Support to Bohol’s First Drug Rehab Center – the Continuing Saga

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

First, I must relay to you the happy news that the Diocese of Tagbilaran is supporting in concrete ways, not only by verbal advocacy and rhetoric as other sectors do, the rehabilitation of drug abuse victims in Bohol. Our NGO, the Bohol Local Development Foundation (BLDF), has been assured by Fr. Val Pinlac, who heads the Secretariat of the Vatican-funded Bohol Rebuild and Rehabilitation Project, that we can send trainees to their existing livelihood skills training program.

These trainees may come from our primary target group, the hundreds of out-of-school youth who are particularly vulnerable to enticements that lead to drug abuse and eventually to unproductive and potentially destructive crime-driven life.

We have been assured that those who recover from treatment at Bohol’s first drug rehab center, the FARM It Works Balay Kahayag (FITWBK) facility, may also be recommended to undergo training and, equally important, apply for post-training support, such as provision of tools and other necessary start-up requirements.

Fr. Pinlac and his team have also endorsed us to a donor, the US-based For Better Tomorrow (FBT), so BLDF can be supported in its advocacy that drug abuse victims from poor families be provided financial assistance to enable them to access treatment services at FITWBK. Hundreds of such victims cannot afford to be treated in Cebu and other places outside the province due to high costs of treatment and associated expense items, e.g., fare, food and accommodation or expenses associated with visit of parents normally required to attend orientation and briefing sessions each month.

The proposal, endorsed by the Diocese Secretariat, will enable payment of the monthly fees (PHP 25,000 per month) for a minimum of 9 months or depending on the progress of recovery; costs of medicines, laboratory fees and other costs. This is a big help at this time because the fund campaign that was launched by our NGO some time ago did not take off as expected.

It seems the potential contributors have not been made fully aware of the great risks posed by the presence of hundreds of untreated drug addicts hidden from view by their families. This misplaced gesture of family love will not be helpful at all in addressing the serious drug addiction problem in our midst.

This unfortunate situation implies that more efforts are needed to do public information campaigns on various aspects of the drug abuse problem, as well as on the urgent need to treat and rehabilitate drug abuse victims. This task properly belongs to government health agencies. It’s one area of support where the Government is in a better position to provide during this critical time when the entire province is under serious threat from the drug addiction problem. 

The Government has the staff and the institutional network with potential to launch a massive and effective public information drive on the impact of untreated drug addiction to both the family, community and society as a whole. What is needed will be the training and the logistics to execute a well-designed action plan which is sector-specific and creative enough to hit each target audience quite effectively.

The deployment of cultural groups such as Gardy Labad’s Kasing-Sining group has been  recommended in the past to be part of this public information campaign. Now that there is a local drug rehab center where drug abuse victims can be referred to, the messages from the cultural shows have a better chance of being received and acted upon immediately.

This public information campaign, if successful, will result in more demand for the services of the FITWBK recovery center. It is expected that a grant from a donor such as FBT will not suffice to cope with the expected huge demand from Bohol. This implies that the facility’s management, composed of two drug rehab centers , FARM (Family and Recovery Management) Center of Minglanilla, Cebu and It Works Chemical Dependency Treatment Center of Ozamis City will have to ensure highly competent staff and adequate facilities to cope with this demand.

Donors such as FBT cannot be expected to provide for cost items that are properly part of a business plan. They assume that FITWBK has such a plan that takes care of the commercial operations of the facility. Since most donors are good only for one-time grants, it is important that commercial operations remain viable and that advocacy be maintained to get additional donors for those who cannot afford to pay the treatment fees.

An important item which has been stricken off from the submission to FBT is the support to the establishment of an Outreach and Drop-In Center (ODIC). It amounts to PHP 800,000 , which will include the construction of the facility and the support for one year for the staff (1 social worker; 1 psychologist). The costs can be reduced if there is an existing structure which can be utilized for this facility.

The ODIC is vital so that there is a place where families with drug abuse problem can have access to information, counselling, diagnosis and referral. As of now, the FITWBK runs the risks of being overloaded with tasks associated with pre-treatment services.  Private sector companies and the Church may be tapped to sponsor and support this vital facility. It should be noted here that more than one such facility is needed for the city and the entire province.

For those who have previously expressed support to Citizens for Drug-Free Bohol, please contact us .

 My email: npestelos@gmail.com.  #Boholdrugrehabcenter

NMP/28 January 2016/10.24 a.m. 

