Remembering Fieldworkers 111

 ROGELIO ALEGADO 

Roger was a high school teacher when he was recruited as development trainer for the "Ilaw ng Buhay" program in Digos, Davao del Sur in the late 70s. He brought a fresh approach to Family Ilaw Training by singing songs relevant to the inputs for the night.

Prior to each input on family planning, environmental management or any topic assigned to him, he would always entertain the audience with his jokes and stories. His many versions of Matudnila  became top hits in all the barangays where he was assigned.

When the training modules for Family Ilaw Training were being pilot-tested in Luzon, he was one of those from Mindanao who was recruited to be part of the national team. He became an instant hit in the barangays. When we organized the staff for the Ilaw International Center in Bohol, he was part of the original team. He resigned his teaching post to be part of the Crazy Company.

Roger and his guitar actually gave a new persona for the fieldworker - as entertainer in addition to being a trainer. He represented a new breed of fieldworkers, those good in singing and playing the guitar in contrast to earlier days when PACD barrio workers were known to bring blackboards and chalks and visual aids to get their message across. With Roger's popularity in Ilaw ng Buhay barangays, the fieldworker must also bring a guitar and sing before villagers would listen.

Of all the fieldworkers and trainers in those days, Roger logged the most number of hours in barangays considered risky by the military. With his songs and guitar, he went to areas considered strongly influenced by armed insurgents and delivered his message about nutrition and family planning and encouraged everybody to sing with him. He had the distinction of logging the most number of training hours in the remote barangays of Quezon, Catanduanes, Leyte and Davao del Sur.

Roger served as resident director of the Ilaw International Center during its final three years, from late 1989 to 1993.

For a brief period after IIC closed, he served as agent for a funeral parlor in Tagbilaran City to keep body and soul together and to support his family. Atty. Juanito Cambangay, head of the Provincial Planning and Development Office (PPDO) took him from this job from where, as the joke goes, he could not sing and play his guitar to corpses. At the planning office, he was able to transform himself as a planner and contributed insights to the creation of a tool for ranking households based on core poverty indicators.

In fact, the need for a software was identified when he manually did the calculations to rank municipalities based on four indicators (child malnutrition, drop-outs, income and unemployment).  It took him quite some time to finish it. He became part of the think tank which provided inputs to Tony Irving for the first version of the Poverty Datbase Monitory System (PDMS) software known at that time as LPRAP (Local Poverty Reduction Action Plan).

While at PPDO, he was assigned usually to conduct workshops and seminars where he again displayed his talent as entertainer. Several weeks after his death, when our DReAMS' project team went to Balilihan, the participants mentioned his name several times and proposed a prayer for him. A tribute any fieldworker would be happy about.

During his necrological services, he might have been pleased to know that his training buddy, Dodong Formentara, was there to bid him farewell. Dodong  had just retired from the community work he loved to do with Roger in so many villages, winning hearts and minds for the cause of child welfare despite political conflicts.

Tony Irving was there, too, part of the crowd which grieved with the family of Roger. A senior member from one of his field teams, a trustee of Bohol Local Development Foundation, former Guindulman Vice Mayor Eleno Laga, delivered an eulogy on our behalf.

Roger, we all love and remember you because, as we always would quote in the old days, "you love the people who are the real heroes."

Tribute to Fieldworkers, Alive or Dead

Some of my friends found time yesterday to send me SMS requesting if I could also talk about not only the top people in the projects we worked with in 1970s and 1980s but also the fieldworkers we have known whether or not they had kicked the bucket.

I told them that's the part of the plan for this current series on the blog. I have been talking about personalities I knew since 1975 when I came to work as information officer for the three programs, Project Compassion, Green Revolution and Environmental Center of the Philippines, until 1982 when the Ilaw International Center (IIC) started to be built in Tagbilaran City in preparation for the replication of the field-tested integrated approach to priority provinces identified through the UNICEF-Government of the Philippines Country Program for Children.

The second part will be from 1983 to 1989 when the IIC became fully operational as a resource center.  It promoted what was called at that time as Appropriate Community Development (ACD), perhaps influenced by the term Appropriate Technology, to show adaptation to local culture and building on what communities have been doing in response to issues such as poverty and environmental concerns. ACD was being positioned at that time against the prevailing trend of change agents and projects introducing something new without first understanding what has been done and what is being done on a specific problem in the community.

