How to you bring a practically dead river back to life?
Do you tell the teeming occupants of its banks to please, please kindly dismantle their shanties and stop draining their wastes into its currents? Do you gather loose change to save the river by deploying fancy carton deposit boxes in the town’s various business establishments? Precisely what do you do to regenerate that river to good health?
IMAGE CREDIT: TRAVELMARIKINA.WORDPRESS.COMWhat if we can successfully rehabilitate many of our country’s dying rivers like this one?
In retrospective, I’ll now retell the probably true story of how one such mayor made it happen for his town a little over two decades ago. A South Korean heavy equipment importer in a nearby town told me about it as I waited for his mechanic to trouble-shoot my car. He recalled a most intriguing day when he visited the mayor whom he was trying to interest in purchasing heavy equipment for the town.
The mayor’s staff had earlier told him over the phone that the mayor was greatly disposed towards approving his company’s bid. The mayor wanted to finalize the deal with him right away, so could he please come over at once to see him?
At the mayor’s office, the South Korean executive quoted the mayor as saying without much ado: “I’ll go directly to the point, Mr. Chung. When you prepared this bid for our garbage dump trucks, how much in overprice money did you put in it for us?”
The Korean said he was so dumbfounded by the question that he couldn’t speak for several minutes. He got dizzy from the thought that the overprice he had put in was too low. But when the mayor repeated the question, a little more sternly this time, he realized he had to give an answer so he finally muttered: “It’s exactly 30 percent, Mr. Mayor.”
To his surprise the mayor said without missing a beat, looking him straight in the eye: “I see. All right, Mr. Chung, I want you to know that I don’t allow and accept such add-ons in our town contracts. Here’s what you should to do if you want to do business with us: knock off that 30 percent and send me your reduced quotation right away.”
“Yes, Mr. Mayor,” the dazed Mr. Chung recalled having blurted as he hastily made the formalities of leaving. “Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. Is there anything my company can do for you in appreciation for giving us your business?”
“Nothing really, thanks,” the mayor replied. “But tell me... I heard a great deal about the beautiful Olympic Park in Seoul that your government built for the 1988 Olympic Games. I’m particularly interested in your Han River regatta course and your Mong-Chong moat. How your country restored that ancient artificial lake for the Olympics intrigues me! I also heard that you have the largest music fountain in Asia. Somebody told me the water goes 88 meters high, changes 1,400 times with the laser lights, and plays 140 different songs. What a great many things your country had done in Korea!"
“Yes, Mr. Mayor, our Olympic Park is as beautiful as you’ve heard,” the Korean recalled saying with a happy jolt in his heart. “If you find time to visit Seoul, autumn will be a particularly enchanting time for you and your staff to come.”
“I’ll seriously think of going, Mr. Chung,” the mayor said.
After several months, the South Korean executive said, huge dredging equipment started cleaning up the putrid stretch of the river. The squatters who choked its banks got relocated and the river became clearer and freely flowing again. One night a singing water fountain with laser lights started performing in midriver, and a sculpture park of farmers and water buffaloes and herons in concrete started to form along the river’s scrupulously clean and neat banks.
(This retrospective by the author is a condensation of a substantially longer essay that first appeared in this column in 2003 and that subsequently appeared as a chapter in his book English Plain and Simple
in 2004.)(Next:
Making sense of abstruse legalese) March 11, 2021
This essay, 2,035th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the March 4, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times
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