06/03/2013

*********

I cannot forget the unkempt hair as if he never owned a comb. Nor will I forget his famous beard, which he used to make funny faces that made us laugh. I clearly remember how he said “orgashem” instead of “agashem”. I still can recall his old black coat, which I think was the only one he owned.

I still hear his songs of love and revolution - in the streets, on the stage, between boring educational discussions or around a warm bonfire on cold winter nights. My memory is so vivid of his graceful theatrical leaps as he tried, hope not in vain, to teach us the basics of acting and dancing and music. As skilled as he was in his guitar, on the drums and the gongs, who would forget how deft he was with the nose flute?

I can never forget one time, while he was busy making some propaganda paintings with those big angry and scary faces of the President, I asked him to make one that is beautiful to see. Using pointillism, he made me a bookmark - of my face and of a gun, and emblazoned with ‘rosas ng digma’ (rose of the revolution).

He was always a patient man, a kind man.  I never heard him raise his voice at anyone. His patience helped turn stubborn, cynical and mischievous girls like me into instruments of freedom, justice and peace.

When we met in the midst of the lush Cordillera forests in a not so distant past, I wouldn’t know it would be the last. Although when he made that decision to offer his life to the peoples’ struggle, I knew that every rare meeting could be the last. And rare it was, as rare as when the moon was blue. But as the “The Little Prince” would teach us, you will forever be in one of those bright stars shining and watching over us, always. ##

Dawn of War

It flies, a solitary black crow
Above the debris of damaged homes
Abandoned in fear and dread
Beyond the parched and barren lands
Fields untended and forsaken.



The echoes of children at play,
Of flopping cows on roads and farms
Of women preparing an evening meal,
Dogs and chickens, cats and bats,
Are now but figments of the past.

For now it is a land of death
That wails and weeps of lives unsaved
Parched from the the stream of blood that flowed
Mute to the cries and welts of battle
Numb to the scorching summer heat.

Oh yes it weeps but still it glides
As it aims at the distant single tree
To rest its wings and heal its heart
To gain its strength to guard the land
Until that seeds of freedom sprout.

(Manja, Mar. 31, 2013, Sri Lanka)

What’s on the Road Ahead[1]

(By Wilson Cadiogan)[2]

T

 hree months ago the decision was simple – well, not so simple. Starting a new life in Australia as a lowly paid factory worker with a family of five to depend on that pay, and after only 48 hours in the country was not necessarily an act of desperation. I could easily have opted for unemployment benefits, considerably higher than the factory job paid, while looking for something more appropriate to my training and experience. But I did not want to lose a moment to find out, in order to find myself in a relation to the land of OZ, whether Australia was the proud and clever country that its politicians say it is.

        

The factory, the heart and soul of the industrial religion, was my second choice as a first step in the journey ahead. I wanted a job with the garbage collection department – an almost impossible aim, being new and non-union and from the wrong part of the globe. It would have been perfect to discover the biggest former penal colony in the world through its backside.

         My decision was a conscious act of commitment to a new way of life. I am a migrant, an Oriental from a non-English-speaking background. The young fair woman at the Commonwealth Employment Office asked me if I could speak English. I said yes. She looked at my job qualifications as we talked. She was a nice person. But slowly I began to understand from her other ‘employment officer’ person, that by some weird logic of the system my extensive university studies and teaching experience were nothing, nothing more than figments of my imagination. Why? Simple, because they were obtained from a non-English-speaking background and therefore non-existent, or at most, inferior.

         She apologized. Equal employment opportunity is government policy and there is no racial discrimination in Australia. “But what can I do? That is the rule. By the way, there is a factory demand for a general hand at Kirrawee, if you are interested”. We stared at each other for a moment. We both laughed. She arranged an interview for me with the factory. I got the job on the spot.

         A master’s degree in philosophy, ten years teaching in the academy, and being 46 years old, are not exactly the right training for a factory peon. The first month was hell. But I soon became intimate with every fibre in my body and sharpened my knowledge of human anatomy. Nightly, I could name the several hundred muscles and bones in my body by the same number of aches and pains. By the second month I was fully enjoying the job.

         The factory building was a formless and ugly prefabricated structure, like all the plants sprouting like pimples around Sydney. Inside was dusty, noisy and unhealthy: freezing in winter and boiling hot in summer. The name of the game was profit, fuelled by cheap migrant labour. The company produced speakers for stereos and public sound systems.

         In two months I was a good factory hand. I could assemble the components with my eyes closed, spray paind the wooden castings, pack them into cardboard boxes and load them onto big trucks while humming ‘Waltzing Matild’ and not miss a beat.

