Workers of the light

(sun.star editorial, aug. 24, 2004)

HOW do you solve a problem like the government? Sen. Ralph Recto has likened the bureaucracy to a person who guzzles nutrients but is not developing muscles in the right places. He revealed that payroll expenses for some 1.1 million government workers shot up this year, up by 210 percent from 1994. 

   “The irony of it all is that the growth in the payroll budget hasn’t plugged manpower shortages in frontline agencies like schools and police stations,” said Recto.
  
    Some of the measures for addressing bureaucratic deficiencies seem to be more bitter than the problems. President Arroyo has asked Congress to pass eight tax measures to raise P80 billion in additional revenues and to generate P100 billion in savings.
   
    Sixty percent of the country’s tax collection goes to the bureaucracy’s payroll. The imposition of new taxes is opposed by sectors demanding better collection efficiency. Others zero in on greater transparency and accountability with public funds.

    Cynics point out that the fourth most corrupt country in Asia needs more than Arroyo’s newly created Presidential Commission on Values Formation with its “anti-corruption roadmap.”

    Is the country a lost case then? Contrasting with this anomaly of bloated bureaucracies and dwindling performance are pockets of individuals who dare involve themselves with others’ plight, braced with little else except a deep sense of community. Invisible, unheralded, indispensable.

    Ordinary folks volunteering their time and resources are taking small but incremental steps that uplift conditions and restore dignity. While there is no database establishing a national profile of volunteerism, many individuals and non-profit organizations are engaged in a wide range of concerns.

    The spectrum is broad enough to encompass a multi-partner organization like Hands On Manila Foundation Inc.-involved from cleaning animal cages in public zoos to visiting museums with the differently abled-to the newly formed Tsinelas Association Inc., assisting the students of Lut-od National High School in Pinamungajan, Cebu.

    Volunteerism is often perceived as a youthful indulgence, borne of an excess of idealism and free time. The stereotype is belied by those whose enthusiasm and commitment to serve remain undiminished by the years.

    Anastacia Tenebro was a college student in the late `50s when she volunteered for the Student Catholic Action. Converted into a believer of the movement’s “see-judge-act” method, she helped, as a young professional in the late ’60s to early ’70s, to start in the Cebu Archdiocese a local chapter of the Young Christian Workers.

    “We grouped ourselves into cells, studied issues affecting (workers’) lives and went into varied actions-personal and collective–that would bring about solutions.” Close brushes with employers of assisted workers did not quench her fire. The former registrar of St. Theresa’s College (STC) continues to share without stint: as a lay companion assisting diocesan seminaries; as a “temporary helper” in the STC library; as one of the founding members of the Tsinelas Association Inc.

    Two of Tenebro’s companions in this “life journey” are a young couple belying that those with obligations in life cannot volunteer or, at the most, can be active “part-time only.” Lawyer Donato “Jojo” Villa Jr. and wife Josephine “Jo” do not only share the same syllable for their nicknames. They have a sense of “family” that embraces not only their six-year-old son Vincent but includes seminarians of the San Carlos Seminary College and the Carmelite Formation Center and some 200 sons and daughters of upland farmers and seasonal construction workers in Pinamungajan.

    It is an “extended” family that takes up nearly all of the Villas’ weekends and after-office hours. But to those who doubt that persons can make lasting inroads against great odds, Jo assures that a volunteer “has nothing to fear and a lot of difference to make.”

    Perhaps what distinguishes volunteers from so-called development workers is a stoical view that neither bottomless funds nor the backing of Congress can make the light at the end of the tunnel come any nearer or faster to those in need. For the unheralded like Tenebro and the Villas, the divide is breached the moment they take the hands of those in the dark and walk with them into the light.