The smallest unit of my country is the "Barangay" and why the position has importance for people within the Barangay

in life •  last year  (edited)

It could have been worse for me and my family if a possible Tyrant Barangay Captain had won the Barangay chairmanship.

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A couple of days ago my whole country just had an election event both for youth councilors and for for the Barrio officials. Barrio is equivalent of a county of USA. To give you an idea, our provinces here are divided into towns and towns are divided into Barrios or also known as "Barangay". The etymology of the word Barangay comes from the word "Boat" because our ancestors came to the islands using boats. I would call our small unit of governance as barrio and yes it is indeed the smallest unit of governing the people where if a more serious case went to happen, the case will be coordinated to the Municipal town mayor and to the police.

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The Barangay or Barrio is the smallest government unit here in my country which takes care of the people living within and aims to help, maintain peace and order, and coordinate with the town government in service to the people living there.

The role of the Barangay officials is to pinpoint some of the problems in their neighborhood and solve it using the funds that would come from either the congressman or Mayor. A very good Barangay Captain as he is called is the one that produces results for his place of responsibility. So if you happen to live in a Barangay which does not have any changes for improvement, chances are that your Barangay Captain and his/her councilors are not doing anything. Here in my own Barangay, our Captain managed to build some Barangay halls, there of them if I remember it right, he improved the road by making it higher, had put a cover over the Barangay's Primary school ground where once it had been a grassy playground for the pupils and a place for us kids in the neighborhood to play as well during vacations and weekends sometimes.

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It will be up to the barangay Captain's ability and resourcefulness on how he would manage the village. So a corrupt Chairman official will either get rich alone or both him and the barangay will get some improvements, I can choose the latter.

These extra projects cannot be done if the Barangay Captain is not active in creating such projects and for some reason he is doing it not totally for the sake of his constituents or the people in the barangay but also for himself. Of course the projects needs some funding and they are not cheap, so if the Captain would graft from it, then he or she will indeed get rich in time. That is why our outgoing Barangay Captain had managed to build himself a very big house plus some properties and new cars. However he also had managed to build some edifice for our Barangay and an Ambulance for the use of the community which I was lucky enough to use last April and may to transport me to the city for my AV fistula repair surgery and without that Ambulance's free service, it would have been very hard for me to fix this fistula in my left arm which had been my problem from the last two decades because it had grown too large during those more than two decades ago.

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Pixabay

I thank the outgoing Barangay Captain that he was able to procure our village one ambulance which for me is the most useful project he did. The road improvements also had helped a lot even though my house gets flooded everytime heavy rains would fall down.


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