By Sophie Fabrigar and Yohann Udtohan || Illustration by Joxyne Gravoso

It is a melancholic tragedy to live in a country where rain is both a threat and a blessing, yet neither its arrival nor its absence seems to find the people prepared. When the drought sets in, they wait at taps that give them nothing; when the rains arrive, the water comes in such excess that it swallows the streets they call home. We had nearly surrendered hope of a remedy until President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., in his wisdom, offered one: prepare buckets to collect rainwater as the country braces for a possible Super El Niño. At last, a national solution that fits in every household. It is inexpensive, portable, and requires no billion-peso budget. It fits, quite literally, in a balde.

When some ungrateful citizens questioned this ingenious proposal, Malacañang’s press office had an answer of equally remarkable simplicity: they ought to buy themselves “buckets and buckets of brains.” We confess we found this reassuring. At last, someone in the government had identified a shortage more fundamental than water, and one which, unlike water, could apparently be remedied by a trip to the store. Indeed, the market seems to have understood the President’s vision before the rest of us did, with reports of increased demand for buckets and drums in Marikina following his advice. If only every government initiative enjoyed such immediate public participation.

We therefore propose that the balde be adopted as the official instrument of national development. If households must provide their own containers to catch whatever water the heavens permit, they may as well provide their own solutions to whatever problems the government cannot prevent. Consider flood control, on which so many billions have been spent, yet which has not spared many communities from knee-deep water. The sensible response is to equip every family with a bucket and instruct them to bail their homes and streets dry, one scoop at a time.

When the power grid stages its customary blackout, which it does with a punctuality our public transportation might envy, Filipinos need only procure a balde and stock it with fireflies, whose modest illumination may prove more dependable than the nation’s electrical infrastructure. Commuters stuck in the long line of morning traffic may carry one balde to sit on, and though fares will not fall, they will enjoy the dignity of having brought their own seats. As for Filipinos who have grown weary of expecting competence from their elected officials, a balde of patience is sold in the same aisle as the brains.

Indeed, the possibilities are endless. If public hospitals run short of beds, patients may stack four baldes to fashion a makeshift cot, drape a curtain over the arrangement for privacy, and rest comfortably in the knowledge that even hospitalization is an exercise in resourcefulness. If classrooms grow crowded, children can turn their baldes upside down and use them as chairs, learning from an early age that education is not something a government provides but something a child must improvise. Should the country experience another power shortage, every household may be instructed to catch lightning in a balde. The Department of Energy need only distribute lids to prevent the electricity from escaping. And as temperatures climb to unbearable heights, citizens may be instructed to wear their baldes as hats. Thus, the balde shall serve not only a practical purpose but also as a bold fashion statement, ushering in a new era of climate-conscious couture in which the size of one’s headwear reflects the severity of one’s suffering.

Some may object that buckets cannot build reservoirs, repair water systems, prevent floods, or guarantee a reliable supply of clean water. These critics, we fear, misunderstand the elegance of the proposal. Such infrastructure requires planning, public funds, competent administration, and accountability—burdensome matters that can be avoided when responsibility is transferred to individual households. Why should the government undertake the expensive business of preventing a crisis when the people can be instructed to prepare for its consequences? Why repair a system when citizens can purchase containers to compensate for its failures? And why demand answers from public officials when the press office has already prescribed the proper remedy for our shortage of brains?

Perhaps, in time, the balde will become the defining symbol of the Filipino people. Every household shall own one, every child shall learn to carry one, and every citizen shall be reminded that survival is a personal responsibility, even when the causes of suffering are public. We shall no longer need grand promises or expensive projects when a simple container can be presented as proof that something has been done.

And should the day come when Filipinos finally ask why they must keep catching the water while those entrusted with governing the country keep passing off buckets as solutions, we are confident that another answer will be ready. Perhaps we shall be told to bring larger buckets. Perhaps we shall be advised to buy more brains. Until then, let every household prepare its balde—for the drought, for the floods, for the next broken promise, and for every failure that might otherwise have demanded an explanation.

After all, the greatest achievement of a government is surely not to keep its people from drowning, thirsting, or going hungry, but to teach them how to endure each condition with a balde in hand. And if the nation should ever run out of water, at least we shall have something left to show for it: a country full of baldes, and a government that can finally claim to have filled them with something.

