A Huge Parting Gift to the Children from Mearns Kirk

 

Bill outside my apartment with a huge pile of boxes of school supplies about to be delivered to Pinagalaan school

Just a couple of weeks before I left Mindanao we revcieved a huge final donation from the people of Mearns Kirk who had raised money from a coffee morning which was donated to the work here with the schools up in the mountains.

As I had very little time left before I was due to leave Mindanao for the final time, we immediately sprang into action.  We contacted the school to see what supplies were most needed by the teachers and pupils, and got to work to source all the items requested.  The list of things each teacher and pupil needed was quite long, and we could never have done it if the donation from Mearns Kirk had not been such a generous one !

Bill handing out school supplies to the children .

I give a pack of jotters, pens, pencils etc to a young pupil as others que up to recieve a pack.  There was so much to give out that the pupils had to go along a line of 3 or 4 “hander-outers” to get it all !

The final list of what each pupil recieved was based on what the teachers told us they needed and was a mighty impressive donation ! Here is the list !

Supplied to each pupil:

Grades 1 & 2

1 plastic envelope

2 Grade pads (writing)

1 writing pad

1 spiral book (grade 2 only)

2 pencils

Various assorted other items (sharpener, ruler etc.)

1 pack of crayons

Pencil case

Eraser

Grades 3 – 6

1 plastic envelope

2 grade pads

7 spiral note books (one per subject)

1 Maths spiral book (graph paper)

1 Formal theme (essay) book (English language)

1 Formal theme book (Visayan language)

1 pack of crayons

2 ball point pens

1 pencil case

1 expanding cardboard folder

For General Use

94 sets of watercolour paints

50 metres cellophane for covering wall posters made by the teachers

Ball point pens

Supplied to each teacher:

2 boxes of Venus chalk

1 box coloured chalk

1 stapler and staples

1 pot glue

5 Marker pens

3 bottles ink

40 sheets graph paper

60 large sheets coloured paper

Crepe paper (assorted colours)

2 reams (1000 sheets) of ‘bond’ paper

Assorted cartolina (large poster-sized sheets of coloured card for making classroom wall posters)

Pencil sharpeners (grades 1 & 2)

Correction fluid

We also left a budget of 2,000 pesos (just over £20) for each teacher to draw down for future needs.

The expressions on the children’s faces said better than any words what it meant to them to get these school supplies !

Teachers and pupils hold a sing-song in our honour  as a thank-you……and …

…….a display of traditional tribal dancing balanced on top of two bamboo poles ! 

At the end of it all we had to get up on a stage in the playground for a formal thank-you speech and to be presented with flowers grown – which are grown locally by the childrens families.

Bill on the stage with some of the children.

The children were soon all sitting everywhere across the playground excitedly examining the contents of their packs. 

 

However, you can be sure the teachers and the pupils knew that the Mearns Kirk had donated the money that made it all possible, and they had prepared a banner to show their appreciation !

The banner the teachers had prepared thanking the Mearns Kirk for their help in making it all possible.

A New Classroom for Valley View School, Berseba

A teacher shows Bill the new classroom built with money raised by our family and supporters in Scotland

Well, a lot of time has passed since my last update of the Blog, and in the meantime a lot has happened.  The main reason for the delay in updating the blog was that my time in Mindanao was coming to an end and there was a lot to do before I left. However, I still have a few items to post to finalise the information about my time there and update you on the last things we did before I left.

Probably the largest single thing we have done is to raise funding to provide a new classroom for a small school in Berseba, high up in the mountains of the Andanan watershed.  The purpose of the school was to provide facilities to enable two additional years of secondary education at the school, which is used by the communities from Mount Ararat and Berseba.  Previously the school had only provided two years of secondary education and wanted to increase this to four years, as the nearest alternative secondary school is a long way away.

Pupils, teachers, us (and the dog!) gather for a programme of singing and speeches to mark the official opening of the new classroom. 

 The whole project took a couple of months to complete, and cost approximately £500. The whole school were delighted with the result and we were treated to songs, and a speech of thanks for our help in enabling them to do this ! They even wove our names into the “thank you” songs !

A pupil reads a speech of thanks for our help in enabling them to build the classroom.

Of course, Bill and I had to respond to the thank-you speeches and I happened to mention it was my ambition to ride a Carabao (a water buffalo) before I left the Philippines.  Carabao are commonly used as “work horses” by Philippine farmers.  To our surprise a Carabao was immediately “requisitioned” from its work where it had been busily ploughing a nearby field and pressed into service to give us a shot riding it !   

