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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. ###
