Socio-Pastoral Institute

Building Resilient Communities in Novaliches

By Jose Clemente

Part 1: The Sky is Falling

The rain fell down ripe, nasty and full, thrashing the bare earth and galvanized iron roofs with loud awful thuds that boomed and punched their way out one’s ears and chest. For the residents of California Riverside and Tomasa Riverside in Barangay San Bartolome, Novaliches, Quezon City, years of living on the easement of the meandering Tullahan River freed them from ignorance or wishful thinking, so that they knew very well what was coming next. What they were unprepared for, however, was how quickly it engulfed and took over the neighborhood.

And so it came.

The flood waters rose, breached the river’s banks and claimed everything in its path with enthusiasm and speed. With complete contempt, the flood water ignored all natural and constructed boundaries and claimed everything, transforming the expanse into a giant restless, eddying puddle interjected only by the protrusion of the occasional roof and tree top.

As the waters rose, the residents erupted into purposeful action, free-sprinting, mad-dashing to higher grounds like a panic-stricken herd of spooked prey running away from a pride of avid lions. Ate Lanie scrambled to carry her belongings to the second floor of a neighbor’s house unaware that the flood would rise above it and gobble up everything in it anyway. Ate Vilma, on the other hand, managed to rescue just a few precious personal documents and the clothes on her back.

When the flood swelled to about chest high or so, Flor and her husband reconciled themselves to the inevitable, turned off the mains, padlocked the door and abandoned their house. They struggled against the raging, swirling currents, doing their utmost not to drown.  As luck would have it, they got hold of a piece of styrofoam flotsam and used that to carry their young grandson and themselves to safety.

While others rode out the flood in the safety of California Village’s Multi-Purpose Hall, Glenda rushed back to her inundated house just as the flood waters began to subside. Foremost in her mind was the money entrusted to her by her group from Church and she was going to get it back.

When she got to her house, most of her things had been swept away by the flood and her handbag, which she hung by the nail on the wall, was nowhere in sight. Glenda hunched down and frantically fumbled about the still flooded floor swirling with mud and debris. After a few minutes of groping in the muck, she finally felt something. It was her shoulder bag!  By chance, it was jammed fast to the floor by a plastic cabinet that had fallen on top of it, keeping it safe from the retreating waters.

She thanked God for her good fortune.

Later that day, the entire world would learn that on September 26, 2009, tropical storm Ondoy (International codename, Ketsana) dumped over 341.3 mm of rain water in Metro Manila in a matter of six hours, causing the worst floods in the capital ever recorded. Even by the Philippines’ undemanding standards, the state of the nation’s preparedness to deal with extreme weather events is lamentable. Like most communities in danger zones, California Riverside and Tomasa Riverside in Barangay San Bartolome were bereft of early warning systems, evacuation plans or community-based quick response teams. Like most local governments around the Philippines, Barangay San Bartolome too was without a Barangay Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council (BDRRMC) ready to respond to the humanitarian crisis.

Given all that, it was indeed a surprise that although, at the last count Ondoy took 747 lives, no one in Barangay San Bartolome died.

 

Part 2: Accidental Partners

Socio-Pastoral Institute

The Socio-Pastoral Institute (SPI) was founded in 1980 during the darkest hours of martial law in the Philippines.  Confronted by an illegitimate regime that corrupted our democratic institutions and wantonly violated human rights and a Catholic Church divided on how to respond, progressive priests and religiou­­­­­­s from various congregations came together and put up SPI to proclaim that work for justice and social transformation is an integral and constitutive dimension of our Christian faith.

Today, SPI participates in the building of peace communities or Darusalams in the urban poor Moro communities of Pagadian City, Zamboanga del Sur, Mindanao. That venture involves helping the communities develop their own leaders, self-help programs and people’s organization alongside the strengthening of the local Inter-Faith Council to help them deal with various socio-economic, political and environmental challenges.

The stirring feature of this project is that the community development endeavor is linked to spirituality or a way of life that enhances life for all, especially the poor. The health campaigns, adult education, feeding program, women’s program, interfaith work and so forth are framed as elements of the Khalifa’s (stewardship) mission to care for all of creation.

Aside from that, SPI has also been working with the poorest local Catholic parishes and dioceses to help them become stewardship churches. A crucial feature of the accompaniment process is the development of a local team which spearheads the re-evangelization education process that covers both the center, the parish and the periphery, people living in the far-flung sitios.  This is in light of the fact that most Catholics today hold fast to a faith muddled by folklore, superstition and magic.

SPI sees stewardship as vital to the renewal of both Church and society because the only way we can make this a better, kinder world is if we share our blessing with each other, one gift at a time.

As it happened, one of the members of SPI’s Spirituality of Stewardship or “Buhay Katiwala” Task Force, Sr. Mila Singap, FLP, was assigned to Christ, King of the Universe Parish (CKUP) in San Bartolome. When Ondoy demolished the urban poor communities in the parish, we therefore had a ready insider who could lead the rapid assessment process to determine the need for and extent of the humanitarian response.

Fr. Jun de Peralta, CKUP and the Church of the Poor

By his guise and garb, it is understandable if you do not think that Fr. Jun de Peralta is a respected and venerable member of the clergy of the Diocese of Novaliches. After all, his predilection for simple, nondescript clothes favored by the working class is in stark contrast to the habit and bid of most priests to appear august and esteemed.  Moreover, it does not help that when this slightly undersized man with a booming voice and easygoing charm speaks, he interfuses his discourse with street waffle and humor rather than with biblical passages and Christian parables as most “real” priests are wont to do.

It is only when you learn that Fr. Jun is an honest-to-goodness stalwart of the Church of the Poor that you begin to understand the “unsuitable” veil of perplexing indicators and start to make sense of the bewildering ensemble of priesthood, simple clothes, earthy speech and folksy manner.

