Ash Wednesday in the Garden of Martyrs
This posting is from Toledo City, just after we had a brief solemn rite of placing ashes on one another’s forehead, by pairs, reminding ourselves, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
I was paired with Fr. Paking Silva, who is 72 years old; I am turning 65 this July. At our brief preparatory reflections, our thoughts naturally turned to death and the end of our life. Not that either one of us expect to die soon, though he admitted that he had a brief scare some months back when he thought he had cancer of the throat. My mother is turning 88 tomorrow, so there is some genetic basis to look forward to a long life.
We had filed silently to the Garden of Martyrs at the People’s Development Center (PDA) in the compound of CEBECO 3. The covered hall honors those workers of the electric coops throughout the Philippines who have died in the line of duty.
There are over 120 participants at the 3-day workshop for officers of unions and associations in electric coops to which I have been invited. Fr. Silva has been promoting the organization of unions, or associations for those who do not want a union. He has supported their federation into the NSU and NSA -National Solidarity of Unions and National Solidarity of Associations.
When the Garden of Martyrs was first set up, other EC participants in the PDA workshops would look for their names, thinking that it was a Hall of Fame. They had sheepish smiles when they were told that you had to be dead for your name to be listed there.
In my brief reflections, I said that we all will die, sooner or later. What do we want to be remembered for? What do we consider meaningful in our life?
I think that one thing we can all look back to is our shared involvement in the mission of rural electrification and the electric coop movement. And that is a mission that is worth a life.
In fact I am thankful, even if it happened late in my life, that I have been given the chance to contribute to this movement. I still wonder aloud when I address PDA participants why we activists who have examined all sorts of power – political, economic, military, cultural, even religious – have failed to take electric power into account.
When I mentioned this to retired General Dumol, the first administrator of NEA, he said, “Did you not read Lenin’s description of socialism? It’s worker power plus electric power!”
The “missionary electrification” of all rural barangays is expected to be accomplished by 2008-2009, and that is something the electric coops and NEA can be proud of. But there is still the unfinished mission to bring electricity to the sitios and ultimately to all the rural households.
With the passage of the EPIRA, the electric coops and the rural electrification movement are faced with many challenges, even threats. In his earlier talk, Fr. Paking presented the list of 12 challenges and the self-assessment by the GMs of their readiness to meet them. During my turn to speak. I used the ORID framework to check what struck the participants most. The first union leader to raise his hands said: “The possible take over of the non-stock, non-profit electric coops by corporations.” He worried about the possible loss of jobs, and higher rates for customers, because corporate distribution utilities need to make profits.
I have taken part in a lot of capability-building programs of NEA and ECs for their board of directors, general managers, and department heads, so that they can shape up for the competitive regime ushered in by EPIRA.
One of the suggestions I made, which the participants agreed to, is to offer similar capability-building programs to the officers of unions and associations. The challenges facing the ECs cannot be met only by the management, with the unions concentrating only on their jobs, wages and benefits. It is in the interest of the unions and associations to get involved in the issues affecting the ECs as a whole.
Will the board members and management of the ECs also see that it is in their interest to involve the unions and associations?
Tomorrow, the participants will work on drafting an “agenda for survival” that the unions and associations can present to their coop leaders and managers.
