Discussion with the Academe on Poverty

Last 09 April, we had a three-hour session with some 19 representatives from several colleges and universities from different regions of the country. They were participants/resource persons of  the Philippine Transformative Approaches to Innovative Leadership (TRAIL) Summer Youth Camp organized by the Youth Leadership Excellence for Active Development (YouthLEAD) Philippines, in partnership with the Philippine Society of Young Good Citizens and the Bohol Alliance of Student Councils.

I was invited to serve as Topic Speaker on the subject, "Developing Social Impact in Student Governance."

We started the session by the participants citing what they considered as priority problems in their respective municipalities or where their academic institutions were located. As expected, all of them cited common problems such as: unemployment; lack of housing; inadequate health facilities; malnutrition; overpopulation; low agricultural productivity; poor garbage collection; logging; traffic congestion, etc. The other problems cited were "sex scandals" involving students; poor governance or political interference in development; drug addiction; vote buying; and lack of family values.

It was pointed out towards the end of this initial one-hour session that most of these problems could be traced to poverty while some problems were environment-related.

To provide a basis for the discussion on what to do with these problems, particularly at local level, e.g. college or community, I presented two tools which have been used in Bohol in efforts to address problems related to poverty and how interventions could be made using initially local resources.

I showed the key features of the Poverty Database Monitoring System (PDMS) software and used it to process the household poverty database of the municipality of Baclayon based on its resurvey last 2009.
For the new approach to providing interventions, I cited the content of the current 5-year Community-Based Eco-Cultural Plan of Baclayon, which is Bohol's first comprehensive application of the ABCD approach to local-level planning.

In their response to the presentations, the participants were cited the following:

• The solutions to poverty need not be generated from outside, but local resources could be identified to address poverty-related problems. 
• Projects with long gestation period may not be suitable for student groups to undertake on account of their temporary stay on the campus. 
• Advisers need to provide examples and guide student groups to link their plans and projects to problems related to poverty and the environment. 
• The school, the community and the family must work together to address poverty and that student activities must support initiatives along this line. 

There was limited time to explore further what specific ideas the advisers could explore with student groups in their respective colleges. The session was more of building awareness about a pro-poor targeting tool that could help ensure that households more disadvantaged than others could be identified and given immediate assistance by the local government and its partners. 

Post-Meeting Reflection 

Hours after the discussion with the advisers I was preoccupied on what could really be done by student groups given their limited time and academic load and still link their extra-curricular activities meaningfully to the global agenda on poverty reduction and sustainable development. 

Here are some ideas: 

-Collecting bottles and using them to reinforce rocks or other materials used in slopes to check soil erosion. 

Bottles of wines and liquor are not returned to the seller or supplier and they usually end up in activity areas in a town or in the garbage dump. In both places, they run the risk of being broken and pose a threat to the safety of persons or children. They cannot be sold; hence, they have no commercial value as far as the people are concerned. In Baclayon, efforts have been done to collect them and volunteers are trained at Balay Kahayag on how to use them to reinforce contouring in sloping areas. 

Just to find out how many bottles could be collected from a public area, such as the town's baluarte or pier, we collected bottles and counted them on 01 Apr and 05 Apr. We were a able to collect a total of 153 bottles in those two days, broken down as follows: Emperador Light, 116 (75%); assorted wine, 24 (16%); and Tanduay rhum, 13 (9%). The average number of bottles collected per day is 75. 

This involves only 1 collector with the help of two or three utility persons assigned to clean the baluarte area. 

Imagine if the advisers could mobilize student groups to collect such bottles all over a city or municipality where they are located and use them for other purposes, such as for saving the soil, etc. The impact will be quite great in terms of checking soil erosion. Perhaps some enterprising students will find some other uses for the discarded bottles and engage local communities in activities in livelihood projects using these bottles. 

-Conducting a survey on what exactly the families are doing in terms of livelihood and finding out their actual needs to scale up the livelihood activities in terms of better marketing, use of technology, improved design. Teams of students can be mobilized during their spare time to just walk around and do a survey with priority in more disadvantaged communities. The findings can help them formulate more relevant projects and at the same time, make them aware of the actual situation in their local communities, their problems and potential. 

I am sure there are many ways the advisers and the student groups can think of to relate their plans and projects to poverty and the environment. Our hope is that they will focus on identifying those who are most in need and identifying simple projects that could directly benefit them. 

Thoughts About Our Faith

The influence of the Catholic Church on the way we conduct our lives is quite strong and pervasive. As a boy growing up in a village in Quezon Province, I experienced it practically in all aspects of our lives, from baptism and confirmation to the fiestas; May-time processions of flowers and candles; weddings; and, of course, during wakes.

The priest is always there presiding over rituals and ceremonies, giving sermons and spiritual advice on occasions during our growing -up period and even in old age when one needs counsel to endure pain and accept the inevitability of death. During the years when I refused to go to Mass and participate in Church activities, I would steal some moments to go inside the Church or chapel when it was empty and find solace in just looking at the altar, stained windows and hearing in my heart the silence of the universe, as it were.

In college, when I learned in our sociology class that there is no universal standard of religion, I started to read a lot about other religions, Protestantism, Buddhism, Hinduism and the Muslim faith in a quest for something to believe in. There was intellectual ferment on the campus in those days. The writings and pronouncements of  a group called freethinkers challenged from day to day the beliefs instilled to us by our Catholic faith.

Aside from this interest in other religions, I experienced during those years in the Sixties stimulating conversations not only about whether God existed or not, but the various philosophies being taught in courses or by reading them in the campus library and being talked about in the coffee shops and bar joints: existentialism; transcendatlism; logical positivism; and, finally, Marxism. It was a period of ferment, of looking for certainties, and enduring truths about life but in the end, we all ended up, like a procession, by the door of the church whose rituals we had abandoned.

The jolly Pope John XXIII, who walked down streets in sandals, briefly captured our fancy and most of those who had left the Church came back attracted by his populist and pro-poor rhetorics. When he died, a little bit of us also died with him. This was how influential the Catholic Church is in our lives.

It was only in 1987 when I returned to the practice of the Catholic faith, going to Mass, taking communion and all that stuff. Several personal tragedies struck, such as the passing away of my Mother the year before, and my Lola's demise on this year, just after my girl friend left me. My close friends brought me to the Jesuit Retreat House in Banawa Hills, Cebu City, where I came under the tutelage and care of a 42-year old activist priest, Fr. Bliss Cavan. For two weeks, he patiently mentored me on the faith, just the two of us, until I could walk again confident in the knowledge I do not really walk alone.

My decision to leave in Bohol, bringing here the remains of my mother, lola, and sister, including those of a half-sister, was pivotal in so many decisions I would make later about how to spend the remainder of my life. Most importantly, I was able to endure pangs of conscience and guilt feelings about my inability to get my mother, grandmother and my sisters out of poverty. It took me years to overcome these guilt feelings and again, it was the Church I turned to for guidance.

Like other Catholics, I have followed the sex scandals and some other unsavory incidents involving the Church but by and large, we remain loyal to what it says regarding the values to guide one's life. Given its 1.2 billion members, of varying degrees of loyalty to its beliefs, the transformation of the Church will be one of the wonders of the century. More than the washing of feet and the walking down urban streets, the Church has to be an institution genuinely committed to the world's poor.

It will be a great thing, a miracle even, if it happens in our lifetime.