BoholAnalysis

In one book that I recommend to be read by all development workers in the world (Deconstructing Development Discourse: Buzzwords and Fuzzwords), much has been said about privatization. Below are some of those noteworthy passages: “The words ‘privatisation’ and ‘social protection’ have come together with increasing ease. In the early 1990s, in developing countries and in the newly defined ‘transition countries’, the main reform promoted by the international financial institutions was the privatisation of pen sions, with dreams of privatising health care and other aspects of social protection soon afterwards.” (Standing, 2010, pg. 73). “Thus the wave of privatisation, denationalisation,elimination of subsidies of all sorts, budgetary austerity, devaluation,and trade liberalisation initiated a deep social desperation throughout the Third World.”(Leal, 2010, pg. 90). Bohol had its share of this buzzword, especially in the context of utilities, when in December 2000, the Provincial

“…. the twins were found embracing each other while floating lifeless in the deep well.” ( Bohol Chronicle , 18 November 2007) I was dumbfounded reading the news on November 18 about two boys who died in San Isidro, Pilar - drowned in a well near their house while their parents were in the fields and an elder brother was watching TV. Though I have not seen nor known the boys personally, I feel a deep sense of remorse and regret, and an unexplainable sense of sadness swept over me. It is maybe because I am a father that I can very well relate how such a grave loss could affect one immensely. Or maybe because I know Pilar quite well, because I have worked there when I was still very young and free of cares, that those children, faceless as they were in the news story I was reading, brought vivid images of children in Pilar that I have talked to in my endless wanderings in the rice fields. Or maybe because I can see myself as that young boy watching TV, which loud noise drowned the cri