Nine Parishes in the Diocese of Novaliches suffered varying levels of ruin by inundation. At CKUP alone, close to 800 families dwelling by the riverside were in dire need of assistance as their homes and livelihoods were either completely washed out or badly damaged by the flood. To add to the difficulties, Fr. Jun had only recently assumed the post of Parish Priest of CKUP and was still in the process getting his bearings.

Working in their favor, however, was that the CKUP had a Social Service and Development Ministry (SSDM) in place. It was headed by Rene Busmente, a soft-spoken titan of a man who walks and treads lightly, who is ever so careful not to intrude on others or draw attention to his person. He is a former overseas worker who now commits his relaxed personality and almost all his free time, skills and resources to serve the Church and the communities in its margins.

Unfortunately, the SSDM’s main experience was limited to organizing and providing logistical support to medical missions. It was in no way above the salt to meet a humanitarian emergency of this nature and scale.

The possible missteps in responding to this kind of complex humanitarian crisis are legion. So when SPI approached Fr. Jun with a proposal to provide relief for those affected by the flood, he also reached beyond the borders of the Parish to enlist the help of a longtime friend and head of the Land and Housing Ministry of the Diocese of Novaliches, Joseph Garcia.

It takes a man who is larger than life, who invites exclamation points, to make it in the confrontational world of community organizing. Joseph is such a man. He is large and full-sized! He is a flamboyant disputant and an enchanting storyteller! Like a tank, he plows forward against all opposition!

As a young man, Joseph cut his teeth in organizing informal settlers in Manila so that they may, in circumstances of illegal and often violent demolition, relocation and resettlement, avail of the protection and rights accorded to them by law. When asked why even up to now, he is still hacking away, doing battle side by side with unsecured communities in Novaliches, he said, “I myself come from disadvantaged circumstances. I know how hard it is and what it is like. I just want to give back and help in any way I can.”

And so, with Rene and the SSDM and Joseph and the Land and Housing Ministry of the Diocese in his corner, Fr. Jun felt he was as ready as he could ever be to tackle this humanitarian emergency head on.

Christian Aid

Christian Aid is an international development agency that works with peoples of all faiths and none, in over fifty countries around the world, to eradicate poverty. Its style is exceptional in that Christian Aid works exclusively through local partners rather than by directly implementing projects or programs.

A great deal of Christian Aid’s distinctiveness, therefore, lies in its commitment to build the capacity of its local partners. On top of this, Christian Aid provides local partners with the necessary funding support to implement effective and meaningful programs on the ground.

When Ondoy ravaged Metro Manila, Christian Aid woke up and stared at the stunning detail that they did not have a single partner in Manila with the capacity and experience to respond to humanitarian emergencies. As a result, Christian Aid called on some long-term partners like Community Organizing of the Philippines Enterprise (COPE) Bicol and the Social Action Center of the Prelature of Infanta, Quezon and asked if they could lend their expertise to lead the humanitarian assistance and to mentor the Manila partners.

And so it was that SPI and other Manila-based Christian Aid partners were invited to respond to the humanitarian emergency and to develop the requisite proficiencies along the way.

Little did we know that this experience would be so powerful that it would induce us to rethink and reinvent ourselves. As to what SPI would become, no one knew at that point. Were we to metamorphose into a development agency with a strong emergency program? Or perhaps become a legitimate relief agency with strong developmental sensibilities and capabilities?

At that point, the only thing we knew for certain was that Ondoy had taken us to a crossroads, to a place marked by the need to question established institutional practices and traditions combined with the need to develop new capacities. It was in this setting of utter uncertainty that we were now called to join this dance of change and revolutions.

And bear in mind, that on top of the qualms we felt at this juncture due to our own ignorance of what was and what was to come, all change – even the most desirable change – contains sadness to them. For whatever we leave behind are still parts of ourselves even if they must die in order for us to live again.

And so with goodwill and lots of derring-do, SPI, Christian Aid and CKUP leapt into the unknown praying that, somehow, a net would appear to catch us before we hit the stony ground.

Part 3: Keeping it together

Four frameworks provided us with the scaffolding on which to glue the many conceptual, operational and programmatic conducts of this project into a coherent constitution. These were (1.) the Hyogo framework, (2.) the linking of relief with development, (3.) the sustainable livelihoods framework and (4.) the integration of spirituality and social change.

Hyogo Framework

By adopting the Hyogo framework, we were driven to regularly consider and attend to the five major gaps and challenges that relief experts have identified as crucial to address, in order for humanitarian campaigns to succeed:

1. Governance: organizational, legal and policy frameworks;
2. Risk identification, assessment, monitoring and early warning;
3. Knowledge management and education;
4. Reducing underlying risk factors;
5. Preparedness for effective response and recovery

Linking Relief to Development Framework

The sorting of interventions according to the categories of relief, rehabilitation, and development is often puzzling, subjective and weighed down with acrimonious debate. To a great extent, the impetus is inadvertently driven by funding agencies that are comfortable with clearly demarcated project boundaries and phases alongside pre-determined timetables and sets of interventions.

In the Ketsana project, we agreed that we would try our utmost to implement the humanitarian endeavor in a way that brings these distinct separate groupings together. That meant introducing developmental activities as close to the heels of relief as possible, as well as the framing of saving lives and other community assets as an immutable requisite of development.

This framework clarified for us that if we setup an effective community-based, barangay-synchronized disaster risk reduction (DRR) program to reduce the severity of disasters and shocks, that would translate into a significant reduction of the need for emergency relief and aid.  Less demand for relief and aid In turn means more resources to invest in enhancing the asset base of the community for its long-term security and development.

Sustainable Livelihood Framework

The Sustainable Livelihood Framework is an asset-based framework for understanding poverty and the appropriate development activities for its remedy. The framework identifies five groups of assets – physical, social, political, natural and economic that we must protect and nurture to help a community withstand, cope with, and recover from natural and humanly created shocks.