By Zoe Quibranza || Graphics by Lyka Lagera

Every age has found a new reason to covet the Philippines. 

Our gold financed conquest. Our sugar enriched foreign economies. Our abaca rigged the sails of foreign navies. Today, the country’s mineral wealth is once again at the center of a global race for power. Now, discussions between Manila and Washington are set to finalize formalities for the Philippines to contribute resources to the US-led Pax Silica, a coalition that seeks to build and secure supply chains for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its needed components for infrastructure. Once again, the Philippines stands poised to assume a familiar role: extracting and processing nickel, copper, and other raw minerals that are to be made technologically viable elsewhere. The technologies of tomorrow may be built from Philippine resources, but their greatest rewards are still likely to be realized beyond our shores. 

The Philippines has remained trapped in the same role: the supplier of tomorrow’s wealth, but seldom its owner. We have become so accustomed to being looted that we now call it investment. 

History gives us reason to believe that there is a need for caution. Behind the illusory jargon that promises high-value job opportunities and foreign investments lie questions worth asking: When will the Philippines become a nation with the self-sufficiency to build and innovate? When will we stop surrendering our own land, labor, and soil only to become a resource pool for other nations to exploit? 

Following the Philippines’ signing into the Pax Silica last April, its role in the initiative has become clearer. Central to the agreement is the proposed development of a 1,619-hectare Economic Security Zone (ESZ) to house a technology and industry complex in New Clark City, envisioned to initiate semiconductor manufacturing, AI infrastructure, and domestic mineral processing facilities. While marketed as a significant leap toward modernization, it leaves the country’s place in the global chain largely unchanged. The Philippines may process more of its own minerals; however, it is obvious that higher-value activities such as advanced chip design and AI model development are still concentrated in countries that already dominate the global technology market. In effect, the Philippines may climb a single rung of the ladder, but someone else will still own the ladder itself. 

Although discussions for the proposed ESZ remain in the pre-development and site assessment stage, certain government authorities have already approved a two-year land rental grace period to the US and prospective investors. Such generous incentives are often justified as necessary to attract foreign investment, yet  they raise a more pressing concern: whose interests are they ultimately designed to serve? An ESZ built primarily to satisfy American supply chain objectives risks becoming, in practice, no different from an extension of the US on Philippine soil–and while land may remain under our flag, its purpose would become increasingly dictated by Washington’s geopolitical interests rather than our nation’s goal of technological self-sufficiency.

AI is often mistakenly viewed as weightless–as though innovation exists only inside algorithms and cloud servers. It does not. Every chatbot, every semiconductor, and every data center rests upon enormous amounts of electricity, water, and minerals to sustain the promise of unmatched innovation. Yet such commodities are far from limitless. As the Philippines commits itself to powering its own technological ambitions and those of other nations, it must also confront the reality that every additional megawatt demanded by AI infrastructure is a megawatt drawn from a grid that already struggles to provide affordable electricity to its own people. 

The contradiction is perhaps most evident in Eastern Visayas, which houses renewable energy plants such as the Tongonan and Malitbog geothermal fields under the Unified Leyte Geothermal Power Plant–among the largest geothermal complexes nationwide. Despite hosting such facilities and contributing clean energy to the national grid, the region continually grapples with persistently high electricity prices. 

It is difficult to accept that a region hosting one of the country’s most important energy resources cannot receive meaningful benefit from it. For the PSHS-EVC community, where students and their families already contend with rising utility costs affecting both learning and way of living, the promise of AI-driven industrialization rings hollow if it exacerbates the problem of extracting local resources without making energy more accessible to the very people who help produce it. 

There is a scarcity of alternatives when presented with a choice between deepening dependence on the US or risking alienation from the very neighbors with whom we share our region. That is hardly a choice at all, but a predicament imposed by powers whose interests have long outweighed our own. For those who have always known comfort and luxury, peace is easy to negotiate when someone else is made to bear its cost. It is clear that the Pax Silica promises a peace sustained by dependence and unequal sacrifice–a peace reserved for the gods who are powerful enough to demand it.