The rain fell down ripe, nasty and full, like fat moist durians and watermelons, thrashing the bare earth and galvanized iron roofs with loud awful thuds that boomed and punched its way out your ears and chest. For the residents of California Riverside and Dona Tomasa Riverside in Barangay San Bartolome, Novaliches, Quezon City, years of living on the easement of the meandering Tullahan River emancipated them from any obscuration by 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 its banks and claimed everything on its track with the enthusiasm and speed of a deadly strain of cancer that was on you, inside you and all over you in a flash. With unmitigated contempt, the flood water ignored all natural and man-made boundaries and claimed everything, transforming the expanse into a giant restless pond interjected only by the protruding 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 swarm of spooked prey running away from a pride of hungry lions. Ate Lanie scrambled like a grunt of many wars as she humped her belongings to the second floor of a neighbor’s house unaware that the flood will rise above it and gobble up everything in it anyway. In counterpoint, the only things Ate Vilma managed to rescue, in her haste to evacuate, were 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 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 jump through hoops 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 to be seen. Glenda stooped down and frantically fumbled around the flooded floor teeming with mud and debris. After a few minutes of anxious groping, she felt something. It was her shoulder bag!  By chance, it was jammed fast to the floor by an Orocan drawer 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 6 hours. That caused an unexpected flood in the capital region that was regarded as the worst ever in its history.

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 Dona Tomasa Riverside in Barangay San Bartolome, were bereft of early warning systems, evacuation plans or community-based quick response teams. Like most barangays around the Philippines, Barangay San Bartolome too was unprepared and responded a day late and a dollar short.

Given all that, it was indeed a surprise that although Ondoy took over 350 lives, no one in Barangay San Bartolome died.

Part 2: Accidental Partners

Socio-Pastoral Institute

The Socio-Pastoral Institute or SPI saw its inception 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 that was divided on how to respond, progressive priests and religious from various congregations came together and put up SPI to proclaim that the social and communitarian dimensions are integral to our faith.

Today, SPI is involved 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, setting up of neighborhood based self-help programs, linking the communities to local government units and agencies along with strengthening the Inter-Faith Council and the people’s organizations to meet challenges and pressures.

The stirring feature of this project is that the developmental endeavor is linked to spirituality. In this set up, the health campaigns, adult education, feeding program, women’s program, interfaith work and so forth are linked together and woven into the Khalifa’s mission to care for the entire 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 and the periphery. It is only after a year or so of re-evangelization, that the stewardship programs of prayer, talents and treasure are set up as venues for the sharing of our gifts to each other.

The response of the poor to this program is tremendous. Imagine an informal settler who has largely been ignored by church, who hears mass thrice a year, who has been told all his life by society that he is nothing, that he is worthless, that he smells, that he is ignorant and then he learns that he is made in the image of God, that he is a child of God who is blessed with many gifts and that he is asked to develop and share his gifts with others. Suddenly, he is a different man, a man who is confident about his self-worth and wants to make a difference in the church and in his community.

The effect on the institutional Church is impressive as well. Imagine a parish that launches stewardship of prayer, talent and treasure programs after about a year of re-evangelization and then finds the poor from the fringe and margins, most of whom have not even been to the church, now coming in droves to participate and claim their rightful ownership of the church.

As such, 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. There is no other way.

As it happened, one of the members of SPI’s Spirituality of Stewardship or “Buhay Katiwala” Task Force named Sr. Mila Singap, FLP, was assigned to Christ, King of the Universe Parish or CKUP in San Bartolome. When Ondoy demolished the urban poor communities in the parish, we therefore had a ready insider there 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 to think that Fr. Jun de Peralta is a respected and venerable member of the clergy of the Diocese of Novaliches. After all, his predilection with simple, nondescript clothes favored by the working class is a drastic counterpoint to the habit and bid of most priests to appear august and esteemed.  Moreover, it does not help his fortune, that when this slightly undersized man with the booming voice and easygoing charm speaks, he interfuses his discourse with street lingo and humor rather than with biblical passages and parables as most “real” priests are wont to do.

