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BY MAE SINGUAY
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BACOLOD City – The Social Development Center is in a dismal state, according to the Sangguniang Panlungsod.
Mayor Evelio Leonardia must look into its poor maintenance and the reported abuse inside the facility housing mendicants and serving as rehabilitation center for delinquent children, the city council said in a resolution.
Councilor Bartolome Orola, author of the resolution, also asked the City Administrator’s Office, City Health Office and the Department of Social Services and Development to check the city hall-run facility in Barangay Taculing.
Orola said he learned the center has a “detention-like environment.”
It has “indecent quarters, inadequate sanitary installations, dirty comfort rooms, clogged toilets, clogged septic tanks, and [no] drinking water stations.” Children are “sleeping on cold concrete,” he said.
Attached to the resolution was a letter a concerned citizen sent to City Administrator John Orola on Oct. 3.
The letter sender said they served as a missionary in Jackson, Mississippi, USA for two years and returned to the Philippines due to their “deep longing for service, especially to the poor, orphans and street children.”
Since serving at the center in April 2015, “I have seen and felt how underprivileged the already underprivileged was,” the sender said.
According to the letter sender, the center’s “prison” had “urine and wastes on the same floor where children sleep.” They claimed a teenage girl was “beaten and tortured” by a police officer and children there “acquire communicable and noncommunicable diseases related to the intake of soiled food and unclean water.”
The Sangguniang Panlungsod said non-potable water, bad hygiene and unsanitary facilities cause ill health at the center, and children there reportedly have highly contagious skin diseases.
It recommended that professionally trained people in charge of the center provide daily monitoring and supervision of the children’s activities “to make sure their welfare and best interest are served.”/PN
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