The Naliyagan Festival

 

Street dancing performance

When I was on a training course before coming here I met a lovely retired lady who had recently volunteered in the Philippines.  Anxious to find out what I was letting myself in for, I quizzed her about what it was like in the Philippines.

Her main observation on the Philippines was that the Filipinos love to celebrate, and will use any excuse for a fiesta. To be exact, she said that if they saw a slug crawling along the pavement (or slithering or whatever slugs do) they would exclaim "oh ! look ! theres a slug crawling along the pavement - we must have a fiesta !"  

Being a very religious Catholic country, they have a wealth of opportunities provided by the abundance of saints days, but manage to find a lot of other opportunities too.

 

Manobo dancers in traditional costume relax after their performance  

The biggest annual festival around where I am based is the Naliyagan Festival which takes place from 12th till the 17th June.  There are lots of fantastic performances and events, from tribal theatre and traditional dancing to mudfish relays.  In case you haven't seen a mudfish relay it is like an egg and spoon race but with a live mudfish on a plate.  They have to catch the fish by hand from a large pool before they can start !  

All the indigenous people of the area dress in their traditional costumes and perform traditional dances so it will be a good chance to sample some of the traditional culture of the area.  

The process has to include the Manobo Tribal ritual involving offerings to the gods, which for a big event like this involves sacrificing a pig by killing it with a large with a spear.  I'll spare you the 'spouting blood' photos with the blood erupting up into the air! A white chicken was also involved but somehow managed to survive.  I am sure it was pleased about that, as despite having its legs bound it fled into the crowd several times during the ceremony and had to be recaptured and passed back.

The festival culminates on saturday which is the anniversary of the creation of the Province of Agusan del Sur.  Saturday's programme also includes the Indigenous Peoples' Summit. 

Other events included concerts and fireworks in the evenings, moto-cross racing, off road driving races, Agri-lympics (fastest manual rice miller, fastest firemaker, and lots of silly games mostly involving coconuts, to name but a few). 

There are lots of booths and displays publicising the work the Provincial Government is doing, and each Municipality in the Province has a stand showcasing their area, its produce and its people. 

About  three days before the festival began it was decided by the Honourable Governor that there should be a display about the work Voluntary Service Overseas is doing in the province, so us volunteers had to frantically put together a display involving posters, photos and leaflets for a VSO booth. 

 

It is work really – honest ! Hungarian volunteer Ferenc Kis and I staffing the VSO booth at the festival. 

Amongst other things in the display we each had to to a large poster with photos of us doing our work out in the communities and a bit of background about who we were and where we had come from ! 

We had to help to man the stand as well, but it was all good fun with plenty of opportunites to wander round and enjoy the festival. 

I even found time to try my hand at learning to play traditional instruments at the Provincial tribal Booth which had displays about the cultures and costumes of the various tribal groups of Agusan del Sur !

On friday the Governor invited the VSO volunteers to join him for the evening programme – considered a great honour.  It was a rather bizarre experience, as we spent the evening surrounded by about ten armed bodyguards. Heavy duty weapons were everywhere. Not something I am unsed to coming from the gun-free UK!

I have never had my wine served by a man with a gun before !  I couldn't quite decide if it made me feel safe or unsafe. 

Anyway, the Governor spent the evening chatting to the Governor and listening to the band competition, although Ferenc was a bit distracted by the pretty young ladies which the Governor's 'entertainment manager' invited along for the amusement of the Governor's male guests (in case you were wondering, similar services are not provided for his female guests !)

All in all, it was a great festival, and not much work (other than the festival) has been done by anyone in the Provincial Government offices this week !

No Bones About It (aka The “Dog Blog”)

Don't work with children and animals they say. Certainly don't even think of adopting strays ! However, what do you do when a starving critter turns up on your doorstep on the point of death ? Ignore it ??  Easier said than done.  When I arrived I swore I would not take in any stray animals. 

Then this thing turned up on my doorstep. It had no hair, was covered on open sores and just a bag of bones. His hairless tail looked like the tail of a rat. His ribs stuck out and his abdomen was tucked up towards his spine.

Reminding myself of the induction course we had in Manila where we were told it is cheaper to ship home a man / woman than a dog or cat, I ignored him for a day. He stayed.