I left IIC in 1989 so I could not write on first-hand knowledge about the period from 1990 to 1993, the year IIC closed down.

Now it can be asked, as some of my friends did when I resumed blogging sometime ago, why do I have to do this tedious and sometimes painful exercise of trying to remember the past beginning from that period when I tried to reconstruct my personal life to assume more or less a normal life?

First, I feel the need to answer once and for all the query from friends and relatives who helped me survive the difficult period from 1971 to 1974, when I was cut off from from family and work to elude arrests on account of my involvement in protests agains martial law;

Second, this is a way of reassuring them that their assistance was not in vain for it helped me pursue a life's mission in a way different from the previous path I had taken and I  have been convinced there are many ways to help build a country with focus on those who need the most help;

Third, I need a more organized way to look back at my particular development journey to have a more appreciative look at personalities and events to be able to somehow articulate reforms in doing development work at local level, in the company of local government units, NGOs and people's organizations and local communities;

Fourth, I need to reassure the people I worked with in various countries that I, at age 70, am still fully committed to discover effective ways of local governance and community mobilization so we can truly move forward to a better life for all, taking into account that we need to bring to the mainstream all those who have been consigned to the periphery on account of their unequal access to resources and opportunities due to social processes outside their influence and control;

Fifth, I need to counter prevailing cynicism, indifference and despair among the young, distracted as they are by enticements to pursue selfish goals, and somehow try to assure them that they are truly part of the future and that they have to create that future now with a sustained involvement in causes that will make humanity advance to a future worthy enough for them to invest a lifetime of struggle and triumph against forces that weaken the resolve to help create a better world.

Having said all these, I will now proceed to tell you what I appreciate in the various characters I have worked with in this somewhat difficult and challenging journey to do what in the literature is called prosaically as people-based development.

More on the next blog.

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Reflections on the Old PACD

They are all dead now, the six (Ramon P. Binamira, Alberto Ramos, Pio Almodiel, Alfredo Dimaano, Damaso Dimaano, Benito Benitez) who were some of the pillars of the old Presidential Assistant for Community Development (PACD) in the 50s. They ere among those who led efforts to do something innovative about the purely service delivery approach which characterized community development work since its launching.

During the 70s and 80s, community empowerment approaches emerged which promoted the no-linkage-with-government policy. Several NGOs and some Church-based groups were thrust into national prominence in their advocacy of these approaches which distinguished themselves from the traditional extension agent approach of the Government.

From a pioneering effort, PACD became part of the bureaucracy with its elaborate structure that extends from the national, regional, provincial to the village level. With successive national elections and changes in the political structure, PACD could not fend off political influences and its sheer size became a problem in ensuring quality performance of the barrio workers who linked up national agencies to the people. RPB was replaced with politicians and, as expected, the barrio workers were perceived more as working for their interests. The acronym PACD became translated into Pag-Abot Caon Dayon (When they arrive, they eat right away!).

The Department of Local Government and Community Development or DLGCD took its place or it was actually the old structure given a new name. Community development was simplified as the organization of cooperatives, which were still an alien and quite sophisticated as far as the village people were concerned. Meanwhile the bad image of the department persisted. The acronym DLGCD came to be known as Department of Local Girls and Contraceptive Devices under the martial law regime. Perhaps this was due to the alleged or rumored practice of arranging dates with "chicks" for visiting officials and politicians. True or not, such rumor indicated that the perceived negative image was not addressed during those years.

In the course of time, community development was dropped from the name of the department. It became officially known as DILG or Department of Interior and Local Government.

DILG has gone through major reforms. Those under the administration of the late Sec. Jesse Robredo were designed to professionalize local governance with its emphasis on performance score cards, cash awards and recognition for LGUs which perform well in cutting bureaucratic red tape, and so on.

Perhaps it is not in the mandate of DILG to worry about the systematic participation of local communities to ensure that the benefits of good governance result in improving the situation of the poorest of the poor or the most disadvantaged and marginalized among the communities that LGUs deal with from day to day.