Coming from this holistic, asset-based standpoint, the Ketsana project had to be a multicollaborator and multidisciplinary endeavor, as no single partner had all the capacities to secure the five categories of assets. Enlisted into active service was a motley group of civil society organizations with a colorful array of strong suits and experiences: UNLAD KABAYAN for sustainable livelihood, TAO-PILIPINAS for infrastructure improvement, Partnership of Philippine Support Agencies Inc. (PHILSSA) for national DRR and climate change advocacies, National Institute of Geological Sciences of the University of the Philippines (UPNIGS) and Manila Observatory of the Ateneo de Manila University (MO) for scientific studies and Sentro ng Alternatibong Lingap Panligal (SALIGAN) for paralegal education.

As the area-based partner in Novaliches, SPI was responsible for seeing that the seeds of resiliency and development fall on fertile ground. This meant preparing the community so that all project interventions, including those from collaborator NGOs, would flourish in the community.

Relating Spirituality with Social Change Framework

In the hard-as-nails world of poverty eradication and social transformation, spirituality is hardly ever brought up as important or pertinent.

To a great extent, this is because of the popular misconception that spirituality is “doing what priests do.”  In that view, the putdown is that while prayer may give us resolve and spiritual energy, it does not by itself say, establish participative democratic organizations or meet the poor’s basic needs. Whereas worship may do wonders to our interior lives, it does not by itself say, lead to redistribution of social wealth or the creation of equitable standards of living.

But spirituality is not just about prayers and rituals. It is not just about what we do during Sundays or about making personal sacrifices and meeting religious obligations. Spirituality is a way of life. It is a way of life that is committed to nonviolence and respect for life, for solidarity with the poor and a just economic order, to tolerance and truthfulness, to equal rights and to genuine partnership between men and women. And most importantly, it is a way of life that is committed to sharing our gifts and blessings – in love and in justice – with others, starting with the poorest of the poor.

And as such, spirituality is a fundamental and constitutive dimension of social transformation.

Any attempt at social change that focuses exclusively on correcting external structures, policies, mechanisms, or institutions to the exclusion of the conversion of the human heart, is doomed to fail. Because as surely as there are unjust social structures that breed injustice, there are habits of the mind and heart that promote oppression as well.

And it is exactly this point that Bishop Julio Labayen refers to in his book “Revolutions and the Church of the Poor.” When the renowned writer, Conrad de Quiros, reviewed that book, he summarized its essence with this single sentence, “To Bishop Labayen, the heart of revolutions is the revolution of the heart.”

No one is saying that this insight is exclusively Roman Catholic or even Christian but SPI believes that it is spot-on!

With these four frameworks – Hyogo, the linking of relief with development, the idea of building  sustainable livelihoods and the integration of spirituality with social change frameworks, we had the helpful conceptual and operational scaffolding to hold the undertaking together. All that was left to do was to pound ahead at the serious work of humanitarian assistance so that out of helplessness and uncertainty may come hope.

Part 4: Shelter from the Storm

Barangays Bagbag and San Bartolome

Due to its sheer size and complexity, it took a few months to bang all the components of the Ketsana project together. In the intervening time, CKUP, not wishing to hang idly while waiting for Christian Aid’s Ketsana project to come to life, took the initiative to raise and distribute aid to the flood victims in the nearby communities.

Through the generosity of the Red Cross, a local TV station ABS-CBN, the Knights of Columbus from Holy Cross Church, Couples for Christ from the Odelco Subdivision, the nearby Chinese communities, kind families from Barangay Goodwill and California Village and many others, CKUP raised a fair amount of food and non-food items which they later distributed to the victims.

In the meantime, a month or so after SPI submitted the results of its rapid assessment of the situation of informal settlers around CKUP, Christian Aid appointed Community Organization of the Philippines Enterprise (COPE) as the lead agency with regards housing assistance and livelihood support in Bagbag and San Bartolome.

Shelter Assistance

Through Fr. Jun’s instigation, a fresh approach to packaging and delivering shelter assistance was modeled in Bagbag. It was more equitable and responsive to the needs of the flood victims than typical modes of aid that were top-down in orientation and execution.

The innovation was that it was the beneficiaries themselves who would determine the assortment of materials that made up the shelter assistance package. The only constraint was that the aid package they devised for themselves must fall within the budget of Php 5,000 per household, a ceiling that Christian Aid, CKUP and the COPE team had agreed upon given the resources available and the scale of devastation.

However, even if the beneficiaries decided to exceed the allotted amount, they could still avail of the package provided that they put up and made good the difference. So through the involvement of the beneficiaries in the determination of the content of the package, the shelter assistance scheme was able to closely match beneficiaries’ needs with the proffered aid.

A key mechanism in the operation was the issuance of access cards to legitimate beneficiaries. The access card is a standard article in most aid efforts and in this case it involved calling house to house to determine who the legitimate beneficiaries were based on pre-determined criteria like poverty, number of children, extent of damage suffered and so on.

This access card also carried a list of the permitted materials that they could requisition along with their corresponding prices.  All the beneficiaries had to do was to write their order of building materials and the quantity of it that they required on the cards and submit them to the designated hardware store on the appointed dates.

The authorized local hardware in turn, verified the submitted access cards by matching them and their signatures to a master list of legitimate beneficiaries. Upon proper authentication, the store releases the materials. And because the hardware store is near the community, the beneficiaries just brought the materials home from the store using tricycles or push carts.

This method circumvented the massive logistical nightmares involved in centralized deliveries from warehouses or depositories and all the usual issues of security, crowd control, quality control and so forth.

Livelihood Support

When the muck from the calamity had settled and the need for relief receded, a cash-for-work program was started in order to clean and repair the walls of the canals running by Oro and Bicol Compounds. This was a strategic move to wean people away from reliance on aid and to nudge them in the direction of self-reliance.

