DR. CHRISTINE E.V. GONZALEZ
The sobering facts
Nationwide, 65 million or about 80 percent of the Filipino poor live in rural areas of the country, many located deep in the mountains. These 65 million Filipinos try to survive on P96 ($2) or less per day. Three million school children go to school without breakfast. How can a family afford the school uniforms, expenses for school supplies, projects, transportation to and from school, and food for the entire family?
This is the case in my community, Barangay Sagpangan, Aborlan Palawan, an agriculture-based community where farming is the primary livelihood. We have 560 households with an average of 5 to 7 per household (3,360 total population). Before the pandemic, more than fifty percent of them earn an average family income of PHP 1000.00 or $20.00 a month, equivalent to P 34.00 a day.
Families cannot afford to send their children to school on this meager living. With worsening poverty and unemployment, each member of the family is expected to contribute to putting food on the table. In June 2016, before the pandemic and after the opening of the school year, I ran after several children because they were not in school. I was told that their parents could not afford to buy them uniforms, school bags, and supplies and that they have to help on the farm. Poverty is a vicious cycle that continuously traps generations of families.
Like our Sagpangan community, poverty is the main reason why the average level of education is only grades 2 to 4. To reach school, children have to walk, often without breakfast, 5-7 kilometers (2 hours one way) through dusty roads during summer or sliding muddy roads during the rainy season.
KEY CHALLENGES OF OUR TAGBANUA COMMUNITY
Aside from lack of household income, there are several key challenges that we need to address: Hunger and Malnutrition, Safe Water, Sanitation, and Transport.
Hunger and Malnutrition
The Philippines is the 9th country in the world with the most number of stunted children, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Among 5-10-year-olds, 32% were underweight, 33.6% stunted, and 8.5% wasted. Wasted means they are thin for their height. Among 10-19-year-olds, 35.7% were stunted and 12.7% were wasted. More than half a million or 534,054 Filipino schoolchildren are severely wasted, according to 2012-2013 figures of the Department of Education (DepEd).
This age group is crucial because this is when children are most vulnerable to infections and diseases, while their nutritional needs are also increasing. Physical and mental damages at this point will be irreversible. A decline in children’s nutritional status signals an eventual decline in their academic performance.
JHC (Jesus the Healer Community) has established a Children’s Feeding Program for ages 6 mo-10 yrs old. Three in every ten children in our community, 0-59 months old are underweight and/or have stunted growth. We have approx. 500 children in our Tagbanua feeding program
Safe Water
There is one river cutting across the community, where everyone washes clothes and bathes. According to the community, it never runs dry, even during the summer months of May and June. The main source of drinking water is from a deep well constructed by a German missionary almost twenty years ago. We tried digging three artesian wells, but only one was successful. Safe drinking water is one major project of JHC, with the ideal situation of one well per “purok” (area).
Sanitation
Lack of sanitation facilities is one of the principal causes of diseases and mortality among children. Among the diseases caused by such deficiency in sanitation facilities are cholera, polio, typhoid, infectious hepatitis, ascariasis, and cryptosporidiosis. These are serious threats to good health and human development. Therefore, addressing the problem of sanitation is an imperative aspect of effective programs. Adjunct with the feeding program is the deep well water project and sanitation: a septic tank in every “purok” addressed to the parents.
Transport * Our School Children – A lost lamb
Our children walk 7-10 kilometers, or 1-2.5 hours one way to school with their book bags. They have to cross rivers and climb hills with their book bags, if available. The ones who can afford take a tricycle, but that is a luxury. We have several families/children in the mountain for whom the school is too far for them to access. Our pick-up often becomes a school bus.
On a Monday afternoon, like any other school day, we picked up school children on our way home from the pilgrimage site. The oldest kid in the group was probably grade one or two. We had driven more than three kilometers when one boy said that his 6-year-old cousin Jacob was left behind. I asked where he was because I did not see anyone else when they got inside my truck. The boy said that Jacob went to one of the houses for a drink of water. We dropped off the children and went back to the highway to look for Jacob. It was almost 6 pm. If we did not go back for him, the boy would arrive at his house at almost 8 pm, walking through a pitch-black street alone.
The critical link between poverty and education
We believe that poverty alleviation will only happen through education. Half of the elementary school graduates and one in three high school graduates are impoverished. Education creates greater opportunities for our youth. If trained well, they can work in larger cities and/or abroad. They can send money to their parents for home improvements, a better quality of life, and tuition fees for younger siblings. Trade schools also create opportunities. College-educated individuals (about 1 in 44) are much less likely to end up impoverished. Only 1 in 10 people with post-secondary degrees live below the poverty line. Unfortunately, the ratios drop precipitously after that.
In the summer of 2010, when we joined the Feast of the Forest in Puerto Princesa, Palawan, I was asked to help create a livelihood program on the city’s environmental estate using organic farming methods. Immediately, I wrote to a few friends in the US asking for donations of heirloom organic seeds for the project. Several months passed and packages of organic seeds arrived in Manila, but I had not heard from the main organizers in Palawan. Looking to move forward anyway, I explored different communities in the province where the project could thrive.
The seeds growing out of my drawer and the need to address children’s malnutrition brought us back to Palawan, the last ecological frontier. National Geographic Traveller named Palawan as “one of the best destinations in the world.” Palawan offers a wide range of ecological wonders, including the longest navigable underground river system in the world and Tubbataha reef, an underwater sanctuary to some of the most beautiful and diverse coral reefs in the world.
However, in spite of this wealth of natural resources, children’s malnutrition remains a problem for local communities. Hunger and chronic malnutrition affect 1 in 3 Filipino children under five years old. When we came to the Philippines in 2001, I saw that the malnourishment in our country was almost like a replay of my work in Africa (minus the war). Malnutrition is associated with more than half of all deaths of children worldwide, causing a great deal of suffering.
Inspired by the encyclical letter of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si in his invitation to care, protect and love the land as Mother earth, the source of life for the entire human family, the Aborlan Green School was born to help transform lives through education.
It took us one year to prepare all the requirements for the Department of Education to set up the K-12 Aborlan Green School in Sagpangan. We submitted all the paperwork needed to establish the school: curriculum, faculty, student materials, facilities, and other resources, to the DECS head office in Puerto Princesa, and were preparing to build the school building inside the community so children would not need to walk 7-10 kilometers. Then the pandemic struck, and everything stopped.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours, yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion is to look out to the earth, yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good and yours are the hands by which He is to bless us now. -St. Teresa of Avila