WHERE HAVE ALL THE NGOs GONE

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

During our more than a year of advocacy on the prevalent drug addiction problem here in Bohol, nothing has been heard so far from what used to be an articulate and socially committed NGO community. Something must have happened that local NGOs have lost collectively their voice to comment on a social problem that can be be considered more dangerous than insurgency.

In the war against insurgents, the battle fronts are defined; you aim your ideological bullets to hit the hearts and minds of the people where the initial battle is fought. Physical annihilation efforts are quite predictable and can often be won by superior strategy and more effective weapons.

In the war against drug addiction, however, the family hides the victims out of shame or fear of public opinion. The drug users are turned eventually into pushers themselves so they can afford their habit and, hence, the problem becomes self-perpetuating while multiplying drug-related crimes, including rape and murder on a scale previously unheard of before in our beloved province.

The network of drug producers/suppliers, distributors and sales agents seems to be a little bit more complicated than the structures created during the decades-old war for political and territorial control waged by the insurgents.

What is perceived generally as a family-based problem should become a matter of concern for the entire community and the broader society as well, but the usually articulate NGOs are unusually quite during this critical time. They have not found it important to help lead the way to rehabilitate hundreds of young people victimized by the illegal drug trade in the province.

Indeed where have all the NGOs gone at a time when their voice is needed to encourage families to speak out and not be afraid to seek help for their afflicted members whose number seems to be exponentially growing from day to day? Where are the militant NGOs who have spoken boldly in the past about environment and other popular issues? Indeed where have all the NGOs gone, they of various stripes and colors proclaiming love of country and the poor?

One relevant question to ask is: are there still genuine NGOs in Bohol? Perhaps due to a combination of factors, what we used to call NGOs have actually metamorphosed into something else due largely to lack of funding to maintain operations; lack of local support from the communities where they operate; or simply lack of management skills to survive as autonomous and vibrant organizations working with Government and local communities.

What we call as NGOs now may actually be groups funded by the Government, political parties or varied interest groups, as well as donors, and not the NGOs we used to know before which existed to build genuine partnership with local communities and sectors or specific population groups with difficulty to access services or to be part of mainstream development planning  and implementation processes.

Perhaps our NGOs are approaching extinction due to varied causes, namely: the inability to support themselves financially; a severe lack of committed staff and volunteers; too much dependence on grants from the Government and donors, who normally will not extend administrative support to financially weak partner NGOs; indifference at various levels of the Government to their plight due to political considerations; lack of community support, or lack of capability on the part of local communities to support partner NGOs.

These constraints need to be addressed systematically if we want a functioning NGO or Civil Society Organization (CSO) system in Bohol. It may not be realistic to expect the Government to do this monumental task for the simple reason that it benefits more from the present arrangement. In co-opting NGOs by hiring them to do service delivery and other functions, it does away with a potential source of opposition to its programs and policies. Government is also assured generally of competent and dedicated staff when it hires from the NGOs.

This silence from the NGOs regarding the drug menace in the province may be due to the current propensity to wait for clear cues from higher authority on how to respond to such a problem. On their own, they may have lost the capacity to define moral and developmental imperatives required by a situation quite unique to their experience and expertise. It has become easier for the NGOs to just wait and see and not run the risk if they blaze new trails in their current efforts.

Probably I will receive brickbats and unsavory remarks from NGO colleagues, but the familiar cheap psychologizing efforts will be counter-productive. We have to work for the common good to save our mission in the face of the general indifference that prevails in our midst. In this development journey, leaders must arise from the NGOs themselves and address the seeming lethargy and indifference to social issues that scream for attention and involvement.   

As in other unpleasant circumstances, let common problems unite us. Here is what Jonathan Glennie writes in The Guardian about the global outlook, which also reflects our local situation level:

“The NGO sector enters 2016 unsure of its way forward. The factors encouraging division are strong, from the funding and media marketplace, to ideological political positioning, to genuinely complex analyses of the international context. None of this is new, but there is more uncertainty than usual.

“So what to do? The answer is simple, even if implementing it will not be. To overcome divisions, and to build a more shared understanding of what is going right and wrong in the world, the organizations that make up the sector, and the people who make up those organizations, need to redouble their efforts to work together, meet together and build a collective front.

“There is an unfortunate tendency within the sector to criticize other organizations: ‘This one is too radical and has lost its credibility’, ‘This one is too conservative and has lost its credibility’. The reality is that people who work in the sector hop from one organization to another. They tend to be loyal, not so much to particular organizations but to their mission, their vision of a better world, a vision that, broadly understood, is shared by all the organizations in the sector. xxx

“Living in a bubble, NGO-ers can allow themselves to be blinded by day-to-day differences of opinion on strategy, failing to see the important reality that they all have much more in common than differences.

