Humping Habit History

There were two islands I am familiar of more than any other- Panay and Negros. And this is their tale:

Panay is an island of wide flats and small hills and on its flank stripped and strapped by many rivers. These natural irrigations made the place ideal for growing rice. Indeed rice was grown here ever since the first agricultural societies dwell in the island. The masses soon relied to rice. In fact they copied population spread from the fashion of the rice plant. Farmers which rooted from the mouths of the rivers speckled inwards, roads splits left and right, and split further left and right, and split further dividing to unpaved paths which end with isolated dwellings. Each dwelling is a watch over hut to a few rice paddies. The complexity of population distribution which was a gift during the agricultural period became a bad convention to serve with modernization. It rather made social cohesion, technology introduction, economic development and other government projects allocation difficult. It was in charge for the fall of the once progressive Panay.

Negros is island skirt to the Kanlaon volcano. The many years of eruptions fertile the soil enough to attract the elites of Panay to put up sugarcane plantations. The population which established here became dependent to sugarcane and imitated indeed the expansion of a sugarcane plant. The people rooting from a southern delta spread in northward and southward directions constructing compact settlements along the way like node ends in the sugarcane stalk. Each settlement is practically managed by a haciendero, a sugar baron, whose manor, sugar mill, and sugarcane workers, rest at the center of a vast sugarcane field. Each settlement is practically a society in itself. It became easier to build public facilities such as schools and implement economic developing projects in these packaged settlements. This condition made Negros advanced more rapidly than Panay in the modern era.

This tale might resonate as a fiction to you yet the whole lot of what was said here are real situations. Panay is an island in central Philippines intricately meshed into four provinces with a total of 90 towns but only 3 cities. Negros is the island just east of Panay but neatly divided into two provinces with a total of 38 towns and 19 cities. Negros is far advance then with city to town ratio of 1 is to 2. Way ahead of Panay ratio being 1 does to30. Practically, geography and population spread pattern became habitual causes of the continuous downfall of Panay while Negros soars.

I live in Panay and formulated this harsh comparison while having a trip to Negros last weekend: There are some habits we can not change. It sticks to us. It pulls us down. That is what I just discovered. I might regret publishing this in a self motivation blog but I simply have to mention my thoughts. Probably change might ensue breaking those habits. But I don not know how powerful it must be to fix the logarithmic damage brought by history. Probably what we have is acceptance and adaptation to it. Adaptation in a sense that to put this bad habit to good use instead of breaking it. I do not know how exactly. It is brain ruining to think about.