Once upon a time a waiting shed

In my third year high school days, we came upon a piece of work entitled “The Use of Useless Things”. I hope my memory got the title right after the lapse of 45 years. Our teacher then, Mrs. Lolita S. Lapinid, assigned it to us for overnight reading and, the following day, she generated a lively and insightful analysis of the opus. It was an entertaining prose as the title would suggest. But, we were not much awed by the details of which things were useless. Rather, the teaching that there could still be many different uses for apparently useless things amazed us no end.

 That essay antedated the word “recycle”, a term of current application. I could not recall its author, whose name I cannot now remember, using recycle. However, there is no doubt to me now that the writer had a far advanced idea on environment protection than the peers of his own time. His thought processes could very well place him among the more respected advocates of environment conservation of the present. Indeed, if he wrote that work today, he could have made full use of this term “recycle” and be hailed at par with former US Vice President Al Gore.

 There is a store, very near the Cebu Business Park, whose owner must have read “The Use of Useless Things”. For specific direction, this store is located at Barangay Luz. Anyone coming from F. Cabahug Street, will find it situated on the right side of the road, probably thirty meters after crossing the corner of Cabantan Street. Supposedly, it is not difficult to locate this house because, to the trained eye, there is a “waiting shed” that can, ironically, serve as its land mark. Locating the waiting shed however, is the problem!

 The physical structure of the shed exists because this was probably built to last. It still has its cylindrical metal serving as posts and galvanized iron for its roofing. But, lo and behold, it does not look like a waiting shed anymore. It has become useless as a shed. In fact, it has ceased being a public property because people cannot use it as a shelter against sun or rain. Here is why it is so.

 The owner of the house in front of which is this waiting shed, has converted it for his use. A new use for a useless thing. He has expanded the premises of his house so as to include now the area where the waiting shed stands. So, instead of a place for people to wait, it now houses a sari-sari store.

 The storeowner has placed several goods under the roof of this once-upon-a-time shed. There is a water dispenser whose housing is fixed to the post. The merchant has so much merchandise to sell such that he had to add some shelves within the former waiting shed with which to display these goods. In short, and at the pain of sounding redundant, what was once a public structure is now a privately owned sari-sari store.

 This may not mean much to most officials. After all, this structure might just have cost a few thousand pesos of taxpayers’ money. It will not even be surprising to hear that barangay officials of Barangay Luz authorized this conversion. Who knows, the storeowner might have paid some of them some money for him to make a sari-sari store out of the waiting shed?

But, did not His Excellency, President Benigno Aquino III, make a plea to all of us to be personal against anything that does not follow the “matuwid na daan”? Certainly, it is not following the straight path for someone to appropriate for his own benefit a public property in much the same breath that officials veer from that straight path if they do not exert efforts to protect public property from the clutches of the usurpers. I might not have voted for him, but our president has a good point, If we cannot right the small wrong things, how can we ever hope to rectify our monumental errors!