People who travel are necessarily exposed to the practices and lifestyles of the people in the areas they visit.
Filipinos having been to countries especially in the North (a term referring to economically developed nations) can’t help but observe the stark contrasts of lifestyles from ours, with their government clearly prioritizing the essential services that they provide to the constituents in improving the quality of their lives.
Take, for example, clean water for drinking.
Our sense of security and comfort now hinges on liters of water encased in plastic bottles, which have, of course, added to the growing plastic scourge haunting us, including our oceans.
Why do you think selling bottled waters has become a lucrative enterprise here and elsewhere in the past decades?
In the good old days when the Metropolitan Cebu Water District was inexistent, segments of one’s childhood experience involved fetching water from communal artesian wells.
Girls and boys carried pails of various sizes for the water to be used by households and for their storage in the big clay jars, an indispensable item then.
The place became the community center for fostering friendships and ingrained the bayanihan spirit that used to be part of our collective psyche.
Our government is duty-bound to ensure that each inhabitant has safe water to drink, and equally as important, has access to it.
The Human Right to Water and Sanitation was explicitly recognized by the United Nations in July 28, 2010 and it acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all Human Rights.