This is an area where LGUs can partner with civil society organizations and NGOs, as well as the private sector, to ensure that service delivery to poor households will be politics-free.

In the Company of ComDev Pioneers – 666

RAMON P. BINAMIRA

RPB was how he was called by everyone, mostly by those who worked with him in the old PACD which he headed for almost a decade since the mid 1950s, when the office was founded to bring government services available to the people in the periphery.  Several books were written about him who is widely known in textbooks as “Father of Community Development” in the Philippines.

He loomed large in the consciousness of those who were with him in the early years of PACD. In their 20s, the young graduates seemed to be under the spell of RPB. To them, RPB was the sole arbiter of what was right or wrong in the program. A persuasive speaker, he could sway arguments to his side in discussion with the staff and tangling with other bureaucrats in the Government.

With a volatile temperament, he would often pick quarrels with other personalities in government. He carried the same wild swings of temper when he was assigned by Mrs. Imelda Marcos to head three of her social development programs in the 70s. RPB lorded it over these programs without much  intervention from Mrs. Marcos because he was handed these programs with limited funding and he had to raise funds on his own.

RPB used the scarce funds given to him and to some extent, the name of Mrs. Marcos, to engage in fund campaigns, which included the following:

• a Php 1 donation drive conducted nation-wide with tickets raffled off weekly for prizes on national TV, in Nora Aunor’s Superstar show;
• a national fund campaign for the Green Revolution which featured solicitation of funds from government agencies and the private sector with volunteers led by the noted columnist, Teodoro Valencia of the Manila Times and RR Public Relations, Inc. as campaign director;
• a boxing match, the Salavarria-Lopez bout, held at the Araneta Coliseum with the proceeds going to the programs;
• the production of a commercial movie, Sapin-Sapin Patong-Patong, starring the country’s heart-throbs at the time, Nora Aunor and Tirso Cruz III;
• the holding of the Baguio Summer Festival for the benefit of the Green Revolution; and
• the holding of cockfight derby in several provinces.

His flexibility to listen to the need for innovations in the design of the programs being integrated under his management was to a large extent conditioned by the need to raise much-needed funds. The program reforms and innovations earned funding support from donors such as UNICEF and USAID. Donor support enabled the three programs to acquire assets such as vehicles, including Land Cruisers, Toyota Coasters, more Sakbayan utility vehicles and other cars, motorcycles, and a big motorboat.  In addition to the vehicles, the donors provided state-of-the-art training and communication equipment.

Aside from steering the programs towards assuming features consistent with the advocacies and strategies of donors, RPB could be credited to reading early signs on the possible overthrow of the Marcos regime. He initiated moves even prior to the 1986 EDSA Revolution of surreptitiously breaking away from the umbrella organization of the First Lady, Mrs. Imelda Marcos.

With savings from the fund campaigns, he bought land in Lucena City in Quezon and Tagbilaran City in Bohol to prepare for the eventual transfer of the property of the programs to secure them prior to the takeover of a new administration potentially hostile to the programs.

RPB took initial steps to fully integrate the three programs under the overall “Ilaw ng Buhay” program and to build a resource institution, the Ilaw International Center (IIC), in Bohol to provide the much-needed institutional framework for an initiative totally outside the authority of the Marcos regime and the First Lady.  

The establishment of the IIC  marked another important stage in the quest for more effective approaches to community development which RPB and the Crazy Co. embarked on in efforts to replicate improved methodologies and approaches, as well as to ensure external donor assistance and to  cope with perceived threats  from the rapidly-changing political environment in the mid-80s.

More on the next blog

In the Company of ComDev Pioneers 555

DAMASO  DIMAANO 

Young people in the organization called him Mang Dama, the deputy of Atty. Ramon P. Binamira at the Environmental Center of the Philippines, Inc. (ECP).  He was also at that time in the late 70s around 60 years old like most of those who pioneered community development in the country. 

At that time, most of the top officials and senior officers of the then Department of Local Government and Community Development  (DLGCD) used to work with PACD or they were graduates from the Community Development Center (CDC) in Los Banos. Because Dama belonged to the earlier batch and occupied a number of posts at the DLGCD,  he knew most of the regional directors and officials at various levels at the department. He was on first-name basis with most of them.