This is a case of an action that blurs the line between relief and development. By using relief funds to compensate people for cleaning and repairing an important community asset – the water canals – the initiative moved into the territory that many would consider developmental.

Aside from the cash for work program, financial support was also provided to kick start the formation of group enterprises that could provide the flood stricken community with basic products vital to its recovery and resiliency. This endeavor, which involved navigating through needs-analysis, technical marketing surveys and business plans, was spearheaded by Jojo Rom of COPE.

Noteworthy in the approach was the development of a Livelihood Committee as the central mechanism for overseeing the various aspects and conducts of the group enterprises. This Livelihood Committee was composed of trusted community leaders as well as representatives from CKUP and COPE.

Out of this undertaking arose two group enterprise schemes, a rice store and a fresh meat shop. These mini-enterprises served not only as providers of essential goods to the community but also a training ground on entrepreneurship and business management.

Barangay San Bartolome and SPI

It was sometime June of 2010, a good nine months after Ondoy,  that the “Building Disaster Risk Reduction Mechanisms (DRR) for Highly Vulnerable Communities” project was given the green light by Christian Aid.

With SPI as the main proponent, the project involved developing community-based DRR programs and responders, strengthening local peoples’ organizations and mainstreaming of DRR into the barangay and the Parish Church of CKUP.

With this new project, we also jumped the track from Bagbag to San Bartolome. Bagbag had already benefitted greatly from the shelter and livelihood assistance led by COPE and Christian Aid, so Fr. Jun proposed that this time around, we come to the aid of the informal settlers in San Bartolome.  As we did that, we nonetheless invited the leaders from Bagbag to attend the DRR trainings we would give in San Bartolome.

The DRR trainings were both intensive and extensive, with the modules spanning a wide breadth to include basic DRR concepts, the Disaster Risk Reduction Management (DRRM) Act of 2010, the Hyogo framework, the various hazards, and contingency planning. In all, we facilitated four DRR modules, each of which took about two to three days to finish.

“As a cluster leader, I share everything I learn here with my community,” Florence “Unso” Pastor remarked on the importance of the DRR trainings. “In that way my neighbors become more aware of our situation in the danger zone and they can begin to think of ways they can participate in our DRR program.”

Our partner NGOs also gave trainings to equip the beneficiaries with a miscellany of knowledge and skills essential to the building of a hazard-resilient community, including the development of people’s assets.

SALIGAN gave paralegal training on Violence Against Women and Children (VAWC), urban governance and the DRRM law. BUKLOD TAO hosted learning tours that gave the people from our communities a peek at early warning systems and livelihood projects of another area in a danger zone. And Christian Aid provided psychosocial trainings to help flood-affected people deal with the shock and trauma.

Fr. Jun attests to how the trainings have boosted the people’s self-confidence. He talked about how someone from the informal communities approached him and told him, “Father, I may not have gone to college but now that I’ve finished paralegal training, they cannot twist the law to take advantage of me anymore.”

The point of the intensive education campaign was not to ram scholastic knowledge down people’s throats until they were fed up back to the teeth, but to provide them with the basic common sense “can dos” and inspiration necessary to build resilient communities. With this knowledge from the DRR trainings under their belt, the people of the community moved on to undertake two crucial activities towards resiliency: the Participatory Capacities and Vulnerabilities Assessments (PCVA) and Contingency Planning.

In the PCVA, the community used popular participatory tools like the Venn diagram, the historical timeline, transect walks, and the seasonal calendar and so forth, to turn its gaze back to itself and appraise its capacities and vulnerabilities. As a result of this group introspection, the community came to a clearer, more insightful appreciation of its situation, its vulnerabilities, and its resources and capabilities to deal with hazards and shocks.

After the PCVA came the Contingency Plan. This plan is about what the community will do before, during and after worst case scenarios. This was collectively drawn up by the residents based on the insights and results of the PCVA as well as their collective experiences of dealing with previous disasters.

A major part of the Contingency Plan is an orderly evacuation plan. This requires the formation of community-based committees that will oversee the entire potentially chaotic process and ensure that everything goes smoothly and no one is left behind. In San Bartolome, the following committees were created and staffed by properly trained community-based volunteers: Transportation, First Aid, Physical and Psycho-Social, Health and Sanitation, Food and Water, Early Warning and Evacuation, Complaints, Rescue and Recovery, Protection and Security and Communications.

Antonio “Ka Tony” Namoro has an interesting backstory. Like most people in the area, he too was a victim of the flood. In fact, he lost half of his house to Ondoy. But the surprising thing was that when shelter assistance from COPE and Christian Aid came, he graciously gave way to others who suffered worse than him so that they could avail of aid before him.

“I still have a place to stay while others do not. So it’s only fair that they should receive assistance first,” was how Ka Tony explained it.

Ka Tony is now the head of the Early Warning System Committee and the Emergency Preparedness and Response Team (EPRT).  “When it rains, I stay up the whole night monitoring the river. We made a critical level marker on the riprap (river wall) and when the river reaches it, I go house to house and wake people up so that they are not caught unprepared.”

Princess Briol is the only resident of California Riverside Extension who owns a telephone line. When there is a heavy downpour, she uses that asset to call La Mesa Dam, the government weather service PAGASA, Barangay San Bartolome, and SPI to make sure that the community has the latest and most reliable information. “This is my way of giving back to the community,” she said.

Reflecting on the outpouring of national and international support and assistance that they received after the flood, Ate Flor said, “We are fortunate because in our case, with the disaster came grace. Thank you to SPI and thank you to Christian Aid. Now we have an early warning system, community-based quick response teams, and we have identified where the most vulnerable in our community are.”

