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.
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.
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