That was why aside from being ECP Deputy Director, he was the de facto liaison of RPB to the department and the Local Government Units (LGUs) where the three pilot programs were being implemented.

Dama was more the field operations type. When he monitored the field teams assigned to him under the integrated program, he would know how to trouble shoot problems related to their relationship to the local authorities. 

In the “Ilaw ng Buhay” approach to community development which builds close collaboration between local governments and the target communities, it is important that fieldworkers know the workings of LGUs, the dynamics within both the political bodies and the technical agencies. 

The new approach called for skills not only in conducting orientation and lectures, but also in dealing with both government technical staff, who delivered services, and the political leaders who either would hinder or facilitate such goal based on considerations other than developmental.

Dama’s contribution was in being able to make politicians consider the development agenda in making decisions about service delivery not necessarily through technical discussions, but more through reviving old friendships and building principled relationships with local political leaders. Thus in the “Ilaw ng Buhay” approach, which was also described by the group or the Crazy Co. as the jawbone approach (bringing the upper jaw of local governance in sync with the lower jaw of local communities and households), Dama contributed much to showing the forces at play at the local government level.

He showed that the process of dealing with LGUs is as tedious as dealing with local communities and their traditional practices. It would require he would say “casing the joint” carefully, which could mean knowing each Mayor or any political leader thoroughly, their beliefs and values, educational background, track record in public service, their virtues and vices and sometimes the number of spouses they have.

Damaso Dimaano was truly the “Upper Jaw” expert during the Ilaw ng Buhay pilot phase in the 80s.

In the Company of ComDev Pioneers 444

BENITO BENITEZ 

Ben was among the community development pioneers we worked with who passed away years ago. He left behind a strong positive impression among those who worked with him in those days of Project Compassion and Ilaw ng Buhay in the 70s and 80s. He was everyone’s idea of a trainer in the mold of the professional  PACD-trained worker – every inch looking like a teacher: well-combed hair;  polo shirt which must have been starched and iron repeatedly;  proud bearing , erect, no paunch and always a ready smile. 

If Bitoy Ramos was the superstar trainer in the boondocks of Quezon Province, his counterpart in the coastal and watershed areas in Bohol was Ben Benitez of Tagbilaran City. If you want to ensure a standing-room only crowd in the barangays, then put these two trainers on a road show of Family Ilaw Training.

If I recall, we did this in the barangays  in the  municipalities of Rizal under Ilaw ng Buhay:  Teresa, Baras, Pililla, Antipolo, Taguig.  It increased their fan base tremendously and also fast-tracked the organization of neighbourhood associations known as Ilaw ng Buhay chapters. 

Bitoy and Ben had contrasting styles. While Ben was well-dressed, Bitoy would always come with his standard collarless t-shirt and faded denim pants. While Bitoy was formal and serious at times, Ben was typically Bol-anon with his seemingly innocent questions and homespun humor. 

Nowhere was this contrast more apparent than in the way they handled their respective family planning inputs. While the yardstick for a successful family planning input Bitoy style was for nobody in the audience to giggle when he put the condom in the wooden phallus, the opposite was used to gauge a successful Ben Benitez’ performance : the audience must laugh all the way to their acceptance of the supermarket approach. 

His subliminal message was that family planning is no big deal; as long as the fun and excitement and thrill is there, as intended by the Creator, go ahead and choose your device if that will ensure your peace of mind that “you can only bring out to the world, the number of children you can feed, shelter and educate.” 

Assisted by Tagbilaran City Mayor Jose Ma. Rocha, Ben did one better over Bitoy. The Mayor, who was our Board chair, invited the Bishop and a number of priests and nuns to observe Ben’s input in one of the Family Ilaw Training in Mansasa. The Bishop saw the light after Ben’s presentation and to the delight of the Ilaw ng Buhay team, announced that he was giving permission to any priest and nun who would like to be Ilaw development trainor and to present the family planning input using the supermarket approach! 

The tension of so many weeks was gone with the Bishop’s response to the Ben Benitez’ show.