Part 5: First Fruits

For all its limitations and imperfections in its discharge, the project has produced a core group of leaders with the skills and commitment to lead the community in their struggle for resiliency. These committed and trained individuals are organized around community-based committees with various specializations that in total play a crucial part in the humanitarian operation, especially in the course of evacuations. The crucial detail here, however, is that the actions of the community-based committees are dovetailed to the response and rescue efforts of both the local government and the parish of CKUP.

The intensive DRR trainings and the formation of community-based response committees have also resulted in the formal inclusion of our DRR trained sitio leaders in the Barangay Disaster and Risk Reduction Management Council (BDRRMC) of Barangay San Bartolome.

As a matter of course, we coordinate all our DRR activities with the Barangay Captain, Dong Pascual. But chalk up this landmark triumph to Sheryl Bernardo, Barangay Secretary, Danny Mariano and Marie Keng, Barangay staff members, Noemie San Juan, Barangay Health Worker, Carmen Lucio and Romeo Darlucio, Barangay Tanods (watchpersons) who all diligently attended our DRR trainings. They were the ones who championed the inclusion of our DRR trained sitio leaders in the BDDRMC.

Toning Balang (FORGE) and Shirley Bolanos (Coastal Core Inc.) told us, “it is a wise strategy to include the barangays from the very start and woo them as partners.” This is a tip that we took to heart from the outset and it has proven fruitful.

At first glance, the inclusion of our trained sitio leaders in the BDRRMC may pass as trifling because there is a law that mandates that each barangay must form its own council. But it is, in our estimation, a small triumph worth marking because most barangays are not properly trained in DRR. Although Barangays often start their DRR program with the best of intentions, most proceed on a catch as catch can footing. More often than not, the default position is to conjure the BDRRMC out of thin air and to assign any Juan or Juana de la Cruz (Tom, Dick or Harry) whom they fancy to staff this council.

By training and developing community-based DRR teams with the skills and aptitude to respond to humanitarian emergencies, we have made available to the barangay a pool of experts that they can tap to become members of the BDRRMC. So while traditionally, inclusion in the various barangay councils was determined by the use of arbitrary standards like say, relationship to the Barangay Captain, today, with the presence of the DRR trained community leaders, it became a no-brainer to fill up the BDRRMC with experts from this pool.

Also worth noting is how innovations and advancements reverberate beyond the original boundaries so that now, officials of nearby Barangay Bagbag have heard about our effect on Barangay San Bartolome and they are now eager to join us in the remaining DRR trainings.

And what about CKUP?

The easy observation is that the project enabled and capacitated the Social Service and Development Ministry or SSDM so that in the event of another disaster, they can now better deliver the goods.

SSDM Coordinator Rene Busmente, lay ministers  Efren Lagunilla and Frank Salgo, and SSDM member Dories Jupia came to most of the trainings and participated in the rolling down of the DRR program in the communities so that they now have their feet planted squarely on DRR ground.

But Fr. Jun was not satisfied with this. He noted that the urban poor community leaders were more diligent in the DRR trainings, PCVA, Contingency Planning and community- based quick response Committees than the members of the SSDM. The common explanation is that most people in the SSDM are employed and so they have less time to devote to this undertaking.  They also tend to come from better-off parts of the Parish and live in places that are less prone to flooding. That, however, is not to say that the only reason the informal settlers are more persistent and participative is because they have a lot of free time on their hands.

Glenda Pentecostes’ story is a bellwether of the people’s commitment to the program. If you remember, she is the woman who went back to her still flooded house to recover the money from her Church group.

Glenda and her husband wake up before dawn to buy fish and vegetables at Balintawak Market, several kilometers away, which they sell on a retail basis at simple wooden stall. It is a physically demanding job that can wear you down but they keep at it because it is what puts food on their family’s table.

You would think that this regimen was already too much for Glenda to bear, but then you would be dead wrong. Glenda is also a CKUP area coordinator, a Gawad Kalinga member, a member of the Church choir, a center person of the feeding program, and a DRR cluster leader.

Glenda was also instrumental in the speedy adoption of SPI’s DRR Program by the community.  She was the leader who vouched for and introduced Karen Sarmiento-Clemente, our community organizer in San Bartolome, to the residents of the informal settlements.

So clearly, there are factors other than mere availability at play here. Perhaps it is personal grit, time-management skills, or a sense of mission and priorities. Or possibly dedication to DRR work is a function of one’s vulnerability and exposure to disasters. Whatever it is, some people are able to sustain participation in works for the common good in the face of personal costs while others cannot.

So taking all of that in consideration, this is how Fr. Jun wants to proceed in the coming Parish Pastoral Assembly, the key mechanism by which his parish determines where it wants to go and how it will get there. He wants DRR formally declared as the centerpiece mission of the SSDM and he wants the leaders of the informal settlers to step forward and claim the leadership of this Ministry.

This is worth underlining because the “isness” or being of the Catholic Church in the Philippines is that the leadership roles in the ministries and mandated organizations are almost always filled by people from the upper and middle classes. This is understandable given that people from the upper classes tend to rise above the throng because of their superior language and people skills as well as their experiences being involved in managing businesses, agencies, or institutions. This arrangement, however, does not move us any closer to the vision of the Church of the Poor.

That vision of Church can only be realized if there is a massive project to tip the center of gravity in favor of the poor. An essential feature of that project must, therefore, be a formation program that empowers the poor so that they can develop the skills and self-confidence and motivation not just to participate in the life of the Chgurch but also to take the lead.

Equally crucial is the re-evangelization of current leaders so that they actively participate in the empowerment of the poor and when the time comes, graciously give way so that the poor can assume leadership positions in the church.

Ondoy created an almighty mess, no doubt about that. And yet to people of vision and good-will, Ondoy was not only a challenge but also an opportunity. It was a rude awakening to the poor to get up and have a bash at building resilient communities. It was a wake-up call for the barangays to become better at preparedness and good governance. It was a nudge at the shoulder of the Church to become better at being Church.

