21:18
Faizan
From mid-2003 to sometime in 2006, I was part of a team that facilitated community meetings in Balangiga, Eastern Samar. Ours was one of several teams working in poor municipalities selected by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) for its KALAHI CIDSS Project. The project applies community participation processes to the planning, implementation, monitoring and operation and maintenance activities of development projects. (Today, the project is implemented in thousands of municipalities nationwide.)
As a poverty reduction, community empowerment and good governance program, KALAHI CIDSS has become strategic due to its ability to reach the so-called underserved and hard-to-reach barangays. In Balangiga, we visited Maybunga, the farthest barangay from the Poblacion, as often as twice a month. We usually spent at least a couple of days during each visit.
For those who took part in the community meetings, the process of knowing what communities could do to improve people's lives evoked a sense of victory, pride and accomplishment. When they saw that something more was coming out of the process-for example, a public good such as a functioning water system-their new-found self-confidence gave them occasion to further engage the government. For a community that had been used to being on its own, that transformation seemed radical.
Before meeting KALAHI, they barely knew what government was all about. Except for a public elementary school teacher (who combined Grades 1 to 3 pupils into a single class), nobody else from government interacted with them. It had been seven years since the last time somebody from the municipal agriculture office visited them, they said. (The municipal government had no budget for its staff to do field work of that kind.) The school teacher would normally be around 3 days in a week, and for such a heroic effort she should have merited a Ramon Magsaysay award.
Hiking and a motorcycle ride brought one from Maybunga to Poblacion, and back. While families were relatively self-sufficient in food, they needed salt, kerosene, soap and other "luxuries" in life. To earn cash and meet those needs, they sold the usual farm crops (banana, cassava, camote, etc.) at the Poblacion. For every 150 pesos worth of deliveries, they spent 100 pesos on the motorcycle ride. For the uninitiated, the more taxing part was actually the hike on a mountainous terrain from Maybunga to Guinmaayohan, the next downstream barangay, and from where they took the motorcycle ride to the Poblacion. They could offer me 5,000 pesos to take the trek with a sack of gabi on my back, and I would refuse it on the spot.
Maybunga used to be a thriving community. Before being down to 35 in 2003, the barangay consisted of at least 250 families in the early 1980s. Military abuses during martial law, and the conditions they created that gave rise to insurgency, led to deadly clashes that prompted massive displacement in the countryside. At one time the population of interior municipalities in Samar decreased by some 90 percent.
As a poverty reduction, community empowerment and good governance program, KALAHI CIDSS has become strategic due to its ability to reach the so-called underserved and hard-to-reach barangays. In Balangiga, we visited Maybunga, the farthest barangay from the Poblacion, as often as twice a month. We usually spent at least a couple of days during each visit.
For those who took part in the community meetings, the process of knowing what communities could do to improve people's lives evoked a sense of victory, pride and accomplishment. When they saw that something more was coming out of the process-for example, a public good such as a functioning water system-their new-found self-confidence gave them occasion to further engage the government. For a community that had been used to being on its own, that transformation seemed radical.
Before meeting KALAHI, they barely knew what government was all about. Except for a public elementary school teacher (who combined Grades 1 to 3 pupils into a single class), nobody else from government interacted with them. It had been seven years since the last time somebody from the municipal agriculture office visited them, they said. (The municipal government had no budget for its staff to do field work of that kind.) The school teacher would normally be around 3 days in a week, and for such a heroic effort she should have merited a Ramon Magsaysay award.
Hiking and a motorcycle ride brought one from Maybunga to Poblacion, and back. While families were relatively self-sufficient in food, they needed salt, kerosene, soap and other "luxuries" in life. To earn cash and meet those needs, they sold the usual farm crops (banana, cassava, camote, etc.) at the Poblacion. For every 150 pesos worth of deliveries, they spent 100 pesos on the motorcycle ride. For the uninitiated, the more taxing part was actually the hike on a mountainous terrain from Maybunga to Guinmaayohan, the next downstream barangay, and from where they took the motorcycle ride to the Poblacion. They could offer me 5,000 pesos to take the trek with a sack of gabi on my back, and I would refuse it on the spot.
Maybunga used to be a thriving community. Before being down to 35 in 2003, the barangay consisted of at least 250 families in the early 1980s. Military abuses during martial law, and the conditions they created that gave rise to insurgency, led to deadly clashes that prompted massive displacement in the countryside. At one time the population of interior municipalities in Samar decreased by some 90 percent.
Posted in: arts
