Arroyo to mark birthday in Pampanga

CLARK FIELD, Pampanga — It’s more blessed to give than to receive.

This seems to be the theme President Arroyo has adopted for her 55th birthday tomorrow which she intends to mark by gifting some 54,000 lahar-displaced families in this province with free house-and-lot packages.

Flordelita Arrozal, deputy director of the Pinatubo Project Management Office under the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC), said the President is slated to promulgate tomorrow an executive order conveying to the 54,000 families and others still awaiting permanent resettlement free houses and lots at the 15 resettlement sites built for them by the government all over Central Luzon.

The properties have lots measuring an average of 70 square meters and houses with about 26-square-meter floor area.

The President is expected to issue at least 20,000 certificates of housing allotments (COHAs) to the resettled families, including 2,000 land titles.

Despite the resettlement of 54,000 families, some 2,000 more families, including those in the government’s priority list (victims whose houses were totally destroyed by lahar), still await permanent resettlement.

Arrozal said some 20,000 families from the Madapdap, Mawaque, Bulaon and Camachile resettlements in this province will be given free transport for their meeting with the President at the tent-roofed amphitheater of the Expo Filipino here.

In the morning of her birthday, the President will hear Mass at the San Agustin church in Lubao town, not far from the reconstructed nipa hut in Barangay San Nicolas where her father, the late Diosdado Macapagal, was born.

She will next try her hand at planting rice in the Wenceslao resettlement in a scenario typical of photos taken of past presidents, including her father, and then join the local farmers in a lunch to be served on banana leaves. — With Marichu Villanueva