One day, the young trainers asked Ben Benitez about his secret in drawing the crowd. He herded them in his UNICEF-issued Sakbayan and brought us to the public market of Tagbilaran City. We walked around the place and stopped before a crowd all roaring with laughter to a salesman of traditional medicines.  

Near the salesman’s cart of bottled medicines, twigs and leaves of plants, there was a basket with a big snake. The guy was talking to the snake, singing, praying, everything to coax the snake out of the basket; he would spice his act with the snake with stories about his grandmother, mother, and sometimes children and neighbours. All funny stories, no tearjerker, and everyone was having great fun. 

It was obvious Ben was showing us that for people to listen to our message, we must first entertain them. Or have a way of telling the often boring message in an entertaining way! 

In the Company of ComDev Pioneers 333

KAKA DIMAANO 

Alfredo Dimaano or Kaka, for short. He was from the same PACD (Presidential Assistant for Community Development) group. Because he had a BS degree in agriculture from UP Los Banos, Kaka  was assigned from the start to take care of what were then called the Green Revolution inputs. Basically, these were about backyard food production. His technical advice guided the reforms made on the program, which was associated with school gardening, with uniform plots, use of fancy tools and lots of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

With the approval of Atty. Ramon P. Binamira, the Crazy Company departed from the standard messages and with the help of Kaka and the other agriculturists in the group, linked up the program to the traditional practices of having perennials on the front and backyard and along the fence. Although still known as  Green Revolution, a term borrowed from the Western model of increasing yield through chemicals and modern implements, the Crazy Company version brought back public attention to those crops planted by their ancestors which helped families achieve good health and longevity, as well as help protect the environment.

The first thing that Kaka would do when he arrived in a town where he would deliver his lecture was to visit the public market and took note of the kind of vegetables being sold. Under RPB's direction, each vegetable was labelled either for life or for non-life. Either a vegetable would prolong life or not, whether or not it woutd contribute to maintaining life.

Kaka would appear in the training venue, usually in a classroom in a remote village, carrying a fancy office briefcase. In the course of his lecture, he would open the briefcase and one by one, showed the 11 priority vegetables that should be bought from the market. Then the training assistant will show pictures of malnourished children who just died in the village or municipality and correlate their death to the fact that vegetables which would ensure health and life were left to wilt in the public market.

Kaka in dramatic fashion would show relatively higher priced vegetables were bought because these were the ones promoted in school gardens and the media. RPB would then interject and say life and death were inches away from each other in the public market, but most of the people would rather make their children die by choosing the wrong vegetables.

Kaka and the team brought glamour to lowly vegetables which were shunned by locals for junk food and crops that would need high inputs of chemical fertilizer to survive. In a sense, Kaka ushered in the real green revolution in consciousness, bringing back sweet potato or camote; malunggay; sayote; garbanzos or seguidillas; patani;and crops characterized as in the PFH category or crops you could plant, forget and harvest in contrast to those promoted by some extension workers that would need daily watering, weeding, as well as heavy inputs of fertilizers and chemicals. 

Under his technical direction, the team produced a step-by-step guide on how to visit public markets, inventory the crops being produced and marketed and convert insights about food consumption habits into actions that would create a strong desire on the part of the people to use their backyard and the public market as source of practical knowledge against malnutrition and disease.

Due to Kaka's influence in the group, we became scholars of public markets and the people's backyards in efforts to make our messages pertinent to the village people who flocked to our Family Ilaw Training. Kaka is gone somewhere to hell or heaven, but we miss him today each time we see young extension workers going about with their power point presentations quite much more efficiently unlike in our days. Because the presentations seem to be of the one-size-fits-all type, the trainers seem not to care whether the messages they impart with their glossy slides are pertinent or not to the needs of their audience who ogle at the pretty pictures. 

In the Company of ComDev Pioneers 222 -

 PIO ALMODIEL

The young people in that diverse group of community development workers called the Crazy Company, which ran social development programs identified with the First Lady, Mrs. Imelda Marcos during the 70s and 80s, would easily consider Pio Almodiel as their role model. The oldest in the group, past 60 at that time, he was a fieldworker par excellence. The label "fieldworker" must have been invented with him in mind.

