For The Bohol Tribune
In This Our Journey
NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS
First, I would like to say, I am not new to the practice of sharing
lessons from experiences both within or outside projects. I am happy to share
that due probably to the fact I am much
older than the people I deal with in my everyday work, I am among the few who
have done this sharing stuff under varying circumstances or, if you may allow,
under different development contexts.
I did it as a high school student
as a requirement for being an auxiliary member of the Legion of Mary who must
share field work experiences with regular members in Lucena years before it
became a bustling city where our
provincial high school is located; as a member of Asia’s oldest college
fraternity, Upsilon Sigma Phi, with a unique fellowship which requires that “when
I meet you, Brother, in the sun I will tell you much”; and still in my college
and post-college years, I participated in all those sharing sessions known as CSC
or criticism and self-criticism sessions using Mao Tse Tung’s so-called Red
Book as a guide.
In our initial professional work after college, we teamed up with the
country’s community development pioneers to assess lessons from past projects
and formulated the new approach called the “Ilaw ng Buhay: Light of Life”
program which features songs and rituals from faith-based practices to convey
messages on nutrition, backyard food production and environmental concerns.
In this new approach, we
incorporated sharing of experiences among field team members using their daily
log books or diaries during monthly meetings of a management unit prosaically
called the “Operations Review Committee,” a think tank and monitoring staff
under the big boss, the country’s Father of Community Development, Atty. Ramon
P. Binamira. Despite my being many years their junior, I was appointed to chair
this task group as Special Assistant on Planning and Operations directly under
the President of Project Compassion, a pet initiative of the then First Lady,
Imelda R. Marcos, to whom Atty. Binamira directly reported.
In my work for thirteen years for UNDP-assisted projects in fourteen
countries in the Pacific and the Maldives, I brought the same bias for bringing
introspection and reflection among community organizers and fieldworkers
which featured sharing of experiences and lessons that focus not only on the technical
and objective aspects of development work but also on what was originally
referred to in the literature of liberation theology, as well as of people’s
revolutions, as the “subjective forces of the revolution.”
In remote atoll countries, almost severed from supply lines of the
central government, local communities worked hand in hand with Church groups,
island chiefs and island councils in battling child malnutrition. Illiteracy and
unemployment, and leveraging local strengths to shake up an indifferent
bureucracy to get their fair of much-needed resources from those mandated by
local customs and newly-installed legal systems.
You cannot do community mobilization in such a situation using only the
project operations manuals provided by donors. To complement the intent of these
manuals, we employed the Ilaw ng Buhay approach to reach out to the inner soul
of the people, as the missionaries of ancient times, by using the language of
their customs and traditions in awakening their collective wisdom and spirit to
fight the ills brought about by poverty and inequality.
The lesson is that we must go beyond program frameworks and operations
manuals supplied by donors and the central government and interpret development
messages and appeals to collective action in ways that also awaken the people’s
will to fight for their rights and entitlements under a modern system of
governance that seems to speak in a different voice.
In recent years, to my amusement, I witnessed almost the same ritual in
sessions of Narcotics Anonymous (NA) arranged by Rene Francisco in Ozamis City
for our visiting NGO team composed of myself, Dr. Pomie Buot, our vice
president and Romulo Pasco, finance officer. The visit was in early 2014 when
Bohol Local Development Foundation was doing field research on how drug
rehabilitation certers in Cebu and Mindanao were doing their work and where
young people mostly from rich families from Bohol where brought to seek
treatment.
Using what they call the Big Book as guide, those who have been
victimized by drug addiction and those who have recovered are brought together
to reflect on their respective experiences and draw lessons using passages from
their “healing Bible.”
Same strategy, same results. You go beyond the ordinary texts of
technical jargons and reach out to your inner self to begin the journey towards
enlightenment and self-transformation, a pillar of healing and recovery.
I have cited all these in efforts to explain what happened to me when my
wife and I were assigned to share our life experiences as is the practice in breakfast
sessions of the Brotherhood of Christian Brotherhood and Professionals (BCBP)
which we joined in 2015 after eight years of dodging the invitation of Atty.
Jun Amora, a family friend, to join. Incidentally, I consider the sharing
sessions of BCBP as a powerful component that brings our faith close to us
because they deal with how family members actually deal with challenges, brought about mostly by deviating
from their true self, and how they are transformed in the process of doing so
and emerged closer to God in rediscovering the path of hope and redemption.
