Sunday, December 2, 2012

Youth and the MDGs

Was resource speaker yesterday at the forum on Millennium Development Goals and Youth Empowerment held under the auspices of the I-Transform Campaign with YouthLead Philippines as convenor. The activity was attended by more than a hundred participants representing some nine youth organizations from within and outside Bohol.

Let me thank John Maraguinot for giving me the opportunity to present the Poverty Database Monitoring System (PDMS) as a pro-poor targeting tool developed in Bohol and used in several countries for the past ten years as part of efforts to pursue the MDGs.

Happy that the differently abled were represented at the youth gathering. Someone was interpreting in sign language the proceedings, quite a refreshing sight to see. We showed a video on how PDMS is used in the Pacific. Due to limited time, we were not able to show the video on how young people in Bohol conduct the household survey to produce the household poverty database.

As usual, we were surprised to learn that most of the participants, who were young students and college graduates, seemed not familiar with the MDGs. Same with the other young audiences before. The 15-year period to attain supposedly the MDGs and there still so many young people out there who are not aware about the MDGs.

This is something that has to be addressed in current global discussions on how to generate more involvement from the youth in the post-2015 MDG program. Let me share this quote from the website of the Social Development Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA):

Young people between the ages of 15 and 24 represent approximately 18 per cent of the global population, or nearly 1.2 billion people. Many youth remain marginalized from social and economic opportunities, with limited access to essential resources. Eighty-seven per cent of the youth population live in developing countries, and nearly 45 per cent of all youth globally living on less than 2 dollars a day. Youth are among the most vulnerable of all persons the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aim to reach. Whether it is poverty, hunger, lack of education, maternal mortality, unemployment, environmental degradation or HIV/AIDS, the impact on young people can be far greater than on their older counterparts. This is because many young people often lack access to information, schooling, social influence and basic rights, and are often overlooked in national development agendas. Therefore, young people’s participation and inclusion in efforts to achieve all of the goals are crucial to ensure a successful and sustainable outcome. (Italics mine).

The path taken by the I-Transform Consortium is a step in the right direction. It lays the foundation for greater youth participation during this period and beyond in the continuing pursuit of the MDGs as a common development agenda for all nations and races.

The strategy for the youth organizations to work with local communities or local sectoral groups, such as those with the differently abled, is both practical and appropriate. BLDF, which owns the copyright for PDMS, is prepared to discuss with the Consortium or its convenor, YouthLead Philippines, on how to make available the software and its survey methodology to any group willing to plan and implement local catalyst projects addressing deprivations in local communities.






Sunday, October 28, 2012

Reflection on faith

Note: I found this in my digital file. Let me share with you.



Email dated 11 Mar 2012,
In response to an email sent by Milwida Sevilla-Reyes, friend and high school classmate

dear mil,

this is ok, something good for refurbishing the image of the catholic church and its clergy. i have no doubt these accomplishments cited here will be good for publicity. the catholic church having more schools and colleges than other religions; its clergy having less cases of pedophilia than others; and so on. all these concern the public lives of clergy and the public image of the church. as with other churches, catholic or not, they will do something to clean up their image for obvious reason: they need to survive as an institution; they must continue to raise resources from the people and donors who support them, and so on.

what i am more concerned about is how our faith is helping us to be a kinder and more charitable and humane person towards each other, including those who do not share our religious beliefs; how we exercise tolerance in an increasingly divisive world; how we truly care for those who are most in need; how our faith translates itself into actual deeds that reduce cruelty and selfishness and moral hypocrisy,

in a social group, for instance, or in a family, why is it so difficult sometimes to achieve
cohesion or harmony? why is our faith not strong enough to hold us long enough for a truly loving and caring relationship? in such a setting, we can probably deduce the irrelevance of what we believe in to how we behave towards each other? how can we extend such caring to those who are outside our group and desperately need our care?

i think this is the dilemma faced not only by catholics but by other faiths as well. the percentage of people who list their religion as None is steadily increasing in recent years. In fact, they are now called the Nones in some publications. How do we explain this trend?

mil, i do not have the answer. the others, i think, pretend they do but i am not so sure.

just a reflection.

Nes

Friday, October 26, 2012

FR. ACONG ON MY MIND



Note: I found this piece in my digital file. Let me share with you.

26 December 1974: I will always associate Fr. Acong Sevilla to that night 34 years ago when I knocked at the Sevilla residence at the “Short Cut” in Lucena City and requested him to help me escape from two armed men who were pursuing me. He was seated on what looked like a rocking chair and he swiftly got up after hearing my reason for coming to his place.

Both of us rushed to his jeep parked by the road. He started the engine and promptly asked me where I would like to go.

For a moment, I could not speak. Then I managed to squeak out the name of the place where I would like to pick up a friend and our clothes and other personal stuff. I guess his calmness sought my frayed nerves and I managed to tell him bits and pieces of the story; how two young men blocked my path while I was walking on the road beside the Lucena Elementary School in Iyam district, in front of our high school; how the two walked with myself in the middle; and how I felt the nozzle of a gun on the left side of my body; my swift decision to parry the gun and free myself from their hold.