The farmer was very concerned that it was muddy and started trying to “polish” it with a sack, but we reassured him that we didn’t mind a bit of mud, and leapt on its back !

 It was a very memorable way to end another enjoyable and rewarding day with the local people in the mountains of Andanan.

Establishing The Jungle Camp

One of the pack horses is loaded for the journey into the forest. the horses here are small (ponies really) but are very stong.  They also appear well cared for, with healthy coats and none of the harness sores you see in some other countries.

The first step in starting the suvey of the wildlife of the forests was to set up a camp within the jungle.  We were looking ideally for old growth forest, but due to timber poaching the best we could find was secondary forest – areas where tree had been cut in the past but where the forest had re-grown. 

Because the area is not accessible by vehicles we hired three pack horses to carry the equipment into the forest – a distance of about three kilometers from the dirt road, across steeply sloping terrain.

The pack horses fording the river.  The water came up to the top of our legs as we crossed, and was flowing strongly. We crossed this river at about five different points during the trek to locate a site for the base camp, as it meandered across our line of travel !

On the walk in we found out first species – a snake lying at the edge of the river! Eventually, an area of rainforest at a place called Tagapunan was selected as being the most suitable area for the researchers to base their camp, and we set about the work of unloading the equipment.   

With the group of researchers, guides, porters and provincial government staff, I arrive at the site of the Berseba jungle camp.  

We had hired five local people – four men as guides and for security, and one young girl as cook, general assistant and companion for Weng, the young female research assistant from Mindanao State University. A respectable Filipina girl will not enter a house with a man unless there is a ‘chaperone’ present, so we could hardly ask Weng to camp in the forest with a group of men without a female companion present !

The local guides set about clearing a small patch of flat ground for the camp, and constructing tables and benches from forest materials – branches lashed together with vines.

Lunch is prepared by Airene over a brushwood fire.

 

The camp takes shape.  After lunch we sit on benches made from thin logs.

Later that day the researchers started setting up mist nets to capture the forest birds by day and bats by night, drop traps to catch lizards, and live cage traps for capturing small mammals.  Very soon, they started getting results. 

 

From left to right – MSU researchers Alrey and Weng, Salome (from the provincial environment and natural resources office) and me, holding a white throated kingfisher – one of the first birds caught.

All captured animals are weighed, measured, identified. Red nail-polish is used to mark the animals before release, so that the resarchers can tell if an animal has been caught before, or is a new individual.

Me holding a Philippine frogmouth – named after its large wide beak.

Finally, it as time for us to leave the researchers and guides and head back to the car for the journey home.  Since the journey back was mostly up a very steep mountain, and the horses now had no load to carry, I decided to ride one of the horses back up the mountain to where we had left the car. 

 

A horse stands cooling its legs in the water in the shade of the riverbank trees while it waits to carry me back the long trek to the car.

All in all, very enjoyable day !

Before We Start….

 

A Greater Flameback Woodpecker. The mountains of the Andanan Watershed are full of rare and beautiful wildlife which has never been researched or documented.

One source of funding VSO is able to access for its projects here in the Philippines comes from the EU under a development programme on sharing and promoting of regional knowledge.  I recently put in a project proposal to get help from Mindanao State University (MSU) to carry out species identification in the Andanan watershed area.  Peviously no real information has been available on what species of birds, bats, snakes et cetera are present in the area, and what is in danger of being lost if the defeorestation of the area continues. We were lucky and funding for the proposal was approved - 255,800 Pisos or around 2,800 pounds.

However, that was only the start of things.  There were still lots of hurdles to jump and hoops to leap through before we could start the work.  One of the most important of these was obtaining the consent of the indigenous peoples who live in the area.  This involved meetings with the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples, then with the Datus (Tribal Chieftans), and finally we had to hold community meetings. 

Datus (tribal chiefans) and Barangay (village) officials sit around the table at the pre-project meeting.  The community members listen from behind. Manobo Datus traditionally wear red jackets or have red banding on their clothes. It is also traditional for food to provided at meetings, so we had to feed about 200 people !

MSU had tried to go through this process last november, but unfortunately they were unaware of the best way to explain the project to the indigenous people of the area.  As a result, the way the project was explained to the indigenous people (IPs) didn’t make it clear why they should give their permission, and what the benefits to them would be from the project.  Since the IPs are very protective of their rights and access to their lands, they therefore refused permission in November. 