I am embarrassed to admit that despite my decades of having such
reflection and sharing session which I had under various contexts, e.g.
political, religious, traditional, developmental, etc., I burst into tears and
cried unabashedly in front of my BCBP brothers and sisters. It came when I was
trying to recall how I left my Lola, Inay and Sister in our barrio in Lagalag,
Tiaong , Quezon to pursue this project on establishing the UNICEF-assisted Ilaw
International Center here in Bohol. I left them practically on their own so I
could pursue this objective to establish what was intended to be a repositiory
and training center based on documented actual experiences of householdS and local communities which we were assisting to
liberate themselves from poverty.
I was overwhelmed by a strong guilt feeling which I thought I had already
buried deep in my unsconscious by serving as though in pursuit of a death wish
in the country’s eight poorest provinces prior to taking on an assignment in
remote villages in the Pacific and the Maldives. I thought I had paid back a
lapse on my part in dealing with my own family while I pursued what I thought
was my mission in life.
At the same time, I thought of the
sacrifices of my friends who gave up their lives that a new nation could be
born from the wreckage of a corrupt and cruel order. I resolved to pursue, as
my punishment of having survived a cause for which many of my friends died, doing
pro-poor programs in places where some of my colleagues in development work
usually feared to tread. That was why they referred to my mission as a death
wish.
I recalled in my sharing all the events in 2014 which led to our NGO
changing track from our building transitional core houses to providing
livelihood to families burdened by the problem of having out-of-school youth.
Then we got into this advocacy to assist the youth with drug abuse
problem when we started compiling all
the news items which showed bullet-riddled bodies on streets of what used to be
a peaceful Bohol, where I sought refuge and fixed my messy life, where I did
most of my development work and worked for a normal family life and returned to
my religion.
I recalled Jojie and I joined BCBP in 2015, with myself feeling like a
kindergarten pupil learning the ABCs of my faith.
All these I recalled when Jojie and I were requested to do our sharing
with BCBP a few days before the Bohol Center for Drug Education and Counseling
(CEDEC) at the Oak Brook Building was launched.
The press release noted that this facility “completes the comprehensive
program to address the drug problem in Bohol.”
The news report also states that the Provincial Anti-Drug Abuse Council
was also created as early as 1997 as an initiative of Kabataang Barangay. In
1999, the Deparrtment of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) issued in a
memorandum to provide for its creation.
The report adds: “This provided for the establishment of the center in
Bohol which was later on included in the Bohol Administrative Code.” Hence, it
can be deduced, if the Center became operational 19 years ago, we could have
avoided this drug menace which is causing misery to a lot of Boholano families.
Yes, we would not have this problem of having to contend with more than
31,000 surrenderees in our midst. But I could be wrong. As it is, life in our
province goes on as usual as though there is no such problem, as though the
system is not broken elsewhere that allows the influx of illegal drugs and make
life miserable for a significant number of families that we need to reach out for
and show we are all in this together, that we affirm a philosophical truth that
the “liberation of one can only be possible with the liberation of all.”
Those who are not affected by the drug abuse problem need to be liberated
from their parochial and selfish interests, lack of social concern and sheer indifference to deeply-held values that hold
human society together.
Lastly, let me point out a bright note cited in the news release printed
by all the weekly newspapers:
“The Technical Working Group of the Provincial Government met a couple of
months back with a three-member team from the prestigious New Day Recovery
Center on a proposed “A Community-Based Drug Demand Support System for the
Province of Bohol and its Municipalities.
“Dr. Miriam Peguit-Cue, of both the NDRC and the Professional Regulatory
Commission; Jay Valderrama, NDRC program director; and Katrina Pantaleon,
psychologist, were consulted for the training of trainors in implementing the
community-based approach and in providing advice for the operations of the
center that will be integrated into the comprehensive anti-illegal drug
campaign.”
Meanwhile, the LGUs of Baclayon and Loay, the Commission of Family and
Life in Dauis and the parish church of Maribojoc have signified their intention
to serve as social laboratory areas to demonstrate a systematic approach to profiling
surrenderees and classifying them into categories (low risk, moderate risk, and
high risk) and planning appropriate interventions for each category.
The Holy Name University has approved the proposal to train 37 psychology
interns and 10 guidance counselors on the use of ASSIST (Alcohol, Smoking and
Substance Involvement and Screening Test) prior to their deployment to interview
427 surrenderees in Baclayon as basis for the planning of relevant
interventions. Other relevant topis will be included such as the Science of
Addiction and Counseling.
The training will be held at the HNU from November 3 to 5 to be handled
by Dr. Miriam Peguit-Cue and her team from NDRC Davao. Interest participants
from LGUs and other entities may contact: Margarita – Mobile 09228167965l;
Grace – Mobile 09064855358; Karen – 09217374565.
With all these developments, we hope there will be no reason to shed a
tear for this vital activity in this journey towards a more humane treatment
for surrenderees to ensure a peaceful and drug-free Bohol. ###
NMP/21
Oct. 2016/8.50 p.m.