This post is from Raymund Villanueva, the Technical Support officer for Meaningful Volunteer.
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| Aeta Kids |
The Aetas are said to be the original settlers of the Philippine archipelago. They are short, dark-skinned and curly-haired people who live in upland communities throughout the country. They live on farming, hunting, and gathering whatever they could from the forests.
The Aetas of Pampanga from their original settlements by the catastrophic eruption of Mt Pinatubo in 1991. Before then they were self-sustaining in terms of food. They hardly needed interaction with the ‘unat” (straight-haired) Kapampangans of the flatlands except for some medicines, sugar, coffee and salt. Now, most are forced to live on resettlement areas around military camps and detachments where they are closely monitored and regularly harassed. Being mountain people, the military thinks they are natural sympathizers of the communist New People’s Army.
At the Nabuclod Resettlement Area, the Manila government has built a primary school. But the school only holds classes three days a week as the ‘unat’ teachers have to travel far from the low-lands. The town midwife and doctor visits once every two months but they do not have enough medicines even for the most common of ailments. In fact, the weekend that we were there, we filmed an Aeta woman forced to walk to sitios where they may be tricycles that could take her to the nearest hospital to give birth. Blood was already flowing from her and she was already in deep labor pains.
In the past year, a narrow and pancake-thin concrete road was constructed going to Nabuclod. Electricity was also installed. While the Aetas are grateful for these, the real reasons for these soon became obvious—rich folks from Manila started snapping up land deep within the Aeta ancestral domain to build hilltop vacation mansions surrounded by tall concrete fences. What used to be their traditional hunting grounds are not private playgrounds of some elite ‘unat’. Lowland traders and middlemen followed with their offers of cash loans the Aetas could pay for their agricultural products are onerous prices. For example, a sack-ful of vegetables are bartered with two gantas of rice. The Aetas are now deep in debt and they ask how could they ever repay their loans if their produce are bought at such low prices. “We have never experienced being in debt before, until now,” they said.
It is not that the Aetas are without friends. In fact, last year, a group of Korean missionaries brought relief food items to feed the malnourished Aeta children. But as soon as the Koreans left, the military confiscated the donations, saying the goods may just find their way to the communist guerrillas the Aetas are supporting.
Such is the current lot of the Aetas of Pampanga—they who are were represented in Congress in the past six years by Presidential Son Mikey Arroyo and now call immediate past President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo their Congresswoman.
One of the most striking experiences we had the previous weekend was accompanying a frail Aeta woman as she fetch water from a spring nearest the resettlement area. The spring was about a kilometer away from her shack but it was on a deep ravine hundreds of meters below the barrio. It was accessible only by trekking through slippery footpaths littered with boulders. She had to carry a five-gallon water container on a basket balanced on her head. When full, the water container could be as much as twice her body weight and she is just slightly over four feet tall. And while we needed several rest stops along the way, she carried the water without ever taking the container off her head. She stopped only to chat with other women on their way to the spring themselves.
Tragically, just a few meters from her shack is a broken pump well that has stopped working for nearly two years already. When they consulted Floridablanca’s water engineer, they were informed that a relatively inexpensive part is broken and needs replacement. For a price of a town council’s regular meal, the pump could have been repaired and it could have continued to give clean and accessible water to a community of 400 households or 28,000 individuals. With clean water comes health, sanitation, wellbeing. With accessible water comes more productivity for the women who do not have to spend hours on a back or neck-breaking errand of fetching what most of us take for granted.
While interviewing the menfolk one night, they also said they already want to try farming their abandoned rice fields. They reckon that after nearly two decades, enough lahar would have been washed off their rice fields already and they could try reviving upland rice farming. They said that if they could be rice self-sufficient again, that would eliminate their subservience to rice traders who buy their vegetables and forest produce from some measly amount of rice. “If we are not forced to buy rice from the unscrupulous ‘unat’ traders, perhaps we could stop being beggars,” they said. They said they want their traditional “kinumpanya’ upland rice variety but no longer have it and must but it from other Aeta communities in Sierra Madre.
I did a quick computation in my head and I estimated these are projects that CERV, its volunteers and alumni can do. Ten thousand pesos may be enough to buy the broken pump component and hire a water engineer to repair it in two days. Another PhP10,000 to find, buy and deliver two sacks of ‘kinumpanya’ traditional upland variety to restart the rice planting activities of 400 households. Throwing in a 10 percent contingency amount, we need 22 thousand pesos or, at the going exchange rate, about US$488.00.
Such benefits for such a relatively small amount. CERV does not have that amount on its own but we are confident that its alumni and friends would want to be part of this worthy undertaking.
Let’s do this!
For donations, Western Union it to me:
Raymund B Villanueva,
83 Adrian Street,
North Fairview Park Subdivision,
North Fairview, 1121,
Quezon City,
Philippines.
And email the transaction numbers after sending your donation to cerv_philippines@yahoo.com.ph
Meaningful Volunteer is also accepting donations directly through our Paypal Account: contribute@meaningfulvolunteer.org
Note: CERV is Meaningful Volunteer's partner NGO in the Philippines - Malcolm
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