Although designated as Atty. Binamira's deputy for Project Compassion, he was never seen behind a desk. He was rarely at the office and preferred to be always "out in the field," which could mean with one of the municipal or city teams covered by either Project Compassion or the field-testing of "Ilaw ng Buhay (Light of Life" approach.

Piux, as he was called, was your idea of a Lolo gone wild with a habit to be always away from home or office. He preferred to be surrounded by people from morning until past midnight or into the early hours of the morning. His inputs during training were always spiced with stories about ordinary people he had known  and he would tell barrio people about what they were doing development-wise and cite them for insights about whatever he was  trying to impart during training.

He must have been guided by the training designs or modules, but he was an example of a trainer who would rather mind the spirit rather than the letter of the law, so to speak. His style was to tell his audience about specific people he met and what he learned from them. Something like Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek twice over complete with narratives and aphorisms. He was trying to show learning from the people's own experiences could be more precious than supposedly superior knowledge that found their way to the training syllabus.

Only Piux could do the kinilaw the way he did. Team members from Luzon learned how to eat kinilaw for breakfast complete with sili and all. He preferred tuba to beer or Tanduay and often he would be in the company of fisherfolks from whom he would collect stories for his training inputs. Like others in the group who endured living from one stressful day to another, Piux was a chain smoker. He claimed it improved his memory.

We remember how he showed this kind of sharp memory in barangay Bool, Tagbilaran City when he was invited as one of those who would crown the Santacruzan queen. He astounded all of us when before he spoke, he greeted each family represented in the gathering by ticking off the name of each household head!
How could he remember each of the 50 or so households present? Well, simple; he had met all of them during orientation of each purok prior to the holding of Family Ilaw Training.

He was driving home a point to us: to be credible as change agents to the people, we must truly know them not in the abstract description usually given by social scientists, but in their actual setting in the barangay or purok where a name is more than a label but a brand to live by or to be cursed with.

Piux Almodiel, take a bow wherever you are. We remember your lesson quite well.

In the Company of Community Development Pioneers 111

Those were exciting times, the Project Compassion period (1973 to 1977) and the field-testing of the innovative "Ilaw ng Buhay (Light of Life)" approach (1978 to 1981). As we noted in the previous blog, there were two groups, the non-PACD staff who were assigned to be in field teams from disciplines other than community development; and the new staff from the academe, who came to work also with the pioneers  in efforts to improve the old extension agent model in community development work.

We had a unique situation where relatively younger staff  had the opportunity to work with those who pioneered community development as a government program in the 1950s.The joke among us in the younger groups was that in evenings when we could not sleep, we do not count the proverbial sheep: we count those from this old group who are still alive and, well,  those who have passed away, and recall our best times together.

Now we will try to remember these development workers from the old days who had made the martial law  period truly an exciting part of a lifetime for us.

Let us limit it to those who have passed away and what we remember most about them-

Bitoy Ramos

Alberto Ramos, overall coordinator for all three programs: Project Compassion; Green Revolution and Environmental Center of the Philippines. He was known with his nickname Bitoy. Quite at home with all sorts of people, including Governors, Mayors and other politicians of all stripes and colors. Bitoy could walk confidently among them - and talk his way out with his integrity as development worker intact.

His input on family planning during Family Ilaw Training (FIT) was easily the most attended despite competition with Janice de Belen's teleserye, Flor de Luna. He established rapport with the audience in ways that seemed to elude most of us in the first fifteen minutes of an input. His idea of success in his lecture on family planning was to be able to sustain attention and respect among his audience  even during the part where village people would normally laugh - the display of various family planning devices and the admonition to the audience to exercise sound judgement in choosing the best method.

He was the only trainer who could bring the input to the point where he would demonstrate how to put the condom in a wooden phallus without anyone giggling or making a joke. He could bring the solemnity of the Mass to his input about the family planning using what we called as the supermarket approach, presenting the facts about all the methods and then letting the families decide according to what they think is best.

He could deliver this in an Ilaw ng Buhay training in Sto. Domingo, Albay, after a gruelling 6-hour Sakbayan ride from Lucena City with the same equanimity and conviction. We saw him did it in a variety of settings: among informal settlers in Lucena City in a place called Bagong Pagasa (New Hope), for example, and still achieved the same behavioral impact.

