Perfect Line Fitness Gym in Cagayan de Oro

Get sweaty, lose pounds, and win back those curves!

Get down to the gym, at the corner of Velez and Tiano Bros. Sts., opposite Dynasty Court Hotel.

Get acquainted with Cindy Crawford and a trio of California girls. And of course, with your old vivacious selves.

Pen Lettering In The Old Times

Speedball introduced us to calligraphy, or pen lettering, in our youth. It taught us Gothic, Roman, Old English, Text, Manuscript, together with pens and India ink. And gave us interminable pride in our improved penmanship and classy letter writing.

Today, the company is still at it, marketing the same products that we had learned to love and treasure.

From the personal ancient archive comes this basic lettering book that came with the pens and a supply of India ink, published in the 40’s.


And with the advent of computer technology, pen lettering has been relegated to the dustbin of things discarded or not taught extensively.

Even in our little hometown, movie and business ads are now done mostly in computer-made tarp billboards. Almost gone are the days of hand-painted signs with images.

Holdouts can still be seen around the city practicing their dying art in small, cramped and dilapidated quarters.

Their lights are dimming and pretty soon they will be extinguished.

And my favorite, Old English, will really look older.

F I C C O

Having read through the latest FICCO Newsletter, it can only be inspiring going through the lead article with its articulation of its clear and unmistakable twin messages. That this union can continue to grow only through its membership; and that these continuing hard times require extraordinary measures and efforts from both the organization’s hierarchy and the general membership.

Though implied but not expressly mentioned, one could also take pride in where real strength and stability lie in the organization – in the collective membership where individually, one member on average accounts only for 23,347 pesos in deposit. Meaning therefore that ownership and stakeholding are well distributed among the many members of the union, rather than ensconced in a small elite group accounting for a great majority of the ownership.

Having been a longstanding member through all these many years, one is also heartened by the two graph insets, tracing the growth of membership and total assets. When I left the city in 1980, indeed total membership counted in the single thousand, and assets were mostly in loans and cash in bank. But look at the very big and diverse picture now!

Truly this credit union is where many dispossessed people, people unable to be properly serviced by mainstream financial institutions, can go to seek relief for their many and multifaceted credit needs, rather than to the informal underground institutions which cater and prey on a people weakened by stubborn ignorance and very emaciated economic conditions.

It is an organization that will also aside from providing credit, teach one how to secure and manage debt, and to build a good credit record and history.

But beyond that, it is also the organization where one can truly learn to manage one’s family and business finances – in the areas of saving for the future, saving for business expansion, etc.

In short, it teaches the entire panoply of good and sound personal finance, which is the only basis for hoping and building for a better future, especially in a land filled with asset- and cash-strapped families.

It is therefore quite a damper listening to some current and prospective members recount their initial dealings with FICCO employees where emphasis is placed too much on first building a good credit history to aim for that Class A label. Thus, the recommendation is for members to start borrowing early even before being able to build a good deposit history, so they can become proud Class A members quickly.

Imagine for a moment what kind of a credit union it would be if the driving motive for becoming a member is so one can borrow, typically an amount way beyond what one has put in deposit?

The union would quickly run out of funds to lend, since loanable funds come essentially from members’ deposits.

For a union to continue to prosper there has to be a very delicate balance between those who borrow because they need to, and those who will deposit so they can build for their future and/or in anticipation of some future needs that will be financed or collateralized by their accumulated deposits.

There has to be enough numbers of the second kind, so that the union can continue to have sufficient funds to lend to those truly in need of credit.

In balance therefore, it should be easy to see why both kinds of members are exemplary members, and not that one is rated better than the other. Consider their symbiotic relationship, one cannot live without the other.

In fine, this is the simple and pure logic why financial institutions exist and survive. They pool the community’s savings which in turn will be lent out to those with legitimate needs but lack enough savings to profitably finance them.

All can be member depositors all the time, but not all can be member lenders all the time.

Think about that.