It is only when you learn that Fr. Jun is a stalwart of the Church of the Poor that you begin to penetrate the veil of “unsuitable,” perplexing indications and commence to make sense of the bewildering ensemble of priesthood, simple clothes, earthy speech and folksy manner.

But this is only if you know what the Church of the Poor is and why it is even relevant to the lifestyle and demeanor of the clergy at all.

It was in the Second Plenary Council of the Philippines in 1991 when the Church of the Poor was first enunciated. The Council headed by Archbishop Legazpi examined the Church and her role in society and in the spirit of renewal, inquired what a transformed Church in the Philippines would be like. After a month of prayers, discussions, reflections and contemplation, the Council, made up of about 500 representatives from the different local Churches around the Philippines, came to the light and consensually proclaimed what the Philippine Church aspires to become – A Church of the Poor.

They described that vision of the Church this way:

“A Church where, at the very least, the poor are not discriminated against because of their poverty and they will not be deprived of their right to receive in abundance the help of the spiritual goods of the Church; a Church that courageously defends the rights of the poor even when doing so will mean alienation or persecution from the rich and powerful; a Church that practices preferential option for the poor; a Church that practices the evangelical spirit of poverty; a Church that will collaborate with the poor themselves so to lift up the poor from poverty; a Church where the poor is not seen as objects of evangelization but evangelizers themselves with the power to renew both Church and society.”

The Catholic Church is often criticized for exerting undue unconstitutional influence over political affairs in the Philippines. While the broad brush criticisms regarding this are often overdone, some of the narrower sharper ones are often close to the mark for the Church can indeed and does impose veiled influence over the state. A point worth making, however, is that this is mostly so because the state in the Philippines is feeble and corrupt. It is this frailty of the state that invites civil society organizations particularly the Catholic Church, to intervene even if at times excessively and wrongly.

To those who are rightfully wary about proselytization, the social action arm of the Church serves all peoples of all faiths and none. The gravest partiality that the Catholic Church is guilty of is that it practices preferential option and love for the poor. And this is indeed why it can be a formidable partner of all persons of good will, government agencies and civil society organizations who wish to promote peace and development, human rights, integrity of creation and social justice.

When Ondoy struck and flooded several Parishes in the Diocese of Novaliches, Fr. Jun was disappointed at how some members of the clergy in the Diocese of Novaliches initially reacted without the succor of reflection and regard to the plight of the displaced poor.

He talked about how some priests initially saw this as an opportunity to do away with the illegal settlers and how, in a general meeting, they put forward a motion that since Ondoy had already swept the illegal settlements of people and materials anyway, the Church might as well hold back the people from returning and re-occupying the land.  They justified this motion as deference to “good” urban planning and development.

Thank goodness the motion was later retracted.

The divisiveness in the Church between those who wish to focus solely on worship and evangelization and those who maintain that evangelization minus social action is rubbish is hardly new and is by no means confined to the Diocese of Novaliches. It is certainly an irritant that could be a pain in the best of times but these times brought by Ondoy were very far from those.

Nine Parishes in the Diocese suffered varying levels of ruin by inundation. At Christ King of the Universe Parish or 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 sniffing around to see which way the wind blows.

In their favor, however, is that the CKUP had a Social Service and Development Ministry or 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 complex humanitarian crisis are legion. So when SPI approached Fr. Jun with a proposal to do relief, 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.

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

As a young man, Joseph cut his teeth in organizing informal settlers in Quezon City so that they may, in the circumstances of illegal demolition, relocation and re-settlement, 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 together with 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 50 countries around the world, to eradicate poverty. Its style is exceptional, in that Christian Aid works exclusively through local partners rather than directly by implementing projects or programs themselves.

Hence, a great deal of Christian Aid’s distinctiveness lies in its commitment to capacitate the local partners and to help them in the avenues of organizational and program development. On top of this, Christian Aid provides local partners with the necessary funding support to implement programs on the ground.