“The forces ranging against progress are many and they are powerful: negligence, lethargy or active resistance to a more just world. Without joint-purpose and joint-working, NGOs will not achieve what their many supporters expect them to.”

Like NGOs in other parts of the world, this divisiveness among us has probably contributed to the seemingly comatose state of the NGO community here in Bohol. However, this may be secondary to the primary illness, which is the lack of financial sustainability.

On this matter, I find relevant what a reader in the Guardian says:

“NGOs need to reinvent their funding models. The dependence on big institutional donors such as DFID and USAID is not sustainable. Social enterprises, impact investors and new age philanthropies will probably progressively have more influence than traditional donor dependent NGOs. There could also be some consolidation of the sector, with complementary NGOs merging. But more importantly, NGOs must innovate to remain relevant.”

Perhaps the worsening drug addiction problem in Bohol can serve as the clarion call for the NGOs to rise up and be counted to help save souls by supporting Bohol’s first drug rehabilitation center, the FITWBK Chemical Dependency Center in Baclayon, Bohol. Note: this is just a suggestion. Any unifying cause will do.

For more information about Bohol’s drug rehab center, kindly visit its website: Fitwbk.weebly.com.  #Boholngos4abetterworld

NMP/21 January 2016/5.25 p.m.

SUPPORT THE CITIZENS' MOVEMENT FOR DRUG-FREE BOHOL

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

Our NGO, the Bohol Local Development Foundation (BLDF), has just launched a fund campaign to support Bohol’s first drug rehabilitation center, the FARM It Works Balay Kahayag (FITWBK) Chemical Dependency Treatment Center, in barangay Laya, Baclayon.

Here are some facts about the fund campaign:

a.   Background and rationale

BLDF has negotiated successfully with two drug rehabilitation centers, the Family and Recovery Management (FARM) center in Minglanilla, Cebu and the It Works Chemical Dependency Center in Ozamiz City, that they combine technical and funding resources to operate Bohol’s first drug rehabilitation center.

Known as the FARM It Works Balay Kahayag (FITWBK) Chemical Dependency Treatment Center, it is located at the sprawling BK training facility consisting of a multi-purpose hall good for 100 participants; a dormitory for 38 occupants; a purok-type function room; a guest house converted into an office and staff house; and a kitchen.

This Residential Treatment and Rehabilitation Center (In-patient Center) with an initial capacity of 30 persons/beds provides comprehensive rehabilitation services utilizing, among others, a combination of the accepted modalities: Multi-disciplinary Team Approach, Therapeutic Community Approach, and/or Spiritual Services towards the rehabilitation of the dependent.

FITWBK  as designed is managed as a business enterprise to ensure its financial sustainability. Its clients are charged standard or regular fees. The management exercise functions as befit a commercial entity to ensure financial viability for the enterprise.

Although a business concern, it is run more as a social enterprise, with its profit used to operate the business and channeled to contribute to the objective of helping increase the access of drug abuse victims from among the youth to high-quality treatment services.

b. Goal and Specific Targets

As determined by BLDF Board of Trustees, the goal of the fund campaign is to open access to treatment services at the FITWBK to drug abuse victims from the youth belonging to disadvantaged and poor families.

The specific target   is to raise PHP 1.5 million yearly to enable the Project to:

·         send a minimum of 5 clients from poor families to the drug rehab center yearly; and

·         provide start-up capital to a minimum of 5 out-of-school youth as preventive strategy against drug abuse, or the same number a year of treated drug abusers as strategy against relapse by ensuring immediate involvement in productive activities; and

·         assist the same minimum number of treated drug abusers a year as strategy against relapse by ensuring their immediate involvement in productive activities. 

c. How to send donations

Donations may be given to authorized representatives or  sent  directly to:           

BPI Peso Acct. No. 001203-3176-34

BPI Dollar Acct. No. 001204-0467-23

SWIFT CODE: BOPIPHMM

BPI Tagbilaran City, Bohol. Philippines

Account Name: Bohol Local Development Foundation, Inc. (BLDF)

Or, through any of the following:

Palawan Pawnshop, Cebuana Lhullier, M. Lhullier,

c/o Romulo Pasco,

Poblacion, Baclayon, Bohol; Tel. +63 0917 306 6158.