“Before Ondoy, the Church was far removed from the lives of the people in the informal communities. Yes, it was there, a beautiful structure standing proudly in the center of the community. And yet it was very far from the people’s hearts,” Fr. Jun thoughtfully declares.

“But after Ondoy, they saw that the Church is actually one with them. Today, they see her as a faithful partner, someone who will never abandon them, someone who will be with them even in their darkest hours.  After Ondoy, the poor realized that this Church is their Church.”

And so the project jolted both the barangay and the Church to shape up to meet the challenge of the times. But what about the people? What is the impact of this project on the informal settlers living in danger zones?

For that we would have to listen to Unso Pastor, a leader from Tomasa Riverside and an informal settler herself. Although her formal education was marked by abrupt interruptions due to extreme poverty, she is not at a loss for words to portray the impact of this DRR project on the poor.

“When Ondoy came,” she said with a profundity that would equal the scholarly ponderings of toffee-nosed philosophers and NGO specialists, “we had no one to turn to but God. But today, thanks to the DRR project, we can now depend on the Church, our barangay, our community leaders and yes, now we can rely on ourselves.”

 

Part 6: Lessons Learned: Pearls of Great Price 

The large-scale crisis brought by Ondoy demanded urgent new action, strategies and methodologies from SPI, an institution that did not have prior skills and experiences regarding humanitarian emergencies. Now that we are near the end of this project, it is high time that we examine this involvement and see if we can find a lesson or two that we can share with others.

Here are some about SPI as an institution, our methodologies and approaches:

1. On Working with Government

SPI was born in the period of Philippine history marked by dictatorship and martial rule. Because of our trying experience to promote democracy and human rights in the face of oppression, there is this lingering if unexamined tendency to cast government as “enemy.”

So for the longest time, SPI was wary, disinclined and sometimes even unwilling to work with government and its agencies. The default thinking is that nothing good could come from that partnership, that government is corrupt and incapable of providing genuine service to the poor and that we would be better off if we go at it alone.

The Ketsana project, however, bound SPI to work closely with barangays because building the capacity of local government is vital in building resilient communities. This experience proved to be a turning point for us.

This is not to say, however, that we discovered the present government to be a perfect partner in development work. On the contrary, we saw that there is still graft and corruption, there is still a need to promote financial transparency and accountability, and there is still a general lack of institutional resolve to stand up to sleazy political pressures from within and outside their institutions just as there are the in-grained paradigms marked by a lack of empathy, especially when it comes to the rights and lives of those they label as “squatters”.

But among the shadows, we also saw a lot of things that made us hopeful that government can move forward in its development agenda. We see a good number of laws that are genuinely pro-poor that hack at the roots of poverty and marginalization.  And we see many people in government who do aspire to make a difference, who wish to work with the poor and who are trying to address the issues surrounding poverty and marginalization. We have realized that by encouraging and helping government become better at governance, we can help uplift the lives of many people.

So a lesson from the Ketsana project is that civil society organizations like SPI can help government achieve its developmental goals, not only by condemning and criticizing it but also by engaging, working with and challenging it especially in moments when it is not quite sure where to go and it is looking for its way

2. DRR and Development

SPI has been involved in community development for quite some time now but it was only in the Ketsana project that we realized the vital significance of incorporating resiliency-building into community development.

We work hard to address community issues that range from gender, corruption, human rights violations, adult literacy, sanitation, basic health education, micro-credit, child nutrition, land tenure and illegal drugs. That is all fine and good but if we do not strengthen the capacity of the communities and the barangays to protect their assets – especially human lives – in the face of disasters like fire, floods and tsunami, all our hard won gains could be taken away from us in the blink of an eye.

A central part of SPI’s ethos is to be a catalyst that assists the poor communities end human misery.  Thanks to the Ketsana project, we know now that such a vision cannot be achieved without seriously addressing the community’s capacity to withstand and recover from shocks and disasters.

3. Interdisciplinary Partnerships  with other NGOs

Without pause and careful self-observation, we fail to notice that many NGOs in the Philippines have a tendency to concentrate actions and interventions on sectors, geographic areas or communities that they then unwittingly treat as their turf or private stomping grounds.  Extreme poverty exacerbated by climate change and intense weather events is so difficult to tackle and subdue that we cannot continue at it alone and unaided.

The actuality is that no one institution can meet all the challenges of building resilient communities. We struggle to put up community-based quick response teams, early warning systems and so on while we endeavor to implement long term solutions  like setting up of sustainable livelihoods, retrofitting of unsafe structures,  looking for safe relocation sites, strengthening of existing people’s organizations and helping the barangays put up their own BDRRMCs.

This is just too much for one institution to do. We need interdisciplinary partnerships that will bring complimentary skill sets, resources and energy to make the work more manageable.

Does that mean that working with NGO partners – each of which bring their own array of activities, deadlines and agenda – is easy?

No but it is not because NGOs are intensely focused only on their institutions or because we are insanely competitive with each other even if the work is altruistic and cooperative.  The real cause of stress is the bursting-in- the-seam schedule of activities.

The logistics, planning and coordination involved in squeezing the myriad of activities to fit inside the extremely short timeline of two and a half years is downright demanding. The sheer number of workshops, drills, meetings and so on pushed the grassroots communities, SPI and the partner NGOs to the verge of fatigue and was the most challenging aspect of this set-up.

The other thing that could have caused friction but fortunately did not is that we NGOs speak different languages. Scientific and legal institutions like UPNIGS and SALIGAN employ data-laden, technical language that creates an aura of pedagogy and exclusiveness while SPI uses the language of ethics and values which other scientific, legal or development NGOs may find preachy and off-putting.

But that is how it is. We organize our work and discourse in different ways which in turn generates its own idioms and expressions. The trick is to appreciate and make use of the larger arena for dialogue, alliances, mutual support and learning and not to get stuck with the baggage of institutional prose.