I ignored him a bit longer. He still stayed. 

Faced with the prospect of him dying on my doorstep I'm afraid I gave in. I fed him. 

I told him not to get ideas – just because I fed him didn't mean he was my dog. He ignored me and started spending his days lying in the shade waiting for me to return home and feed him.  I still keep telling him "You are not my dog.  You need to keep foraging for food." 

I nicknamed him "Bones" since that's all he was. At first he was very frightened and timid, but time and food cured that, and he has gone from strength to strength. 

As his strength has returned he has become very puppy-ish.  He started stealing the neighbours shoes and piling them up outside my door. 

Then he appeared with a childs vest. 

Another  time it was a pair of knickers !

I now have to surreptitiously creep round the neighbourhood under cover of darkness trying to return pilfered items without being seen. 

By the time six months had passed one of my fellow volunteers who lives next door to me (Don from England) decided he was a "Born Again Canine" and should be re-named "Kusog", which means "Strong".

And so Kusog was born (or re-born !).  He seems to be enjoying his second puppyhood. 

I have no idea what to do with him when I leave.  I think I need to find someone to take him over when I go.  Shipping him home is not really an option.  Apart from the cost, and problems of quarantine, he is what's known here as a "street dog" who has never known a lead or a collar and is completely untrained, although he is now affectionate and likes people (now he has learnt he can trust some of them !).  In the meantime at least he is healthy and happy for two years, when he would otherwise have been dead by now. 

Last week I went to the island of Bohol for nine days for a conference.  

As I left I gave the neighbours (whose shoes he steals) a bag of dog food and, while pointing out that he was not my dog (That shoe-stealer ? Mine ? Never ! Nothing to do with me! He's just a Street Dog) I asked them to give him one measure of dogfood a day for the week.

Not that he's my dog, you understand. 

Our First Visit to Pinagala-an School

The children crowd around to greet our arrival !

On Tuesday June 13th I, along with the manager of the Water District and a few of his staff, visited Pinagalaan to offer our help to the school and to distribute packs of school materials to the children.  The packs were tailored to the age group involved – grade one got a writing pad, drawing pad, crayons, ruler, pencils, sharpener, eraser and pencil case, whereas Grades 5 and 6 got a formal essay jotter, two notepads, pens and pencils, a sharpener, ruler and an eraser. They were very gratefully received, and the children were very excited.

Grade 1 pupils display the school packs they were given

Before beginning distribution of the packs we had a meeting with the school principal and the teachers to explain what we were trying to do – basically to try to help the children (particularly poor, indigenous pupils) stay in school for longer by providing them with school materials, and helping to develop livelihood opportunities for the parents to enable them to keep their children in school for longer (and to be able to afford to feed them !). 

The children happily begin using their new pencils and jotters.

We also want to help to make the children more aware of the need to care for the environment of the area so the supply of clean water to the communities is not harmed by environmentally damaging farming or logging activities.  This is important since their future livelihoods will depend on conserving that environment – especially as most of them will grow up to be farmers.  It is important that they learn how to use sustainable farming techniques, especially when farming steeply sloping hills.  Apart from the need to conserve soil so as to maintain crop yields and stop the rivers and reservoirs becoming full of silt, there is a steep hill above the school which must be protected from the risk of landslips like the one that recently happened in the Southern Leyte area of the Philippines.

 

Providing the Principal with posters on environmental education - focusing on the management of mountain areas which supply water to towns downstream as well as to the local communities.

To help encourage the teachers to address these issues in the class we gave the principal two copies of a poster (one in English and one in Visayan) which explained about the importance of caring for the water catchment.   

 

The Principal (right) and Grade 1 teacher (left) explain to me about the problems of running a school in a poor upland community. 

With 53 children the Grade 1 class (6 year olds) is very crowded. Three children share each desk though they were designed for two, and there is just one teacher.  By Grade 4 (9 years old) less than half will still be attending school.  Instead, they will be working to help their parents support them. At present there are only 23 in Grade 4. The figures speak for themselves !

The Grade 2 Classroom at Pinagalaan is fairly basic timber building – at least it is well ventilated !