         It was by the end of the third month that I paid more attention to what I was handling. As I worked on the assembly line I noticed disturbing signs of the state of the Australian dream. The woofers and tweeters were made in Taiwan, the amplifiers made in Hongkong, the screws and drivers made in the People’s Republic of China, and the big plant machines bore instructions in Nippongo. Only the wood and the labour were Australian. It dawned slowly on my unbelieving mind that the ‘clever’ country was a myth. Australia was going down the Argentinian road, a fetcher of water and a hewer of wood for the industrialised nations of Asia. The signs are there in that factory.

         It was Friday. It was payday, always my favourite day these last three months. I drew my pay. I walked leisurely from the factory through the main street of Kirrawee, part the ugly factories, the shops pregnant with goods, the banks and their sharp-eyed moneylenders, the bottle shop doing its usual Friday double time, the silent apartment houses, the concrete steps down to the railway station. It then occurred to me that this was the last time I would walk this familiar road. I had made up my mind that moment that there was nothing more to learn in the factory.

         The station. The train arrives. The hard seat. The train moves. I continue to ponder over my three months spent in the factory earning my daily bread and a beginning that they were also spent looking forward to its end and the start of something new. Now jobless, I grew uneasy that I have done nothing to make the new life more real. Only my walking out of the factory had reality. I felt cheated and betrayed. Three months lead to the myth and a seat on this train. Were it possible for me to fix this train on its tracks, to extend its present rails to eternity, to defy space and gravity, I would have done so. I would then stay rooted on my hard seat, close my eyes, drain my strength and passion, my mind empty as my idiotic grin, and I would stay there, timeless and unnumbered, unregistered and unknown, bothering no one and no one to bother me, travelling forever and ever between my past and my future.

###

          

---

[1] Patti Miller (ed), Writing Your Life: A Journey of Discovery (1994), Allen & Unwin Pty. Ltd. Australia, pp. 120-124.

[2] Editor’s Note: Wilson C. wrote the following piece about his first job in Australia after he arrived here from the Philippines with his wife and three children. He writes with his characteristic sharp observation and skeptical, wry voice.

Getting Lost in Colombo

Galle Face

It was another one of those long weekends, so I decided to get lost in the city. I chucked my umbrella and a bottle of water into my backpack and draped my camera over my shoulders, put on my runners and went out to a cloudy Saturday morning. It rained a few minutes after I went out so I had a big use of the umbrella. My plan was to walk and find my way to the city’s Fort. Along the way, I passed Galle Face which surprisingly, despite the rain, was enlivened by a few, mostly couples, promenading or sitting in a romantic embrace on the benches along the beach, protecting their heads with umbrellas from the rains that continued to drop in trickles.  Luckily, the rain later on let up and the sun started to shine bright and hot.

Rain or shine date

In my efforts to find the fort, I ended up in naval restricted areas but was able to take some good photos along the way, retraced my steps back, discovered some buildings of European architecture and then got lost in a maze of narrow, busy side streets selling all kinds of merchandise from fruit drinks to chocolates to saris. One can get drowned in the multitude of products that one can buy here – just don't forget to try their delicious thirst quenching fruit shakes. It takes all the heat out of your body.

As I did not know where I was, I just got on a bus, dared myself to get back to my apartment using this public transport. Very luckily, I guess I got on the right bus because 10 minutes later, I saw a familiar place that I knew was just 10 minutes by walk to my place. I got off and walked the short distance, realizing that one cannot get lost in this city after all.

What's on the Road Ahead

What’s on the Road Ahead[1]

(By Wilson Cadiogan)[2]

T

 hree months ago the decision was simple – well, not so simple. Starting a new life in Australia as a lowly paid factory worker with a family of five to depend on that pay, and after only 48 hours in the country was not necessarily an act of desperation. I could easily have opted for unemployment benefits, considerably higher than the factory job paid, while looking for something more appropriate to my training and experience. But I did not want to lose a moment to find out, in order to find myself in a relation to the land of OZ, whether Australia was the proud and clever country that its politicians say it is.

        

The factory, the heart and soul of the industrial religion, was my second choice as a first step in the journey ahead. I wanted a job with the garbage collection department – an almost impossible aim, being new and non-union and from the wrong part of the globe. It would have been perfect to discover the biggest former penal colony in the world through its backside.

         My decision was a conscious act of commitment to a new way of life. I am a migrant, an Oriental from a non-English-speaking background. The young fair woman at the Commonwealth Employment Office asked me if I could speak English. I said yes. She looked at my job qualifications as we talked. She was a nice person. But slowly I began to understand from her other ‘employment officer’ person, that by some weird logic of the system my extensive university studies and teaching experience were nothing, nothing more than figments of my imagination. Why? Simple, because they were obtained from a non-English-speaking background and therefore non-existent, or at most, inferior.

