Sidewalk to Nowhere

This article is a year in the making. Everything below happened in April 2018. I wrote it in October but got sidetracked and decided to wait for a whole year to pass just to see if the situation would change. It did not.

A few months ago a shed popped up out of nowhere!

Turns out the shed was to house the men who were about to reupholster the sidewalk

See how hard they are working? What they are doing is placing faux red bricks onto an already existing sidewalk to....beautify it? I have no idea. But they sure are working hard. And that means sleeping hard too.

A hard day of work follow by a few hours of well-deserved drinking and snoozing. What a life. But then one day the shed disappeared and so did the workers. The sidewalk was not even finished. Where did they go?

Down the street to the next barangay!

And you know what? They actually finished the job in that new location. However it is now October and has been SEVEN MONTHS and the original location they were at remains unfinished!

It's doubtful they will finish the job anytime soon. Besides this is literally a sidewalk to nowhere in the middle of nowhere. Why even waste the time and money to beautify it? What is the point? In several spots across town they are adding brick to an already perfectly good sidewalk. What for? When they do this work they dump the sand and bricks in the road which impedes traffic flow.  In some places they have had to use huge boulders to fill in ditches and build the sidewalk. 

In places where they are upgrading the sidewalk they not only have to place the brick but they also have to redo the curb with a whole lot of cement and it looks bad.  Even in places where they originally had brick it looks terrible. Like this sidewalk near the mall.  

The lack of sidewalks is a big problem in the Philippines. Why bother fixing what is just fine the way it is? Sidewalks are for walking. They don't need to be beautified. They are purely functional. But if they are going to spend the money to beautify the sidewalk they should spend the money on the upkeep. That this sidewalk, which is one big trip hazard, is allowed to remain in this state is ridiculous.