Excerpts from Manila Bulletin Online written by Dr. Bernardo Villegas last July 14, 2006.
AURORA in Spanish means dawn. Aurora Province is literally at the dawn of more rapid economic development after decades of neglect, as its present leaders are mobilizing resources to give a major push to countryside and agricultural development.
Last May 26-29, I made a sentimental journey to Baler. Accompanying me in the harrowing 8-hour land trip was my 97-year-old mother who last saw Baler some 65 years ago. In 19401941, just before the outbreak of the Second World War in the Philippines, my parents and their first three children moved to Baler where my father worked as a young rural doctor in an anti-malaria unit in this remote outpost in the Pacific Ocean. I was barely two years old. My brother Eddie was newly born and actually got baptized in the Baler church, with the late Maria Aurora Aragon Quezon as his godmother. You can imagine what great emotions my mother felt as we attended Holy Mass in the old Baler church, made famous world-wide by the Spanish soldiers who made their last stand inside the church during the SpanishAmerican War.
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