BEFORE going to our topic for the day, permit my thought to thank our daughter Ma. Gina and her son Gian Luc from caring husband Lyndon. Their unexpected visit was unique vitamin to me. How different the now lanky Gian looks from the tiny babbling two year old that left our BSU cottage twenty years ago.
Much, much thanks to Lord God that they left Philippine airspace practically just long hours before the landfall of master environmental teacher Ompong (Mangkhut) and then untouched upon landing by the peripheries of another environmental teacher, Hurricane Florence.
First-born Donee and dad should come next! Their whole Sison family is a multiple of BARP in health care to me. Just appearance would be more than enough. The Buliyat, Lirio, Toledo, and other unforgotten families and personalities at the BSU campus are expectant of you. Hearts you touched at UB, SLU, UP, TI invariably manifest their remembrance of you when we meet and play intellectual pingpong.
To Gina, this info: The Balili River, whose biological condition you and your group researched on in college, was nagged on by Ompong to clean its bottoms and banks. After your monitoring visit?
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He hit the nail on the head. This is how we could succinctly describe the hurried but clearly delivered message of Atty. Edison Bilog, vice mayor of Baguio City. The vice mayor was personally invited by President Federico Balanag of the BARP Foundation, Inc., to be the guest of honor and speaker at its monthly assembly meeting last September 29, 2018, at the BARP Auditorium, this city.
He confessed that he had failed to read the hand-carried invitation letter and so could not be sure of a proper topic to expound on to the audience but that his initial predicament was solved when he was handed a copy of the Golden Years Newsletter containing the program theme: "Activating the committees."
The production committee and personnel of the paper could congratulate themselves for the choice of the theme. The coincidence of the fact that the theme expressed the need of the hour for BARP and that the experience and ability of the speaker imparted his credibility to the hearers was simply marvelous. It might not be well realized that the BARP organizational setup is patterned after that of a university.
A university is made up of three or more colleges. The university is said to perform well if the colleges perform well. If the member colleges fail in their mandated function so will the university. The committees in BARP are like the colleges and other departments or major sectors in the university. They are not there just for show. They must perform. That is the rationale for induction and taking the oath, "sapata," punctuated with the holy Name of the God Who said, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain."
In entry into service positions, the oath psychologically nudges us to perform despite work and sacrifice. We enter with enthusiasm but also with fear.
The parallelism cited above fitted well in the case guest speaker Vice Mayor Bilog. For as such vice mayor, he headed the city government planning body that is the City Council composed of the councilors and himself. From experience then, he could credibly tell to the acquiescence of his mostly elderly audience that it is the committees that initiate work in the council. Planning, analysis, decision, monitoring, evaluation and remedial measures start, if not done to a more or less degree by them. The whole council comes necessarily mostly in final touches, adjustments to fit the whole, collegial acceptance or rejection, and owning of responsibility for better or for worse.
Since BARP is a service-oriented organization, particularly BFI, self-interest should be far out of a BARP member's way. Speaker Bilog did not have to elaborate but his point came out clearly by quoting wholly a priest's parable of the sacristan wherein, in the end, the donee farmer whispered to the solicitee-donor priest to next time himself give the donation directly to the donee, "...not through the sacristan, because, last time, out of the 1,000 that you gave, he gave me only 800."
By body language, someone in visibility could have laughed his/her heart out. But anyway, mathematics is still an imperfect science for imperfect man. What matter more in life are happy coincidences. They bring in source of confident strength, in the Gobang vernacular, "bilog."