Donations will be acknowledged through the following: 

http://www.nestormpestelos.blogspot.com/

http://www.facebook/bohollocaldevelopmentfoundation

http//m.facebook.com/drugfreebohol

Official receipts or letters of acknowledgements will be sent upon receipt of the donation.

For queries about the fund campaign, please contact us:  Email – npestelos@gmail.com; Mobile –

09173041450.

On Livelihood Support to Drug Prevention and Rehabilitation

BLDF and its key partners have seen the need to provide livelihood opportunities to households affected by the problems related to drug abuse to further ensure project sustainability. Engagement of FITWBK clients in livelihood activities can also be part of treatment and rehabilitation to further ensure reintegration into normal community and family life after the treatment phase.

BLDF will realign project activities it has initiated based on its program framework on Informal Employment and Sustainable Livelihood (IESL). This component project will provide skills training and start-up capital to serve as preventive measure against drug addiction among the youth.

Donors or contributors are welcomed to provide start-up capital to initiate social enterprises among the young people, preferably out-of-school youth or those enrolled in the Alternative Learning System (ALS) of the Department of Education.  Due to limited resources, we can only support a few projects.We are constrained to confine our interventions in Baclayon,  where our NGO is based , to cut costs. Hopefully, we can realize substantial returns from these projects to be able to provide funding support to out-of-school youth in their involvement in livelihood activities.

Former Ilaw ng Buhay colleagues, Conrad and Onnie Ayson, who are now based in California, are now helping us raise funds for this cause. They have initially sent USD 400 to be used in Native Chickens project. Marit Meijer, our intern from Saxion University College of Applied Science, will come back February for the next phase of her work with the Mountain Bikes Cultural Tour project undertakenlay with ALS Baclayon. She intends to expand the present Community Bikes Rental project into a key social enterprise project.

Our volunteer, Paolo Mabilangan, is still on leave but we expect him to be back either to resume his work with the Bikes rental project or to get involved in the other social enterprises. Much thanks for the patience and the perseverance to stay with the Crazy Company of dreamers and the never-say-die team!  Welcome to the club, young man.

The Diocese of Tagbilaran has encouraged us to send participants to their existing livelihood skills project under the Bohol Rehabilitation and Rebuilding Project (BRRP). We are assured BLDF may also apply for support in terms of materials to livelihood activities undertaken as part of its Bohol Youth Livelihood and Drug Assistance Project. Based on the request of the BRRP Secretariat,

We have prepared a PHP 17 million project that will provide infrastructure, technical and administrative support to Bohol’s first drug rehabilitation center. It will be directly administered by the Secretariat in partnership with BLDF.

On the whole, it has been a difficult journey, this advocacy to have a drug rehabilitation center in Bohol, but we are encouraged by the exemplary dedication shown by the FARM Recovery Center of Minglanilla, Cebu and It Works Chemical Dependency Treatment Center in Ozamis City in going through the tedious process of having such a facility in the province.

For queries about the FITWBK, kindly contact COO Alain Alino at Mobile: 09173250252; 09327468009.  Or Rene Francisco at Mobile 09189088237. - You may also visit its website: Fitwbk.weebly.com.

Lastly, thank you to those who have given encouraging comments through Facebook or by email. You know who you are. It’s now more than two readers who have given us feedbacks. As they say in that song, you’re the wind beneath our wings.  #Bohollivelihood+drugrehab

NMP/15 Jan 2016/5.43 p.m.

THE BOHOL WE WANT - PART TWO

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

The Bohol We Want – Part Two

First, let me report with a certain degree of sadness that, except for two readers, nobody responded to my request in last week’s column for feedbacks to my views on the topic, The Bohol We Want. It’s either the topic is too esoteric or too plain ordinary to be responded to or that the column was not read at all. It could be that those who have read it feel they are powerless anyway to change things and, hence, why bother at all to give a piece of one’s mind.

Or it could be all of the above, as we used to joke in college when frustrated by multiple-choice questions. To know the readers’ feedbacks, it may be necessary to conduct  an opinion survey but this can may be costly and impractical. It will entail identifying those who have read the column and then classifying them based on the usual demographics to satisfy requirements for a scientific survey.

All we can do at this point is to assume most of those who have read it actually agreed with our views on the Bohol we want. Well the posting of the column on Facebook, earned a respectable 27 likes! I used to get an average of 9 likes on serious post. I could get more than a 100 if I talk about my health or state of   Bohol or the country as a whole.