So in the end, the Ketsana project was instrumental in gently prodding SPI and other Christian Aid partner NGOs to accept, welcome, learn from and take advantage of each other’s strengths and uniqueness.

4. DRR as an endeavor that unites

We were surprised at the speed with which various stakeholders – from the grassroots communities, the barangays, the various churches, to other NGOs – adopted DRR.

Perhaps this is because the severe hardships of fellow human beings reawaken our sense of solidarity and compassion so that there is an upsurge of volunteerism and donations immediately after disasters. On the other hand, we must also acknowledge the role that the DRRM Act played in contributing to the prevailing sympathetic and altruistic temper in our society. After all, that law deconstructed and reframed the relationship between government, civil society organizations and the poor communities from rivalry and antagonism to partnership.

Another pleasant surprise is how DRR managed to transcend the toxic fault lines of religion and social class as many peoples and institutions exerted genuine effort to go beyond their vested interests, class consciousness, world views, ideologies and egos to assist the affected people and communities in urgent need. Noteworthy is how the various churches suspended their mission to “save souls” as they focused on providing relief and saving lives.

In sum, the outpouring of sympathetic response from all sorts of peoples and institutions that we saw during Ondoy was such that it tempts me to say that – at least for a few precious moments – DRR narrowed the gap between the periphery and the center and constructively advanced its attending socio-symbolic discourse on marginalization, oppression, disenfranchisement, exclusion and power.

5. Women and DRR

It is without exaggeration to say that the successful adoption of DRR by the communities and the barangays is largely due to the industry and determination of urban poor women.

Perhaps the DRR program’s call to save lives and lessen human misery is something that rings deep in the hearts of women. Perhaps they realized more and before others that if they did not step up, the elderly, persons with disabilities and children would remain in harm’s way.

Whatever it was that stirred them to action, the women from the danger zones embraced DRR and used it as an opportunity to re-write their life narratives from helpless, passive recipients of aid and mercy to leaders and dynamic actors who build safe and resilient communities.

We are grateful to all who selflessly shared their time, talent and resources to breathe life to this communitarian undertaking but to not underline the leading role urban poor women played in the program is a grave error and an injustice.

6. On the limited duration of the project

Clearly, SPI thinks that the project window of two to three years is too short given the ambitious goal to build sustainable resilient communities.

Our dream is for the communities to continue to enjoy the hard won gains of the Ketsana project long after we have packed up and gone. To realize that, there are a couple of things that need to be secured in place – strong Home Owners’ Associations (HOA) that are committed to safety and development, community-based Quick Response Teams with the skills and wherewithal to do their job, barangays with capable BDRRMCs and Barangay Development Councils (BDCs) that partner with the communities at risk, organic leaders who inspire, educate and mentor others, vibrant civil society organizations in the area that support and promote pro-poor and safety initiatives, and so on.

The gold standard is for the culture of safety, development and preferential option for the poor to permeate the organizational structures as well as infuse the ethos of all stakeholders. When we reach that point where safety and development is in the vision mission statements, in the institutional action plans, in the newsletters and memos, and in day-to-day conduct and prose of all stakeholders, then we could rest easy that DRR will indeed endure with or without SPI and Christian Aid.

As SPI is a faith-inspired organization, we like to share with you some of our insights regarding the emerging spirituality from the people living in danger zones. Please note that we use the term spirituality in its broadest sense as the striving to integrate our lives according to what we hold as our highest values and meanings.

We also use the term “emerging spirituality” because spirituality is dynamic and ever changing. Even today, the people are still in the process of negotiating this emerging spirituality from various perspectives and categories– the known versus the mysterious, the human against the divine, the traditional as opposed to the current and relevant, the what-is as opposed to the nascent.

So what did we do to help the people negotiate the slippery slopes of spirituality?

There were three key processes that SPI instigated to accomplish this: the conscientization-education efforts embedded in the community organizing process; the actual actions to improve the community (DRR, development work, advocacy campaigns and claim making); and the promotion of the spirituality of stewardship or “buhay katiwala.”

1. Spirituality from the river banks

The general observation is that the extreme context of the people living in danger zones has given birth to an emerging spirituality that is not only personal and relational but profoundly social, economic and political.

Unlike those of us who do not share their vulnerability, they do not have the luxury of adopting a spirituality that is privatized – faith and spirituality that is limited to one’s relationship with God alone – and ecclesiasticalized – faith and spirituality as abiding by the doctrines, traditions and sacred rituals of a religion.

Their vulnerability demands a spirituality that provides them with the self-identity and the direction for the transformation of their communities that addresses their urgent need for protection from shocks and hazards. So a feature of the emerging spirituality from the river banks is that it is strong on social, political, economic, developmental actions that bring concrete benefits to the community.

As a corollary to that, because socio-economic-political actions that make right unjust situations often result in intense opposition from persons and institutions that benefit from the discriminatory order, the people from the danger zones also had to negotiate a model of spirituality that includes the problematic of struggle.

In this regard, their experiences of advocating and demanding rightful services from LGUs, government agencies, and other civil society organizations provided them with the perspective to transact a nuanced view of spirituality. What emerged from that is a position that spirituality from the danger zones must be strong on justice and must accept that conflict is unavoidable.

This characterization of spirituality is in fundamental discrepancy with most other discourses from the center that regard spirituality as smooth personal and social relations. Its basis, however, is in their own experience that when the poor negotiate for their rights with the rich and powerful, hard bargaining, advocacy campaigns and militant action along with the attending strains in relations are necessary to obtain results.

2. On human misery and how to address it

The community organizing process necessarily involves activities like historico-socio-structural analysis of social problems, tactic sessions, etc. that summon and sharpen critical awareness. By critical awareness we mean a deep understanding of the world that exposes social and political contradictions that are the roots of oppression.