         She apologized. Equal employment opportunity is government policy and there is no racial discrimination in Australia. “But what can I do? That is the rule. By the way, there is a factory demand for a general hand at Kirrawee, if you are interested”. We stared at each other for a moment. We both laughed. She arranged an interview for me with the factory. I got the job on the spot.

         A master’s degree in philosophy, ten years teaching in the academy, and being 46 years old, are not exactly the right training for a factory peon. The first month was hell. But I soon became intimate with every fibre in my body and sharpened my knowledge of human anatomy. Nightly, I could name the several hundred muscles and bones in my body by the same number of aches and pains. By the second month I was fully enjoying the job.

         The factory building was a formless and ugly prefabricated structure, like all the plants sprouting like pimples around Sydney. Inside was dusty, noisy and unhealthy: freezing in winter and boiling hot in summer. The name of the game was profit, fuelled by cheap migrant labour. The company produced speakers for stereos and public sound systems.

         In two months I was a good factory hand. I could assemble the components with my eyes closed, spray paind the wooden castings, pack them into cardboard boxes and load them onto big trucks while humming ‘Waltzing Matild’ and not miss a beat.

         It was by the end of the third month that I paid more attention to what I was handling. As I worked on the assembly line I noticed disturbing signs of the state of the Australian dream. The woofers and tweeters were made in Taiwan, the amplifiers made in Hongkong, the screws and drivers made in the People’s Republic of China, and the big plant machines bore instructions in Nippongo. Only the wood and the labour were Australian. It dawned slowly on my unbelieving mind that the ‘clever’ country was a myth. Australia was going down the Argentinian road, a fetcher of water and a hewer of wood for the industrialised nations of Asia. The signs are there in that factory.

         It was Friday. It was payday, always my favourite day these last three months. I drew my pay. I walked leisurely from the factory through the main street of Kirrawee, part the ugly factories, the shops pregnant with goods, the banks and their sharp-eyed moneylenders, the bottle shop doing its usual Friday double time, the silent apartment houses, the concrete steps down to the railway station. It then occurred to me that this was the last time I would walk this familiar road. I had made up my mind that moment that there was nothing more to learn in the factory.

         The station. The train arrives. The hard seat. The train moves. I continue to ponder over my three months spent in the factory earning my daily bread and a beginning that they were also spent looking forward to its end and the start of something new. Now jobless, I grew uneasy that I have done nothing to make the new life more real. Only my walking out of the factory had reality. I felt cheated and betrayed. Three months lead to the myth and a seat on this train. Were it possible for me to fix this train on its tracks, to extend its present rails to eternity, to defy space and gravity, I would have done so. I would then stay rooted on my hard seat, close my eyes, drain my strength and passion, my mind empty as my idiotic grin, and I would stay there, timeless and unnumbered, unregistered and unknown, bothering no one and no one to bother me, travelling forever and ever between my past and my future.

###

          

---

[1] Patti Miller (ed), Writing Your Life: A Journey of Discovery (1994), Allen & Unwin Pty. Ltd. Australia, pp. 120-124.

[2] Editor’s Note: Wilson C. wrote the following piece about his first job in Australia after he arrived here from the Philippines with his wife and three children. He writes with his characteristic sharp observation and skeptical, wry voice.

Face Off at Galle Face

It was a splendor to watch the sun set – with the sun fading into the horizon into a ball of orange, illuminating the graying sky with a bright auburn hue, and be lost in the flow of tourists and locals relishing the blissful afternoon mood.

Galle Face was an otherwise deserted strip of beach area in Colombo City when I last saw it in 2009, with military soldiers armed to the teeth manning checkpoints along the roads. That was just after the “end of the 30-year civil war”. Today, it was totally not as I remembered.

Galle Face was now teeming with families, lovers, tourists and traders. The long stretch of lawn was full with children (and adults) flying their kites, playing ball, and vendors selling colorful toys. Parents sat leisurely watching their children as lovers cuddled and whispered, or promenaded, creating a world of their own from the otherwise exultant and noisy crowd.

Along the beach, children and adults frolicked excitedly as the waves caressed the shore with big splashes of cool water. Some were ecstatic, some were frightened, and some were just dipping their feet in the water. Most of them though were dressed from head to toe.

Merchants lined the paved area with stalls and carts, selling mostly food – from ice creams to fries to meals and souvenirs. Of course, they have their famous ‘kottu’ and ‘isso vade’ (pronounced ‘isuwade’), which I certainly tried, and which I topped with a delicious ice cream and then some spiced guavas.