In January I approached the Provincial Officer for the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples, who is based at the Provincial Capitol where I work.  He gave us good advice on the correct process to follow, and put us in touch with the Regional NCIP Office in Butuan.  Together they guided us through the procedures for meeting the legal requirement for obtaining the Free Prior Informed Consent of the IPs before carrying out research in thie tribal lands.  The Provincial Officer even facilitated a new set of meetings with the datus, Barangay (village) officials, and the communities to explain why the project was needed. 

During these meetings, he explained the project to the tribal groups in their own language (Manobo) as well as Visayan, and clearly explained how the project on biodiversity would help the IPs to prepare their Ancestral Domain Sustainable Development Plan – an important requirement of the process of getting their ancestral lands recognised in a Certificate of Ancestal Domain Title. 

The end result as that the indigenous people agreed to the project going ahead, and agreed to offer their protction to the researchers from Mindanao State University while they were carrying out the work.  This was formalised by all the Datus and Barangay officials signing a document agreeing to the researchers entering their area to conduct the research.  However, educational facilities in the remote mountain areas are limited both by physical distance from schools and lack of money for families to pay for their children to be educated, and were even more limited when the current Datus were of school age.  As a result, many of the Datus’ ’signatures’ were in the form of a thumbprint.   

 

‘Signing’ the agreement.  An elderly Datu appends his thumbprint. 

The agreement of the datus, officials and communities to guarantee the safety of the researchers was of particular importance, as the researchers would have to camp in the forest overnight in order to catch and identify nocturnal species such as bats, some bird species, frogs, etc.   As there are members of the New Peoples Army (communist insurgents) in the mountains of Mindanao, it was necessary that the researchers be under the protection of the community, especially while staying overnight in the mountain forests.

So, with their safety assured and the ‘red tape’ complied with, we were able at last to begin the research to identify the biodiversity of the mountain forests of the Andanan Watershed. 

A warning sign on the access road into the watershed, at a site subject to major landslides during every rainy season.

Only the natural hazards such as snakes and landslides remained to be negotiated !

A large rat snake.  One of the many species of snake present in the forests.

A Day in the Life Of…

A local man brings me is ‘catch’ in a coconut shell to examine by the Andanan River. The fish is a tiny tilapia – an introduced species which is not native to the Philippines but which is now one of the dominant species in the river. 

Having looked back at my blog it was apparent that there was more about my ‘out of work’ activities than about my “day job”.  So here is a bit more about what I do in working hours.  Recently we have had two main activities ongoing -

1. identifying the key issues which a Managment Plan for the Andanan Watershed will need to address, in terms of sustainable use of natural resources, and achieving conservation whilst meeting the livelihood needs of communities
2. documenting what is happening in the watershed, including
   • land use activities
   • natural resources present in the area,
   • pressures on water resources and natural resources, and
   • biodiversity in the area. 

As soon as you start doing anything like fish sampling (we hired a local fisherman called Dante to catch fish for us) a crowd of locals gathers round to try and figure out what this crazy foreigner is doing ! 

 

A crowd of locals gather round to watch us work – we are catching dragonfies, placing them in a glass tank to take photographic records, then releasing them. Soon some of the locals started catching more of them and offering them to us ! 

We wanted to know what fish were present, which had died out and what the health of the fish stocks in the river is.  Toxic chemicals are often used (illegally) by locals to catch fish by poisoning them (would you eat a fish which had been poisoned by insecticide ?).  Between that and the introduction of non-native species which dispace the native fish we think around nine species of fish which were present in the river in living memory may now be locally extinct. The size of the remaining fish being caught is very small. 

While Dante was fishing, other fishermen came to show us their catches.  We also spent our time catching samples of different dragonfly and damselfly species to record the species diversity in the area.  Dragonflies are thought to be indicators of good water quality. We have recorded about 20 different types already, and have seen others we still have to catch ! 

   

A few of the species we have caught and photographed.

I order to identify the issues in the area we have also been consulting with local residents as well as barangay (village) officials and tribal representatives.  Today we had a big workshop which brought together a lot of these people in order to find out their views on the issues in their area, and what they think should be done to improve the situation.

 

The Barangay representative from Mount Ararat explains the local peoples’ views on the issues in the mountian area. Behind him are cards on which they have posted up the key issues that need to be addressed.    

