1104. Tagbilaran City. Now I am feeling the weight of the years. I woke up with ill-defined ache somewhere in my body. Now I understand the phrase “dragging one’s carcass” for the simple routine of getting out of bed and starting a new day. But I managed somehow to put on my jogging pants and shoes and fooled myself I could make it to the front lawn and up the hill for the usual morning ritual of walking and, for the most part, just staring at grasses, trees, and the distant sea. All these intimations of mortality …

Now at the office. Have been here since 9.30 a.m. It’s now almost noon. I have just rushed revisions to a draft agreement with AusAid. I wonder when will this project start. We thought this could start a month back. The approval process is stuck somewhere as usual. If it’s not the bureaucracy either with government or the partner donor agency, it’s the typical inertia of rest that afflicts the paper trail. Everything stops on its track. Worst, you sometimes get lost yourself just trying to figure out how to restart the stalled process.

We submitted the proposal to the donor as early as July. Several meetings were held with them, each meeting resulting in some revisions to the document. There as a time in September, the PPDC and I flew to Manila for a two-hour meeting. Then we decided to propose a pilot phase for the next eight months so there would be limited implementation during the election period.

We prepared the Memorandum of Agreement and the proposal for a pilot phase. Now we are still waiting for the go signal from the donor. Everything is prepared at this end, but we have not heard for quite a well from our AusAid partners.

Hope we will not wait a long time. By this time, we at the provincial planning office should be used to this kind of waiting. In 2000, a scooping study was undertaken for a provincial support project. Another scooping study was undertaken in 2002. A project proposal was prepared; it was going to be a AUD3 million project for five years. For one reason or another, the project did not push through. Probably 9/11 has something to do with it.

Now we have this new proposal focused on 17 out of the 47 municipalities which rank high on levels of deprivation (child malnutrition; school dropout rate; unsafe water source; poor sanitation). Hope we can put something on the ground soon.

For the PATSARRD, there was a consultation meeting last 19 Nov. Manila-based consultants came to facilitate the consultations with stakeholders. The output was an agreement on a work plan for Jan to Apr 04. As explained by the facilitator, the objective was to focus on 9 ARCs in Bohol which have prepared development plans. These ARCs are in 8 municipalities and a total of 62 barangays. It was explained that the strategy was “partnership, convergence, collaboration or complementation.”

Translated, the strategy means for each participating agency to allocate resources to priority ARCs based on certain criteria. These criteria are as follows:

-Strategically located
-Accessible
-Supportive LGUs
-Coops levels 3 to 5
-Rice is the main crop
-With irrigation facilities
-With potential for off-farm activities

ARC Estaca with 10 barangays emerged with the most number of points (34) for the convergence of agency resources. The criteria used will ensure agency accomplishments in the most developed ARC. It was clarified that government services are designed not only for agrarian beneficiaries, but for all individuals and households in the ARC. It’s the standard government extension service for the whole population then. If the real poor or the agrarian reform beneficiaries are not singled out for service delivery, will they miss out in the end as it was in the past? Just a thought.