At SPI, however, we do not stop there. We use this educative method to not only examine the social condition but to also examine the human person and how say, selfishness, greed and ignorance generate actions, conditions and structures that are oppressive to others. Consequently the community comes to the realization that human misery is caused not only by unjust social structures and socio-economic-political relations but also by the weaknesses and failings of the human person.

A mark of the emerging spirituality from the river banks, therefore, is that it understands that our task in the world is not only the renewal of social institutions – church, media, armed forces, schools, government, family and so on – but the purification of the human heart and changes in individual behaviors as well.

When the structural analysis is combined with faith reflection, the communities come to the insight that poverty and social ills are not God’s will. They realize that they are not destined to endure oppression and exploitation; that it is not their fate to suffer because of “karma” or punishment from a vengeful God for their “sins.”

This insight is profoundly liberating to the urban poor. When they realize that their misery is a product of unjust social structures and the machinations of avaricious persons and not decreed by God, they are encouraged and reassured that they can indeed do something to improve their situation.

3. Spirituality sustains DRR and development

There is an emerging appreciation that actions that strengthen peoples’ capacities and develop public assets are not just activities of a project by Christian Aid and SPI but fundamental to who we are (identity as stewards) and what we do (mission to care for one other and all of creation).

Thus an important character of the emerging spirituality is that all actions – DRR, development work and common, everyday activities and personal deeds – are integrated into a way of life or “gawi ng buhay” held together by the frame of stewardship.

Given this, SPI believes that it is the spirituality of stewardship that will provide the energy and motivation to sustain DRR and development initiatives in the danger zones. We must continue to foster this emerging spirituality that enables the communities to continue confronting both structural and individual injustices and oppression, be that in the form of poverty, domestic violence or the absence of rights or access to basic services.

4. Democratization of spirituality

SPI conducted stewardship workshops that gave the poor communities access to symbolic, religious resources that were normally held only by members of the clergy and lay theologians.

When the communities realized that spirituality is not the exclusive property of churches but that it is about the everyday events of their lives, about their hopes and aspirations, their pains and struggles, it gave them the self-confidence to participate and join the dialogue on spirituality. This process serves to culturally empower members of the poor communities, enabling them to challenge stereotypes, repressive doctrines and hypocritical traditions and to engage with governing institutions and the Church.

So the other mark of the emerging spirituality from the river banks is that it approaches the discourse on meaning and purpose, self-transcendence, renewal of the community and conversation with God in a language that is intelligible to the ordinary person because it is rooted in their context, struggles and lived experiences.

As this spirituality of stewardship engages peoples of different faith traditions, SPI’s DRR program includes Mormons, Protestants, Muslims and Roman Catholics.

Part 7: Raising it up to the Light

There is no disputing that Ondoy has left the urban poor in Metro Manila racked in trouble and uncertainty. Not only did Ondoy take what little they had, but Ondoy also made it even more difficult for them to recover and realize the most modest of life ambitions like putting food on the table, paying for electricity and water or seeing their kids through school and staying alive.

Poverty in the Philippines springs from a curious compost heap made up of massive failures of development initiatives, an imposed globalization process that favors corporations over states and peoples, the bungling inefficiencies of a feeble corrupt self-serving state and a history marked by colonialism and neo-colonialism.

If poverty then is a result of unjust social, political and economic relations and structures, where does that beggar-your-neighbor spirit that drives it come from?

Fr. Nonong Pili has an answer to that intriguing question.

Through years of self-reflection and self-discipline, Fr. Nonong was able to conquer his mercurial instincts and passion so that he now succeeds in sensitive life-coaching and socio-pastoral projects that require calm, patience and careful diplomacy. He is currently the Rector of St. Joseph Formation House and an SPI Board Member but Fr. Nonong is the sort of person who is equally at ease around cardinals of the Catholic Church as well as unschooled peasants and children.

He says, “The reason why the world is in such a mess is because we have lost awareness of our true identity. We delude ourselves that we are individuals who are totally separate and apart from each other. But the truth is we are all interconnected. We are one and in solidarity with each other so that what happens to you, happens to me.”

And that hits the nail firmly on the head!

How can we put our backs into helping the poor rise above their poverty without that sense of basic solidarity?  How can we commit to social justice, human rights, sustainable development and care for creation, shorn of that communion with the “other?” How can we transform our human institutions of its ills and ineffectuality when there is this fundamental brokenness in ourselves? How can we aspire for the common good when we are without that basic connection with others?

We need solidarity with, rather than for, others; a fellowship which refuses to objectify the poor, even as it demands a rigorous analysis of poverty and its cause. Without that solidarity, the poor could never be part of our lives and concerns. They would forever be doomed to subsist at the margins of our awareness like specters or ghosts, scooting in and out of our realities without weight or with barely a ripple.

They could be out there in broad daylight, begging in the streets, hanging around the courtyards of Churches, tapping on your car windows for hand-outs but impeded by our tribalism, we do not even see them. Hindered by the “we-they” mindset, we fail to see their dreams and aspirations, their pains and struggles, their innate capacity to transcend themselves, their need for purpose and meaning and their generous capability for self-sacrifice and self-giving.

“And because we do not see, then we just might tread on it and trample it,” Fr. Nonong said.

We have talked quite a bit about frameworks, methodologies, inputs and outcomes, now we come to the weightier matters. The hardest part in the journey to build resilient communities is not the Participatory Capacities and Vulnerabilities Assessment or the Contingency Plan but it is that which takes you from where you are to a place where you truly see the “other” especially the poor, as yourself. That could be just a short hop to the next corner or a voyage to an unexplored dark continent that lasts an entire lifetime.

Because that journey is fraught with twists and turns and involves trekking up the highest mountains and down the lowest valleys, you may rightfully wonder if we will ever – as a nation, as a Church, as a community, as a civil society organization – approach that holy place and enter it together.

In solidarity with the poor and all peoples of good will, we certainly believe so and we dream so.

Let us pray our dreams shall be prophets.