The two young men ran after me, but I managed to elude them or, probably, they would not want to risk getting notice by the neighborhood. I was able to reach my relative’s home and told the family what had happened. I decided to leave so as not to involve the family and a young boy volunteered to accompany me in the dark until I reached the main road.

Still no sign of the two young men, but I had the feeling they were just observing from a distance. I rode in a passenger jeepney and to ensure I would not be followed, I got off after the Iyam bridge and followed the familiar unlit and stony path leading to the Sevilla home. In fact, I remember I ran unmindful of the barking dogs.

Looking back to this incident, which I did many, many times during the last three decades, I had the same feeling of relief that Fr. Acong, at that moment of extreme anguish, did not hesitate to help me and a friend find ourselves out of a difficult situation. 

We were being pursued like rats on account of what we stood for at that time against what we perceived as injustice committed against our people and the more than thirty of our friends who had been persecuted and just disappeared without a trace.

By extending help at a time when we needed it most, Fr. Acong demonstrated what it meant to be a shepherd to his flock, including those who had strayed off the path. When my friend and I finally decided to leave the underground, two weeks after Fr. Acong brought us to a safe haven, you can doubtless say his singular act of kindness had influenced for the most part that crucial decision. ####

 Nestor M. Pestelos
Kuching, Malaysia
28 January 2008

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Interview with BLDF President, 14 March 2008



Note: Found this in my digital file. Let me share with you.

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS, 66
Replies to questions from an Australian student, Ms. Paula Zulueta,
 for a Mass Communication class project
14 March 2008

Please provide a brief personal profile , focusing on the interesting aspects of your work and other aspects of life.

At 66, I am grateful I have survived consequences brought about by my tendency to test convictions against all odds. My only regret is that I have not fully compensated the people close to me for whatever inconvenience or damage I may have done them with this seemingly unending quest for meaning in this otherwise drab life. 

I have travelled the road from orthodoxy to unorthodoxy and back again in terms of religion, philosophy, lifestyle. At this late age, however, there is still the constant yearning to be free of conventions, norms and all the jargons of ordinary existence. While I have fully embraced the rituals, ceremonies and usual requirements of a peaceful and orderly life, I find myself questioning the basis of what I do each day that I live through what I regard as the final and inevitable phase of my life. 

The tragedy is that I have run out of biological time to test new convictions against the usual constraints brought by the tendency to accept the obvious advantages of living in the comforts of an ordinary family and social life. While I continue to confront this tragedy with the courage of a truth warrior, the ineluctable fact is that in the final analysis, we will all die no matter what meaning we may have found during this borrowed time on earth. 

Indeed we are merely “tenants of time” and must pay the appropriate rent to those who have allowed us to experiment and explore a little biological and social limits imposed by this rather unique circumstance of finding ourselves with a right to breathe and exist and procreate in a context in which we do not participate in creating in the first place, as a precondition to begin a cycle of life on the planet. 

And such is the riddle of life I can now only try to continue solving in the windmills of the mind, rather than in the vast fields of possibilities I no longer have the vigor to explore.  Hence, at 66, I can only beg understanding from the people I have not fully paid back the rent for borrowed space and time while I pursue this quest for a higher meaning in life. 

I thought about your shift from being an activist (who presumably was against government) to joining government, then working for UNDP and HFHI. On this  basis, it would be good to have your responses to these questions:

 How and why did you become an activist? 

First, I was caught up in the intellectual ferment of the Sixties at the State University. I went through the whole gamut of fashionable philosophical thinking of the young at that time. I was involved in those debates about the existence of God, the relevance of religion, the meaning of life itself.  I went through transcendentalism, existentialism, logical positivism and other schools of thought. Then the Vietnam war, its brutal images etched on our consciousness by mass media, brought us to our senses, so to speak. We had to confront social realities. 

The Marcos dictatorship of the early Seventies sharpened our understanding of these realities. We turned from “contemplating our navels,” as a professor put it, to trying to understand inequalities in Philippine society. Some of us, including myself, dropped out from school to be part of the social and political activism emerging in campuses at that time. I became an activist as part of my shift from being merely a spectator to a participant in what we regard as a struggle for change during the period.    What beliefs and ideals did/do you advocate for?

During those times in the Sixties and the early Seventies, I subscribed to the principles and platform of the National Democratic Movement. Our activism was part of a mass movement against feudalism and imperialism, what we regarded as the root causes of inequalities in our society.  On this regard, the youth activism of those days was heavily influenced by the works of Jose Ma. Sison, the founder of the new Communist Party of the Philippines, and Renato Constantino, the leading nationalist thinker during the period.
We used their writings to provide  a framework for analyzing the inequalities in society. The Marcos regime provided a lot of arguments to the hypothesis that the State serves only as instrument of the ruling classes to perpetuate their greed. 

Since the Sixties to the present day, I have advocated for more relevant policies, programs and projects that seek not only to deliver basic services to the more disadvantaged sectors of society, but also to serve as vehicles to get them organized so they can participate more effectively towards their own liberation from the constraints of underdevelopment. 

What encouraged or inspired you to transition from an activist to a government employee? What brought the change?