When Ondoy came and ravaged Metro Manila, Christian Aid woke up and fluttered to the stunning detail that they did not have a single partner in Manila with the capacity and experience to respond to humanitarian emergencies. So Christian Aid called on their old-hand partners like COPE Bicol and the Social Action Center of the Prelature of Infanta, Quezon and asked if they could lend their relief experts to lead the humanitarian assistance and mentor the Manila partners.

And so SPI together with other 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 was so formidable 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 transform ourselves into a development agency with emergency programs? Or perhaps become a legitimate relief agency with strong developmental sensibilities and capabilities? What about our mission to proclaim, with words if necessary, the social dimension of our faith? Does that have a place in humanitarian endeavors?

The only thing we knew for certain was that Ondoy had taken us all to a crossroads, to a place marked by the receding of established institutional practices and traditions combined with the oncoming of newfangled capacities and opportunities which were still too far away to perceive clearly. It was in this setting of utter uncertainty that we were now called to make a decision whether to join this dance of change and revolutions or not. And bear in mind, that on top of this disturbing qualm and cloud of ignorance, all change – even the most desirable ones – contains sadness to them, for what we leave behind are parts of ourselves which must die.

And so with good-will and lots of derring-do, we leapt into the unknown praying that, somehow, a net will appear to catch us before we hit the stony ground.

Part 3: A Method to the Madness

Far more than just a huddle of fancy but empty words, the Hyogo, the linking of relief with development, the sustainable livelihoods and the relating of spirituality to social change frameworks provided us with the scaffolding on which to glue the many conceptual, operational and programmatic conducts of this project into a coherent constitution.

Hyogo Framework

By adopting the Hyogo framework, we were driven to regularly consider and attend to the 5 major gaps and challenges that relief experts have identified as crucial to address, in order for humanitarian campaigns to succeed.

The 5 identified areas are:

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 with acrimonious debate. To a great extent, the impetus to do so 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 will try our utmost to implement the humanitarian endeavor in a way that brings these distinct separate groupings together. By and large 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.

What that concretely meant on the ground was that if we set-up an effective community-based, barangay-synchronized 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. In turn, that would mean 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 5 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 man-made shocks.

Coming from this holistic, asset based standpoint, the Ketsana project had to be a multi-collaborator and multi-disciplinary endeavor as no single partner had all the capacities to secure the 5 categories of assets. It had to be, therefore, a joint project of sorts. Enlisted to 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, PHILSSA for national disaster risk reduction or DRR and climate change advocacies and SALIGAN for para-legal education.

As the area based partner in Novaliches, SPI was responsible for seeing to it that the seeds of resiliency and development fall on fertile ground. This meant making certain 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 put-down is that while prayers may give us resolve and spiritual energy, it is not enough in itself to say, establish participative democratic organizations or meet the poor’s basic needs. Whereas worship may do wonders to your interior life, it does not in 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 personal sacrifices and meeting of religious obligations. Spirituality is a way of life. It is a way of life that is committed to non-violence and respect for life, to solidarity with the poor and a just economic order, to tolerance and truthfulness, to equal rights and 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 making right 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 Conrad de Quiros reviewed that book, he summarized its essence with this single phrase, “To Bishop Labayen, the heart of revolutions is the revolution of the heart.”

On the other hand, spirituality does not ensure proficiency in the art of social change. Good intentions and energy is one thing, operative skills on community organizing, advocacy, networking and so forth is another. To kick-up dust on the ground, you need both tools in your pocket.

With the Hyogo, the linking relief with development, the sustainable livelihood and the relating spirituality with social change frameworks, we had the helpful signposts to guide us along the way. All that was left to do was to pound ahead at the serious work of humanitarian assistance – to move one step forward and two steps back, trial and error, action and reflection – 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, Christ King of the Universe Parish or 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 Red Cross, ABS-CBN, the Knights of Columbus from the 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 or COPE as the lead agency with regards housing assistance and livelihood support in Bagbag and San Bartolome.

