Barely a week since a US Navy minesweeper got stuck in the Tubataha Reef in Sulu Sea, another foreign ship has run aground in Philippine waters, this time in the Pasig River.
MV Doulos, the 98-year old freighter that last visited the country in 2009 as a floating library, got stranded on a mass of trash and feces near the Jones Bridge in Manila early morning yesterday.
Bookshop manager Walker Moller said the ship was navigating upstream to Laguna de Bay to supply books for impoverished illegal settlers along the river and the lake when it hit the floating mass.
"Knowledge is the greatest wealth because it can never be stolen from you," Moller said by phone. He added that the ship offers affordable books ranging from P100 to P2000 on all kinds of topics from the life of Jesus Christ to the Disadvantages of Family Planning.
"Of course, to be able to do that, we have to get out of this mess first."
MV Doulos has been stuck in the Pasig river for more than 12 hours now. While the ship is still reportedly in a good shape, some of its crew members have already contracted leptospirosis and herpes courtesy of the infamously filthy river.
Efforts by authorities to evacuate the ship have failed, largely due to the inability of MMDA equipment to get in the Pasig River without sinking.
Palawan Representative Antonio Alvarez, a vocal critic of the USS Guardian that ran aground in the Tubataha Reef last Wednesday, also voiced his disapproval of the latest antic of MV Doulos.
"I thought this ship has already been retired to become a restaurant in Singapore two years ago?" he said in a statement. "What is it doing there taking a joyride through the sewers of Manila?"
Reports surfaced over the weekend that the wreckage of MV Logos Hope, the purported replacement of MV Doulos, was found floating 15 miles off the shores of Paracel Islands in a pool of its own books.
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