Bitoy was the coolest trainer alive in those days. Well, to illustrate: in a post-FIT activity in a barangay in Carmen, Bohol, the trainers were invited to attend a dance party as part of the fiesta celebration. In the house of the Ilaw Chapter officer, there was this drunken guy who was forcibly inviting everyone to dance with his Caliber .38 pistol. Everybody stood up except Bitoy. So the man went up to him and aimed his pistol at him. Bitoy calmly looked at him. He smiled while seated and sang the Ilaw ng Buhay song after saying he would sing rather than dance because he did not know how to dance.

The drunken guy laughed. So did all of those in the house. To be cool under fire, a trait development workers should have and cultivate for all seasons.

To be continued in the next blog.

Field-testing the "Ilaw ng Buhay" Approach, 1978 to 1981

What eventually came to be known as the Crazy Company evolved from the years 1978 to 1981, quite a busy period for field testing the new "Ilaw ng Buhay (Light of Life)" approach to community development in several pilot cities and municipalities: Lucena City in Quezon Province; Legazpi City in Albay; Oroquieta City In Misamis Occidental; Lapu-lapu City in Cebu, Tagbilaran City in Bohol; and in several municipalities (Naguilian, La Union; Teresa and Pililla in Rizal; Candelaria, Quezon; Basud and Daet, Camarines Norte; Sto. Domingo, Albay; Digos and Hagonoy in Davao del Sur).

The 45-member group of community development workers were divided into small teams to cover each pilot municipality. Each team, comprising of around 5 members, was assigned a team leader. The team must live in the area of coverage, in a designated team house. Each team member was provided a UNICEF-donated Sakbayan, a local clone of the Volkswagen, and a copy of the Ilaw ng Buhay Operations Guide to serve as their "bible", according to the head, Atty. Ramon P. Binamira, known as the country's Father of Community Development.

The senior members of the former PACD group served as deputies and department directors (Pio Almodiel for Project Compassion; Beinvenido Garcia for Green Revolution; Damaso Dimaano for Environmental Center of the Philippines; and Alberto Ramos as overall program director; Enrique Tolentino, training director). In addition to their line functions in the structure, each was assigned specific cluster of pilot areas to look after and monitor.

Probably because I was doing liaison work with international donor agencies (UNICEF, USAID), I was assigned to head the Planning, Monitoring, Research and Communication Division. I was 31 working with community development professionals almost twice my age with international experience as community development advisers in war-torn Vietnam and in Laos where Operations Brotherhood was located. I was easily the youngest in the group until we recruited Bimboy Penaranda, around 7 years my junior, who used to work with the Nutrition Center of the Philippines, and did journalism work on the side.

Bimboy and I recruited our staff from the UP Los Banos interns who had spent their internship in Ilaw ng Buhay areas as requirement in their human ecology degree. Some of the people who worked with us for almost two years as researchers were: Doracie Zoleta, Lilibeth Vargas, Irene Reyes and Noemi (?) Pandi. For some reasons, I could not recall the names of their male classmates. All of them were two or three years younger than Bimboy.

As for the field teams, they recruited new members from the ranks of local development trainers they had trained and worked with before in Project Compassion projects prior to the formulation of the "Ilaw ng Buhay (Light of Life Movement)." That was how each team drew fresh blood from other sectors who did not come through the PACD curriculum. 

Later I was designated as Special Assistant to the President on Planning and Operations and concurrently Chief of the Operations Review Committee (ORC) to further ensure regular tracking of each team's performance in carrying out the community-based and integrated program on backyard  gardening, environmental management, and family planning with particular focus on child welfare.

Each team member was required to keep a daily log of his or her activities, as well as reflections, to be submitted with the regular monthly reports first to the ORC and then to the deputies. The ORC members, who were to travel to the field once or twice a quarter, had to supplement their reports with observations or analysis from the daily logs submitted by team members.

