EDITORIAL - February 2018

EDITORIAL

Signs of Love All Around

February is, of course, the month of love, and what better way to celebrate it than to train our spotlight on lovers. In LGU life, that means holding the Annual Mass Wedding. We had 100 couples to take care of, who availed of a comparably grand civil wedding which came complete with a pre-marriage counseling session down to a framed portrait of the couple on their wedding day to memorialize the occasion.

But love, though mysterious in its ways, as the popular ballad goes, comes in many forms, even beyond CS Lewis’ four categories. The local government thus expresses its love through other concrete means.

There’s caring for its children as expressed in the Search for the Orally Fit Child in “Ngiting Lodi 2018” to advocate self-initiated dental care among the very young. This is on top of the dental-medical-surgical mission we held with the help of the Bayambang Association of Southern California and the Philippine-Medical Association of Western Pennsylvania.

There’s also the love and caring for our fisherfolks as evidenced by the latest release of fingerlings in Langiran Lake to help revive the fishing industry there.

February inevitably reminds us of JS Prom, and so we are also reminded that our love for our students isn’t far behind, with the continued support given to 300-plus LGU scholars and the frequent recognition we accord to achievers in all academic and non-academic fields.

Perhaps the greatest love of all that we have expressed so far is no less than biblical in nature: our love for the poor, as exemplified by our 3-day crafting of Bayambang’s Poverty Reduction Action Plan.

The rest of the month is spent on tougher kinds of loving: through a mini-job fair, public consultation over a poultry farm, public hearing on the cause of reported brownouts, and frantic preparations for the fiesta.

Another song, a sad one, pointedly asks, “Where is the love?” In Bayambang, it can be found everywhere you look, if you look around hard enough.