Despite the Commission on Audit's recommendation to stop allegedly unnecessary hiring of job order personnel, the Sangguniang Panglungsod relentlessly batted for it because it did not want to break the momentum of Pasay City's main thrust of social and moral transformation.

Job order personnel are residents of Pasay and are pursuing their studies. Many of them are children of overseas foreign workers.

The main intention of the Sangguniang Panglungsod is to provide jobs to young Pasayeños given the number of Filipinos leaving the country every year.

CoA seemed not aware of the social and moral problems created by the exodus of job-seeking Filipinos to other countries resulting in broken homes.

Was there awareness on the part of CoA that the JOP program would somehow ease the unemployment problem and thereby help keep families together?

Your humble author was a witness to the difficult condition faced by Filipinos working abroad, although an experience overseas broadens a person's perspective in life.

In July 1971, the Local Government Center of the College of Public Administration of the University of the Philippines sent me to Europe under the International Union of Local Authorities to attend a Comparative Local Government Course on "The Management of Municipal Finance" from 19 August to 14 October of that year.

There were 20 of us as participants representing 16 countries.

The course took us on a tour of various cities and various countries in Europe — France, Italy, England, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, and Germany particularly the cities of Paris, Versailles, Brussel, Trier, Cologne, Rome, Venice, Frankfort, and Berlin.

The pleasurable side of it is sightseeing and walking. But there is the serious side of sitting down and looking at blueprints on how different countries manage local government, for example, how they plan and develop new settlements and communities in Holland. What I observed could also be done in the Philippines.

When the Dutch government put up a new town, the first thing they do is build the government building for offices or places of work; second, they put up facilities for health and other services; and finally, a provision for the residence of employees or workers is set up.

The time spent going to the office for work is reduced and traffic is avoided.

Office workers, male and female, in Holland use bicycles in going to the office. They look strong and sturdy.

They dug canals and waterways that looked clean and clear. You could see the fish.

Had the Spaniards done this in Quiapo and Binondo in Manila, perhaps these places would have been different without the stink of the esteros. That was in my mind when I was in the Netherlands in 1971. (To be continued.)