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Last Monday's fire in sitio Aroma, barangay Subangdaku in Mandaue City has produced more displaced families and revisits an old question: What happens to the vicitms? And whose responsibility are they?
For local government officials, the problem ahead is helping the new homeless relocate. With or without an election in May, that is their official role.
Most of the victims are transients or dirt-poor settlers, who don?t own the land they occupy.
With relief efforts also come the photo-ops of high-profile givers of material and cash aid.
But the celebrity appearances are brief. They don?t diminish the ordeal of inviduals, who are reduced to refugees wondering how to help rebuild their lives and where to start. (They can?t live in gymnasiums or barangay health centers forever.
In the Aroma fire, a shantytown was levelled to the ground by a fire whose cause is still unclear.
With one burst of flame that quickly spread in the dry heat of summer, Mandaue City instantly added over 680 families to its list of desperate poor.
What little these residents had is gone, just like that.
It could happen to any neighborhood.
Faulty wiring, overloaded electrical systems, an untended cooking fire, a tipped over candle ? these are causes that repeatedly turn up in fire damage reports of residences, both marginalized and middle-class.
What separates the two is security, the knowledge that one has a home (or shack) to rebuild.
Sitio Aroma residents have no security.
They didn?t dare spend the night away from the blackened neighborhood. They huddled in tents or the open grounds for fear that the land owner would finally get to drive them out.
That fear found new foundation in yesterday?s arrival of a vehicle loaded with barbed wire and bamboo poles.
Fencing off the property is the priority of the owner.
(We watched the same drama play out in last year?s barangay Lahug fire, where disaster turned into opportunity for a now assertive landlord.)
No local government can claim it upholds social justice if it allows fires to be used as man-made instruments of eviction.
While time and land titles may not be on the side of sitio Aroma?s undocumented settlers, there is still room for the value of compassion.
That could be the driving force to:
? allow fire victims to stay for a fixed period on site till they gather their wits;
- invite true neighbors to join relief efforts and contribute what they can;
- prod the Mandaue City Council to resolve its logjam over a planned relcoation site in Paknaan.