On The Streets Where People Live

Real estate definitely is a very scarce and valuable commodity, especially in a place teeming with people not only exponentially expanding through runaway birth dates but with added growth accounted by the influx of migrants from different beleaguered parts of the big island of Mindanao.

Thus, the purchase and acquisition of real estate for housing hereabouts is simply beyond the dream of this unfortunate segment of the population.

Cagayan de Oro is a place bursting with people, reaching a nadir where one believes total population for now defies accurate census counting. I have never gotten a definite answer to the question about the current population of the city. Voter registration records should only reveal an incomplete picture, since it clearly does not include non-voters like children which number in great hordes.

A basic societal dilemma then is where to decently lodge all these people with their families. Where and how to provide sufficient and adequate places where people can live and raise their burgeoning families.

Given the gargantuan size of this problem in this particular context, one can only sadly wonder how.

But we do see daily where many of them “live”, not far from the streets that we negotiate daily in our workaday lives. Actually, many of them live partly on the streets that we use daily – parts of the street where their kids play, laundry and bathing are dutifully done, etc.

This video typifies many such streets in the city where residents live lives in their cramped and precarious worlds.

A messy situation exacerbated by the fact that these houses or shanties that people build on these sites are actually squatting on tiny strips of public land separating the actual paved streets from the boundaries of private land. In the process erasing whatever necessary provisions for road shoulders and sidewalks were planned.

Creating a scenario where a narrow street of two lanes, one lane for each direction, has not only been deprived of necessary shoulders but where parts of both lanes have been co-opted by squatter residents coming out of their reed-thin houses and their lives literally spilling into the street proper. Add to that all their parked vehicles of assorted construction – motorized or pedal-powdered, etc., garaged flushed to their shanties’ sides. And some house furniture to boot.

Imagine then how the passing vehicles have to expertly negotiate thru those extremely narrowed streets replete with impediments both human and otherwise.

Even in the terribly busy national highway that traverses the city, one can find street lanes embedded with metal spikes where clandestine vendors would attach ropes to hold down temporary tarp roofing/siding.

Life under bridges in this benighted place is another matter best suited for exposition at another time. Or what about life in a river island created by silting which has now enough residents to merit the label of a barangay?

Cry For Me, Cagayanons?

Old Cagayanons pining for familiar sights in the old hometown may have to brace themselves for a visual jolt.

View these short videos taken Saturday late in the afternoon. See if you can recognize from the maze the old familiar haunts very reminiscent of your youthful memories.

Many probably would not recognize these places.

These were shot along Divisoria Park as I walked along the middle of R N Abejuela (So. Divisoria) St. inching toward Xavier University or positioned at a corner of Velez (Del Mar) and the former.

The chaotic frenzy that is now the infamous hallmark of the weekly two-day nite café has ominously masked the once rough jewel we treasured anyway as our premier park, centered right in the heart of the old poblacion. A truly distinctive landmark we used to proudly attach to our beloved hometown.

Now, it might as well be a huge disorderly movie set depicting a tent city of refugees, or a dreary scene of displaced merchants forcibly ejected from their establishments by some natural calamity, like a conflagration or a bad flood. Except this nightmare recurs every week, with the eager players showing up earlier and earlier than allowed, and showing up even during regular weekdays.

But no, for this is an actualization of a method of madness, executed with design and promoted with flagrant political self-interests by the city government. Proffered with, one is sure, some expressed sham Christian concerns for the less fortunate of the citizenry, providing them rare opportunities not otherwise enjoyed in a competitive business environment.

But in the process social order, equity, and the respect and compliance with laws be damned for the rest of the city residents, especially those who are duly licensed and taxed and also in the business of providing the self-same merchandise and services provided by the purveyors in the café.

Never mind that the countless fly-by-night (literally) bazaar-like purveyors there may be unlicensed, untaxed, and maybe selling contraband. Small pesky details really in the general scheme of things where voting constituencies are the paramount concern. Political power at all costs, that’s the price to pay.

But for whom?