Community Organization of the Philippines Enterprise or COPE

To fill you in on who COPE is, you have to cast your mind back to the time when community organizing almost perished like the dodo during the repressive times of martial law. The Marcos regime cracked the whip on community organizing as it killed off anything that promoted social awareness and unity. Despite the reign of tyranny, however, Church-based NGOs like the Philippine Ecumenical Council for Community Organization or PECCO soon stood up again to challenge the dictatorship. It was these faith-inspired NGOs that resuscitated community organizing back to life. Unfortunately, internal ideological differences eventually tore PECCO apart and from its ashes two separate organizations were born – the People’s Ecumenical Action for Community Empowerment or PEACE and Community Organization of the Philippines Enterprise or COPE.

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 sway and orientation.

The innovation was that it was the beneficiaries themselves who determined 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 appointed. But then again, even if the beneficiaries 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 precaution in the operation was the issuance of access cards to legitimate beneficiaries. The access card is a standard article in most aid efforts and 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 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 put 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 hauled the light building materials on the roofs of hired tricycles and took them home.

This method circumvented the massive logistical nightmares involved in centralized deliveries to warehouses or depositories and the consequent issues on security, crowd control, quality control and so forth.

Livelihood Support

When the dust from the calamity settled and the need for relief receded, a cash-for-work program was initiated right away 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. When they used relief funds to compensate people who cleaned and rehabilitated an important community asset – in this case the water canals – the initiative moved into the territory traditionally labeled as developmental.

Aside from cash for work, 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.

From out of this undertaking, which served as a good training ground on entrepreneurship and management, arose two group enterprise schemes, a rice store and a fresh meat shop.

Barangay San Bartolome and SPI

It was sometime June of 2010, a good 9 months after Ondoy,  when the “Building Disaster Risk Reduction Mechanisms for Highly Vulnerable Communities” project was given the green light by Christian Aid. With SPI now as the main proponent, it involved developing community based Disaster Risk Reduction or DRR programs and responders, the strengthening of local peoples’ organizations and the mainstreaming of DRR to 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 Christian Aid’s shelter and livelihood assistance 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 gave the leaders from Bagbag a fair crack of the whip to attend any or all of the Disaster Risk Reduction or DRR trainings we would give in San Bartolome.

The DRR trainings were both intensive and extensive with the modules spanning a wide breadth from basic DRR concepts, to the DRRM Act of 2010, to the Hyogo framework, to the various hazards, to contingency planning and so on. In all, we facilitated 4 DRR modules, each of which took about 2 to 3 days to finish.

Because of its length, there were the inevitable drop-outs who fell by the wayside.  On the other hand, there were others who replaced them and joined the trainings albeit mid-way. In general, the participants were keen as mustard to attend the trainings and learn about disaster risk reduction as it gave them valuable knowledge that spoke directly to their life-or-death situation in the danger zone.

“As a cluster leader, I share everything I learn here with my community,” was what Unso said regarding her view of the relevance of the DRR trainings. “In that way they become more aware of our situation in the danger zone and they begin to think of ways they can participate in our DRR program.”

As the asset based framework is in play here, 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. So SALIGAN gave paralegal training on Violence Against Women, Urban governance and the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management or DRRM law, learning tours hosted by BUKLOD TAO gave the people a peek at early warning systems and livelihood projects of another community in a danger zone and Christian Aid provided psycho-social trainings.

Fr. Jun attests to how the trainings have boosted the people’s self-confidence. To exemplify this, 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 foundational, holistic knowledge and inspiration necessary to build resilient communities. So with this knowledge from the DRR trainings under their belt, the community moved on to undertake two crucial activities towards resiliency: the Participatory Capacities and Vulnerabilities Assessments or PCVA and Contingency Planning.

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

The Contingency Plan is what the community will do in worst case scenarios. It is, therefore, a cornerstone in the building of disaster resilient communities. 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 committees that would oversee the entire potentially chaotic process and ensure that everything goes dead right. In San Bartolome, the following committees were created and manned 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 as well as Communications.

