Mambulaoans WorldWide Buzz

 

Easy life … these girls at the Jose Panganiban National High School (JPNHS) in Jose Panganiban, CamNorte are happily taking their lives in stride, enjoying a short break from classes under a canopy of a lush mango tree at the campus mini-park. They are lucky as they are in school, while many others would be somewhere else eking out a living to help support their families, or simply in the streets growing useless. “O, pose na kayo … pang-Facebook ito ...”

Gold expert at young age …  the way he works on the dirt he shoveled from the bed of Patyaw river in Calogcog, a baranggay in Mambulao, this boy is obviously an expert gold worker. Toiling under the rain, he knows that it won’t be long when he could hit the “high grade”, thus earn him big ones so he could be in school by next year, just like most of the kids in his neighborhood. But what a damage he has done to the river – he and the rest of the gold workers along this tributary have choked the river with silt and at the same time destroyed the habitat of many aquatic life that thrive here. Worse, the muddy river water ends up in Mambulao Bay, making the seashore water equally polluted and unsuitable for bathing or swimming in. – Photos by ERIC ESPANA, text by ALFREDO P HERNANDEZ