The school covers a large area where there is no public transport. Some of the children walk up to three hours each way in order to attend school. As school starts at 7.30 this means they leave home before 5am in order to get there in time ! School finishes at 4pm, so the children who live a long way away will not get home until 8 at night, and will then have to set out again before 5am the next morning.  No wonder the teachers say they are tired in class !

The children from the indigenous communities are often absent from school on thursdays and fridays as their parents have run out of food for the week by then, and they therefore have to stay home or help their parents to earn money.

Today we discussed :

• educating the children, including increasing their level of environmental awareness,
• training them how to manage their environment more sensitively to preserve it for the future,
• making sure they leave school with an understanding of how to farm the land in a sustainable manner, and
• how we might provide training in new livelihood opportunities for the parents to help them to keep their children in education for longer and to raise household incomes and thus alleviate poverty.

A tall order, but we will do out best ! 

Pinagala-an Adopt a School Project

The local Water District in the mountain area where I work is trying to establish an Adopt-a-School Project.  The school they want to help is Pinagalaan Elementary School, which is in a remote mountain area known as the Northern Interior. 

The school has 220 pupils and seven teachers, but no library, play equipment, sports equipment or even books.  Many of the children can not afford pens, pencils or writing pads for use in their lessons.  

The parents of the children are labourers, vendors and flower planters whose income is insufficient for their basic family needs, including food. 

As a result the children are malnourished, underachieve at school, and drop out before reaching the higher grades in order to help their parents earn money by selling flowers in nearby market towns.

75% of pupils in Pinagalaan are malnourished and are therefore slow learners.

A third of the children are from the Manobo tribe.  Indigenous peoples tend to be amongst the poorest and most disadvantaged of the area's inhabitants.

The environment has been severely damaged by activities such as illegal logging as people struggle to find any way they can to feed their family. Part of the project therefore aims to educate children about the need to protect the environment. 

The area is very remote and is accessed by an abandoned logging road.  The state of the road is so bad that much of the barangay (village) is only acessible by foot, horse and motorbike (during the dry season !).  On average the children walk 3 km to get to school (6 km round trip). There is no electricity in Pinagalaan, so no TV or electric light !

The project has a range of different objectives, including :

* to improve the level of educational achievement trough a feeding and deworming programme in school for malnourished children and the provision of vitamins

* to encourage the poorest children, especially Manobo children, to complete 6 years of elementary education by providing them with school supplies such as pencils, paper, etc.

*to encourage environmental awareness in children through activites such as tree planting, in order to reduce environmental destruction

* to provide books, shelves, tables and chairs for a school library

* to provide basic laboratory equipment to set up a school science lab

* to provide play equipment for a 'physical fitness park' (slide, swings, see saw etc)

* to provide the basic supplies needed to set up a school clinic (bandages, plasters, sterilising alcohol, and basic medicines) 

* to help parents support their children through school by providing low-income parents with training in new skills such as mushroom culture, duck raising, tailoring and food preservation which will enable them to increase their incomes.  

Although the Water District is providing staff effort to try and set up the project, the materials needed - such as school supplies, medicines, equipment, etc. – all need to be obtained through sponsorship and donations. There is no money currently available for this.  Hence the reason for the project title – Adopt-a-School.

The more money we can raise to support this project the more we can make a real difference to the lives of these children. This project is something which can change their whole future by enabling them to achieve the education and skills to make a better life for themselves.

I plan to use £100 donated by Mearns Parish Kirk, and some of the pencils, paper and books they donated, to support this project.  When I learnt about this project I told my husband Bill about it, and he has already managed to raise a further £200 in donations.  He has also committed himself to trying to raise more.  So a really big thanks to all of you – this gives the project a really good flying start. Your money will really make a difference. 

But let's not stop there – let's all make this project a huge success for the sake of all the children in the school, who don't have even the most basic of things which children in the UK can take for granted. 

Its a big task, with a lot of equipment and supplies needed. A large number of children and families are involved, so we still need more support.  Things which will help are :

* Money, of course, to buy things such as supplementary feeding, worming tablets, vitamins, medical supplies for the clinic, tables and chairs, etc.  

* pencils, pens and writing pads

* children's books, especially school books, educational books or books which teach children about caring for the environment    

* educational toys and equipment