DAVAO CITY—A sanitary community water system now serves an interior town in Sulu, along with a public school building, as the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) continues to cover more areas to deliver social services and prevent more of its poor from turning into extremism.
The new infrastructure came with the hiring of additional teachers to serve the various school districts in the province.
One of the projects, the Sagay-Sagay Water Supply System Level II, or communal faucet units, would be among the many other water-system projects to be pushed into the interior towns of Sulu, where many villages rely on unsafe deep wells, some of which are contaminated with salt water.
The ARMM said the water system in Sagay-Sagay was turned over on January 4 to the local officials of Panglima Estino municipality, formerly Panamao town, as ARMM Gov. Mujiv Hataman described the project as “significantly important to residents.”
“The water system project now supplies the community of Panglima Estino with safe and potable water. In the past, the community sourced its supply of drinking water from deep wells and water pumps, which put their lives at risk from water-borne diseases. For instance, residents of Barangay Marsada, an outlying village, used to get its drinking water from a deep well with salty water,” the ARMM Bureau of Public Information said.
It said the municipal government of Panglima Estino “is currently planning to establish a water district that would further improve water services to its residents.” It quoted Estino as saying that, “once a local water district is established, the residents will only pay for the transmission and administrative costs of the water supplied to them.”
In addition, the town also received one six-classroom school building at the Panglima Estino National High School to cater to senior high-school students.
The Hataman administration already poured a total of P323.77 million worth of infrastructure projects to Panglima Estino since 2012. This year, it said, another paved road—5.5 kilometers long in this town—would be done this year. It costs P109.50 million.
Panglima Estino is a fifth-class town in Sulu province composed of 12 barangays with almost 30,000 residents.
Meanwhile, the ARMM Department of Education hired 192 public-school teachers in Sulu, their appointment papers signed also on January 4, including their deployment papers.
Hataman was assisted by Dr. Tim Undain-Sanchez, Sulu schools division superintendent in distributing the papers to the teachers, who were hired “after undergoing a screening process that includes validation of their credentials, a comprehensive examination, a teaching demonstration, and a panel interview that guarantees only good quality teachers will be hired.”
The ARMM is composed of nine divisions that include Maguindanao I and II, Marawi City, Lanao del Sur I and II, Lamitan City, Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi.