Babbles to Bubbles

Since January 2006 when the Filipino management took over the Lafayette mining project in Rapu-Rapu, the company opened its doors to the public in consonance with its policy on transparency.

To date hundreds of visitors from the whole spectrum of the society have witnessed the mining operations of the company - teachers, students, nuns, church leaders, bankers, government officials, environmentalists, local residents, foreigners. Most of the visitors have never seen an actual mine before.

The technology amazes them and the employees are always delighted to see new faces in the campsite.

It is quite an experience when facts dispel hearsays. It’s enlightening. New worlds emerge. The visits also played host to those moments when babbles about the mining operations of the company were driven off by facts and firsthand experiences.

Babbles… to bubbles. Like when anti-mining folks say, “If we allow Lafayette to operate, the island of Rapu-Rapu will collapse underwater.” Visitors now know that it won’t happen. The island’s land area is actually more than 5,500 hectares and the mine-pit has an area of only 17 hectares.

Just recently the company welcomed UP students and their professor to the mine complex, drenched in rain. The weather was bad that day due to low pressure and rough seas prevented boat travel. The employees provided accommodations, dry clothing and food. They were also given the usual orientations accorded to visitors. And later a safe trip back to their destination.

But anti-mining groups weaved a different story; they said that UP students who were conducting research were harassed by company employees. Below are some of their pictures at the campsite. Do they look harassed?

Visits are always considered as special delight, especially the boat rides – and of course the facts.

Another fact, hundreds have responded to the company’s invitation to visit the camp; anti-mining proponents declined. These people who made up stories in an effort to stain the company image have never been to the campsite. The spectacle they create out of macadamized stories never fail to gain audience.

They consider themselves as founts of truth… but their creations have nothing but air. Spectacular bubbles.

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Death in Rapu-Rapu?

Comments on “Death in Rapu-Rapu” by Pyrex

Erroneous Detail. Maurita de Ramas died on November 22, 2007, not on the 23rd as reported in the blog. Medical Certificate issued by Rapu-Rapu District Hospital where she died says so.

The Rest of the Write-Up Becomes Suspicious. Having started with a mistake, the rest of the article becomes untrustworthy.

See For Yourself. The item claims that Maurita, after eating fish caught on October 28 “complained of nausea and vomiting immediately” and “was immediately brought to the hospital and was given some medication. For the next few days, she went back several times to the hospital because of her ailment.”

However, a nurse in the only hospital in Rapu-Rapu swears that she never saw Maurita in the hospital during the period October 28-November 18. She saw Maurita only on the 19th of November and the days thereafter.

The medical certificate reflects that she was confined on Nov. 19-22, 2007. She was confined only on the 22nd day after the alleged food-poisoning!

Further, the hospital has no records showing that Maurita was an outpatient anytime during the period October 28-November 18.

Strangers impose the idea of food-poisoning. Maurita’s husband Miguel said that during the burial of her wife, strangers who identified themselves with Sagip Isla approached him, pressing on him the idea that his wife died because she ate fish on Oct. 28. Miguel noted that he never saw these people in Rapu-Rapu before, and they spoke in Tagalog.

The medical certificate identifies the cause of death as Cardio Respiratory Arrest secondary to Congestive Heart Failure (CHF). Nausea and vomiting, of which Maurita allegedly complained of, are symptoms of CHF.

May her soul rest in peace.

"Death in Rapu-Rapu" @ http://firesetternews.blogspot.com/2007/12/death-in-rapu-rapu.html

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Rapu-Rapu residents to militants, outsiders: can you give us jobs?

Rapu Rapu residents asked militant groups if they can help the poor community and create jobs should they succeed in getting Lafayette’s polymetallic project on the island closed down.
“These outsiders are risking our future and our lives in the name of the environment. Their real advocacy is to keep us poor and desperate and we all know why. And they get paid for what they do,” said Ananias Balato, Rapu Rapu resident.

Balato said these militants and even some Church people have resorted to lying to scare the public into non-existent disasters they blame on the project.
“It is not true that there was a fishkill in Pagcolbon, where the project is, and in neighboring barangays. I live here and I can tell you we had a perfectly normal life until these outsiders started telling the world we had a fishkill,” he said.

“The world believed these lies because Rapu Rapu is so remote that there was no immediate way of checking. But if only people can come and see for themselves, including the priests who prefer to just stay in the comfort of Legaspi City, they would realize they are actually putting at risk our present and our future without any basis,” he said.
Militants associated with Sagip Isla, Gabriela, Bayan, and other groups associated with the Left, have camped out in a park in Legaspi to ask for the closure of the project because of the supposed fishkill.

Government experts, however, have ruled out the project as the cause of a supposed fishkill in Poblacion, which is more than 10 kilometers away.
The supposed fishkill, based on reports, involved about ten kilos but no more than two sacks of marine life.

Lafayette has invited the anti-mining groups, including a bishop and his priests, to visit the project in an effort to prove to them it had nothing to hide and nothing to do with the supposed fishkill. The invitation has yet to be accepted.