It was a very useful  discussion, and I certainly learnt a lot from them, which will all help in the development of the Management Plan for the Andanan Natural Park.  It as been another busy day, so it is now time for bed (as Zebedee said). 

Tomorrow we are off to Pinagalaan again for the mass feeding programme for the school children there.  I will post another blog page soon with an update about the school.

Life on the River

 

The river where work is the Andanan River, which can look really quite beautiful at times - especially from a distance ! It is about 100 metres wide, but only about 2 metres deep. However, it does have a lot of problems. 

The Provincial Governor describes it as "a headache".

Illegal logging has wiped out almost all native tree cover, although it was completely forested in the 1950s.  Some locals did once report the illegal loggers to the authorities, but all that happened was that the loggers found out, and threatened them. Nothing was done to stop the logging.  It is very dangerous to get mixed up in such things, as "forest-related violence" is a major problem.  

A lot of the uplands has been converted to agriculture, bananas, coconut or rubber plantations. Vegetables are grown in rows running vertically down the steep slopes, with no use of measures to stop soil erosion.

Huge amounts of sediment wash off into the river and are carried downstream, turning the water into something that looks more like flowing, watery mud than a clear, sparkling stream shimmering in the tropical sunlight. Bobbing along merrily in the water are illegally cut logs from within the protected area, floating downstream to collection points.

However the real 'piece de resistance' is the municipal garbage dump, serving 100,000 people, and is not so much on the banks of the river as in it !  Whenever it rains the water washes the garbage off the banks and carries it downstream where it gets into the irrigation systems of fields and causes skin diseases amongst the people living there.

The good news is that the Provincial Government has issued an Order telling the municipal authority to stop dumping rubbish there, but at present it is still operating and no alternative site has been identified. 

The tributaries are very attractive in some places, and have even managed to retain remnants of the original vegetation.  Given the large amount of rainfall we get here (about 3,500mm per year, which is seriously wet) and the steepness of the slopes, it is not surprising that there are a lot of waterfalls, some of which are very beautiful.

The local Environment and Natural Resources Office confidently says that there is no water pollution in the mountains.  However, as far as I know, no-one has ever tested the water.  What we do know is that in Mindanao there is a lot of illegal cyanide fishing and also a lot of small (and large) scale mining which uses mercury and other noxious chemicals to extract gold. And guess where it ends up…..  

On top of all this, bribery, vested interests and lack of political will leads to non-enforcement of those environmental laws that do exist.   

My task here is to prepare a management plan for the area which will solve all the problems and also provide secure and improved livelihoods for all the poverty-stricken residents. 

Easy-peasy, eh?

What am I doing here ?

Well here it is – my first attempt at writing a 'web log' or 'blog'.  I hope you like it and find it a useful way of keeping up with what I am doing here during my two years as a volunteer Watershed Managment Adviser based on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines.I arrived in the Philippines in October 2005 to work for the Provincial Environment and Natural Resources Office as a Watershed Managment Adviser.  The post was arranged by Voluntary Service Overseas, which means I don't get paid much (just a local salary of P14,000 a month, which is roughly equivalent to £150 UK pounds) but I also get the use of a motorbike and a mobile phone and get my rent paid for me, so all in all its not too difficult to live on what I get.  Food is very cheap, and you can easily dine out and have a beer, all  for just P70.  There are not too many luxuries available here to spend money on, so it is possible to live quite cheaply – or do I mean there is nothing much to buy !

 My main task here is to survey and define the charachteristics of the water catchment of a particular river here – the Andanan River – so that we can develop plans to conserve and protect the area for the future.  Part of the area is a Protected Forest Watershed, although many of the trees originally in the area have been cut by illegal loggers, so there is little or no old growth forest left. The cutting of forests and the use of 'slash and burn' farming techniques (called 'kaingin') have also been contributing to serious problems of soil erosion and sediment in the rivers.  As a result the irrigation dam which the river supplies can only irrigate 2,500 hectares of rice fields, not the 5,000 hectares it is intended to supply.

The area is very important, not only as the source of water for the irrigation dam, but also as the source of  drinking water to the population of a big town, Bayugan, with a population of around 100,000 and also in providing all the daily needs of the people living in the mountains.  The area also has a lot of important habitats and species present in it, including the Philippine Eagle, Philippine Tarsier, various species of parrots, and much more.   

There are about 12,000 people living in the mountain areas of the watershed, including a large number of the indigenous people  of the area, who belong to the Manobo Tribe.