SHARING

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.