These FB friends are more concerned about my sugar level rise than the phenomenal increase in illegal drug supply and addiction cases in the province. They care about personal issues than the other things I talk about in the column which are mostly on local issues in relation to current development themes such as the new UN global development agenda, poverty and the magical phrase to get donor funding, Climate Change or Disaster Risk Reduction.

I thank them most sincerely for the concern about my health and the fear that at age 73, I may just conk out and leave the scene. If I become gravely ill and die sooner than what my friends or relatives want, it will not change the development situation in the province.  It will not ensure an age of peace and prosperity for the people of Bohol.

In the province that we want, we hope there is included a fervent desire to engage all classes in regular conversations about their common aspirations for a better way of life and governance in the province.  In the Bohol we want, there must be deliberate efforts on the part of political leaders at all levels to engage in regular and routine conversations about development issues, not only the economic and political elites , but also those referred to as “the people,” the toiling masses, the multitude who share one thing in common aside from their misery, and that is their inability to find motivation and encouragement fo find and use a proper forum for their grievances.

On the serious drug addiction problem, the dominant voice comes from police authorities announcing the number of drug pushers “neutralized” or killed in buy-bust operations. Representatives of women and youth sectors, who are most affected by the drug abuse problems, have responded with deafening silence on the issue probably out of misplaced prudence or fear. Of the forty-eight (48) sermons I listened to intently during the past year, I never heard any mention of the drug abuse problem which affects many families in this predominantly Catholic province. In the various consultations at the barangay level on this issue, I observed only very few dared to speak out.

I doubt it if any social worker, political leader or anybody from the academe and religious sector talked with families who were victims of drug-related crimes to consult them and elicit vital information which could be used to reduce the negative impact to the family and ultimately, the whole community as a whole. Families with drug addiction problems have no way to seek counselling or advice on what to do with their problems since there exists no outreach services mechanism available to them. If there is, they do not know about it.

Our proposal to create an informal network for heads of families grappling with drug abuse problems has so far met with sublime indifference on the part of the families themselves and their local leaders. On this drug addiction problem, everybody it seems prefers uninterrupted evolution rather than management of planned change as strategy to combat a serious social problem. Perhaps the expected quantum rise in drug-related crimes in the years ahead will galvanize action on the part of the people and their local government to address the problem in a concrete and systematic way.

Early this week, we received several blessings which were quite unexpected. Fr. Val Pinlac and Ms. Daidee Padron of the Secretariat of the Diocese of Tagbilaran, called up to say we could resume discussion on how to get funding for our joint advocacy for drug-free Bohol. Prior to the scheduled meeting on Thursday, 07 January 2016, Fr. Pinlac assured funding for training activities related to creating community awareness on the drug addiction issue, as well as livelihood skills training as part of preventive strategy against high drug abuse incidence among the youth. The Diocese will also support our fund campaign in support of the advocacy for drug-free Bohol.

Yesterday, our former colleague from Habitat for Humanity International, Raul Sarceda, requested that we email some documents in support of the fund campaign. He said he would help us raise funds among his friends in Bukidnon, where he is now based upon retiring from Habitat Thailand several years ago.

Last Monday, Shun-ichi Murata of UNDP, wrote to say they would prepare an internship program that will include assigning volunteers to projects in Bohol. Hopefully, this will address our lack of staffing in proposed projects in Baclayon and other municipalities.

A few days ago, we signed a contract with Saxion University in the Netherlands, that will allow our Dutch volunteer, Marit Meijer, to serve under a new internship program so she can implement the project she has designed on the Cultural Mountain Bikes Tour in Baclayon to benefit out-of-school youth in Bohol.

In early December, our co-alumnus at the Quezon Provincial High School in Lucena City and retired staff of Asian Institute of Management and , more recently, ABS-CBN Bayan Academy and ABS-CBN Bayan EDGE (Evolving, Developing and Growing Enterprises), volunteered to help us prepare a proposal for localizing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Bohol.

These developments, modest as they are because they do not involve huge cash inputs, propel us to continue our development work in Bohol. Despite the consensus of friends and relatives that we deactivate BLDF and fully retire from this often thankless development work  to focus instead on personal health concerns, we feel strong enough to be active in this critical phase of our work in the province we have come to adopt as our own. Hopefully, we can mobilize resources enough to recruit, train and deploy staff to various proposed projects and ensure the survival of our NGO.

We need your prayers to help us in this mission to continue in helping build the Bohol We Want. #Boholwewant

NMP/06 Jan 2016/ 6.59 p.m.