First, let me just explain as background, I believed at that time that change could still be possible within the framework of democratic institutions no matter how flawed they were. I was not prepared intellectually and emotionally to fully embrace revolution as the ultimate solution to our problems. There as a time when  I avoided the militant left and went to a province to teach literature in a provincial high school. Then I sought employment in Manila because my only sister got sick and had to take care of her in the hospital.  

During this time, however, my girl friend who was still studying was arrested by the military jailed and reportedly tortured . I had no choice but to seek refuge in the underground. 

How I became a government employee? At one point in my life, I assumed tasks that brought me in contact with young people working with the planning authority who were most idealistic but sought  to reform society by non-violent ways. I was given the opportunity to join the training of local government units, promoting the aims of backyard gardening as intervention to check child malnutrition and a way to augment household income. I was given tasks as information officer to explain the plans and programs of the Environmental Center of the Philippines and the Population Center and for the first time, I had a close look at these programs and their potential for uplifting the lives of the people. 

I became involved in formulating social programs and monitoring both the delivery of inputs and their impact on the status of households. My experience for five years while staying at the  Nayong Pilipino compound to be involved in government programs strengthened my resolve to be part of the quest for solutions using existing frameworks of governance.

What type of job did you take on during the time that you were working for the Philippines Government?

With funding assistance from UNICEF, I was hired as consultant to improve the community participation component of projects supported by the donor agency in various sectors: health, rural water supply and sanitation, education.  I was put on detail under a UNICEF-assisted project at the Social Development Sector of the National Economic and Development Authority of the Philippines. I served as head of a monitoring unit tracking programs in targeted poor communities in the eight poorest provinces of the country.
Based on the lessons learned from previous work with NGOs and this time with the government, I participated actively in the formulation of a new approach to community development. I contributed inputs to the formulation and field-testing of the Ilaw ng Buhay (Light of Life) Movement  which sought to deliver services to specific households while organizing them into independent community groups. 

What made you join the international development community? 

My friends at UNICEF advised me to leave my work at the Ilaw International Center, the resource facility supported by UNICEF and other donors, so that I could pay my mounting personal debts. I had to bail myself out from financial difficulties.  I was given scholarship by UNICEF to the University of Bradford and the Asian Institute of Management to straighten out my academic credentials and prepare me for international assignments. Unfortunately, the UNICEF posts reserved for me were no longer available after I completed my PhD.
It was my friends from UNICEF who found vacancy at UNDP Fiji for which I successfully applied for in 1989. 

What major projects have you worked on at UNDP? at Habitat for Humanity International?

At UNDP Pacific, I worked as Participatory Development Specialist for the Integrated Atoll Development Project in small countries in the Pacific and Indian Oceans;  the Equitable and Sustainable Human Development Project  for relatively bigger countries in the Pacific; and as Chief Technical Adviser to the Government of Solomon Islands for a total of 12 years under a project, Solomon Islands Development Administration and Participatory Planning Project (SIDAPP).
In HFHI, I served for more than two years as Regional Program Manager for the Philippines, East Timor, Indonesia and the Philippines. For the past several months, I work as Program Adviser with specific tasks in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. I serve concurrently as Interim National Director for Habitat for Humanity Malaysia. 

 What are the positives and negatives of development work/job? 

On the positive side, development work, particularly those related to poverty reduction and sustainable community development, provides us an opportunity to link our technical skills and knowledge to influence policies, plans and programs that will benefit local communities and target households directly.  It gives you a satisfaction that indeed you participate in working for a better world. You see how marginalized sectors are progressively brought into the mainstream of development planning at various levels. This empowerment stuff energizes you from day to day. 

On the negative side, I feel  my family and I have paid high social costs for my involvement in development work. This is like my NGO and UN days. I not home often. My two boys aged 16 and 14 sometimes complain that I am again an absentee father at I time when I should be home and truly be a retiree at 66.
I sometimes have the illusion my career has just begun and the mission to serve the poor has become an excuse to escape the drudgery of domestic bliss and explore new frontiers and revisit old issues which have something to do about finding meaning in life. Looks like I am getting full circle to where I began the quest. This is a dangerous sign and I must find  time to take a spiritual retreat, retrace my steps and probably reorder my priorities 

How does it feel to be able to help poor people in various places?

Having come from the poor myself, I feel a deep and powerful sense of fulfillment when I see poor people gradually take control of their lives which can only be made possible by options afforded through sound approaches to participatory planning and project development. 

Have you encountered any problems in this field of work wherein you thought you could not survive?

No. I am crazy enough to think I will survive anything as long as I am clear about my mission and do nobody any harm. I am a survivalist. My wife says I have a creative way to create problems to enmesh in and find somehow my way out. Looking back, that’s not a particularly absurd observation to make. 

Aside from working for Habitat for Humanity, are there any other things or actions you want to pursue in the near future?

 Somebody says before we die, we must be able to do three things to be fulfilled: have children; plant trees; and write at least a book.  I feel I have done the first two while pursuing more difficult tasks to help emancipate the poor. I want to try the final task to clarify the meaning of this journey or just to have a record of my passage. ###