All the teams would meet only twice a year for assessment of field experiences and replanning. Atty. Binamira and the deputies made sure that the office at the Green Revolution Command Center at Nayong Pilipino would have only the basic necessities on top of it being crowded to discourage field teams to stay longer than the one week required for each meeting.

At our division and ORC level, we who were younger than the pioneers of community development, were afforded a ringside view, as it were, of how these veterans in community work used their skills and commitment to try something new in their profession in pursuit of the old mission to reach target households and communities with much-needed services from the center to the periphery.

All of us in this group were thankful we were given the privilege to see the country's veteran community development workers at their finest, mentoring young conterparts and volunteers, in the quest for the Holy Grail of doing meaningful work among the poor and the not-so-poor in cooperation with local government functionaries, who were normally avoided by NGOs during the martial law regime.

More on this in the next blog.

From Project Compassion to "Ilaw ng Buhay" (Light of Life) Movement

Project Compassion and its use of trained 20-family unit leaders to reach more households in the villages represented a key milestone in the history of community development in the country. The target community itself was seen as a source of extension agents which could expand the outreach of services from poblacionto to the remote villages.

The infusion of new blood in the organization mainly composed of pioneers of community development presented an opportunity to assess this emerging trend and to build on it to further explore the limits of participatory development in the potentially repressive context of a martial law regime. This new blood came from specialized disciplines and other entities, including the academe. The PACD pioneers held their ground initially when their long-held beliefs came suddenly under seige from sectors traditionally non-committal regarding development issues.

The leader, Atty. Ramon P. Binamira, displayed an openness of mind and participated in the intense discussions until each issue was resolved to the satisfaction of all protagonists. He displayed a readiness to accept ideas from outside the pioneering group, a rare trait from his inflexible ways in ordinary meetings. He displayed an uncanny ability to cut through the maze of academic discussions to reveal the bare-bones messages or the gut issues, as he called them. His insistence to test new ideas and settled differences among the three groups by actually going to barangay Pahinga Norte, in Candelaria, Quezon paid off in the end.

The three factions within the group agreed in the end on the following:

First, pertinence is the rule. It is wrong for extension agents and development workers to just barge into the community, herd people to listen to lectures peppered with technical information that nobody understands, and then leave in a hop without indicating what should happen next. Nobody will be allowed to just say, for example, that children should eat malunggay because a gram of its green leaves contains 21,000 units of Vitamin A. Instead, trainers should say children will run the risk of being blind if they are fed malunggay and that they should plant malunggay preferably along the fence or near the kitchen easy picking of leaves before cooking time.

Second,emotions are key to make people listen to developmental messages. We must make people cry or laugh and if we can sing technical inputs on malnutrition, family planning and environmental management, we must do this and be experts in understanding how people feel, the symbols they embrace to build community-ness and the stories passed on from generation to generation to give pride of place and local traditions.

Third, to say that people should participate in development is never enough; communities and people need to get organized to be able to participate meaningfully in local decision-making and to get their share of benefits from development plans, programs and projects. Although organizing by sectors, e.g. farmers, fisherfolks, women, etc. is important, efforts must be exerted to organize as a community, e.g. as puroks or sub-villages, and to use institutional arrangements which have withstood time and external influences, as traditional mutual aid societies, neighborhood associations.

Fourth, child-based issues should be used as much as possible to galvanize support from all sides of the political fence in a culture where the child provides sheer joy to all despite political and religious differences.
The trainer/community organizer must use effective means to win political leaders to the cause of pro-poor development and encourage participation in activities that bring all parties together in such issues as child welfare.

Fifth, it is not enough to train unit leaders and officers of people's organizations in skills to facilitate service delivery, but also in those matters that build community confidence in being able to use local resources and accomplish goals they themselves identify for general welfare.

Sixth, projects are not only means to deliver services, but they can also serve as entry points to build greater partnership between communities and their local governments in their pursuit of common goals.

Having agreed on these key points, the three groups representing diverse viewpoints thus discover their common unity and proceeded to define the "Ilaw ng Buhay" approach to development, clearly a marked evolution of the Project Compassion model into a neighborhood movement with organized communities and committed political leadership at local government level.

That was how it was designed and implemented as an improvement on the old top-down model of community development pioneered in the Philippines in the 50s.