Antonio Mamoro has an interesting back-story. He lost one half of his house to Ondoy. When shelter assistance came, he gave way to others who suffered worst fates so that they could avail of aid before him. He is now one of the members of the Early Warning System Committee.  “When it rains, I stay up the whole night monitoring the river. We made a critical level marker on the riprap 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 landline. When there is a heavy downpour, she uses that asset to call La Mesa Dam, PAGASA, Barangay San Bartolome and SPI to make sure that everyone is on the same page and ready to act with order and purpose if the need arises. “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 the limitations and imperfections in its discharge, this project produced a core group of leaders with the skills and commitment to lead the community in their struggle for resiliency. The hat trick is that these committed and trained individuals are organized around community-based committees which play an important part in a humanitarian operation and that all their efforts are dovetailed to the response and rescue efforts of both the local barangay and Christ King of the Universe Parish or CKUP.

Furthermore, the intensive Disaster Risk Reduction trainings and formation of community-based response committees resulted in the formal inclusion of our DRR trained sitio leaders in the Barangay Disaster and Risk Reduction Management Council or BDRRMC of Barangay San Bartolome. As a matter of course, we coordinate all our DRR activities with the Barangay Captain, Dong Pascual. But chalk this triumph to She, Barangay Secretary, Danny Mariano, Barangay Staff, Noemie San Juan, Barangay Health Worker, Carmen Lucio and Romeo Darlucio, Barangay Tanods who all diligently attended our DRR trainings. They were the ones who championed the inclusion of our sitio leaders in the BDDRMC.

Lest the DRR project fall on stony ground, Toning of FORGE and Shirley of Coastal Core told us, “it is wise to include the Barangays from the very start and woo them as partners.” This is a tip that we took to heart from the start and it has proved fruitful.

At first glance, the inclusion of our trained sitio leaders to the BDRRMC may pass as a trifling because there is a law that mandates that all barangays 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 so although they start the 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 de la Cruz that they fancy to man 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 Barangay Disaster and Risk Reduction Management Council or 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 option to fill up the BDRRMC with experts from this pool.

How will this barangay renewal continue to unfold in the future?

We can only hope that because the Barangay Disaster and Risk Reduction Management Council or BDRRMC now includes the community leaders we trained in its fold, they will propose to the Council that SPI continues to assist them in the matters of say, providing Disaster Risk Reduction or DRR training to other sitios or the making of the Barangay Contingency Plan and its corresponding budget and so on. If that happens, SPI and the communities will become full-fledged partners of the barangay in the common quest to build resilient communities and we will then in be in a better position to promote financial transparency or greater participation of the people and the like. In that scenario, we can be a significant partner of the barangay in its journey to institutional development.

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.

But all of those are still forthcoming and further down the road. Cognizant that a boxer who is distracted about big pay check fights down the line and not focused on the fight at hand will almost surely lose, we keep our eyes solidly fixed on the sustained development of the community based DRR committees and the accompaniment of the sitio leaders now in the Barangay Disaster and Risk Reduction Management Council or BDRRMC.

And what about Christ King of the Universe Parish or CKUP, did the Disaster Risk Reduction or DRR project have any impact to it at all?

The easy observation is that through the project, it 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, so to speak. Rene Busmente, SSDM Coordinator, Efren Lagunilla and Frank Salgo, Lay Ministers as well as Dories Jupia, SSDM member came to most of the trainings and participated in the rolling down of the DRR program in the communities so that by now, they have their feet planted squarely on DRR ground.

Fr. Jun, on the other hand, was not satisfied with this. He noted that the community leaders were more diligent in the DRR trainings, PCVA, Contingency Planning and more active in the community- based quick response Committees than the members of the SSDM. This is mainly because most people in the SSDM are employed and have much less time to devote to this significant undertaking.  But that is not to say that the reason the informal settlers were more persistent and participative was because they had loads of free time on their hands.

Glenda Pentecostes’ story is a bellwether of the people’s commitment to the program.

Glenda and her husband wake up before dawn to buy fish and vegetables wholesale at Balintawak Market to sell on a retail basis at their jerry-rigged stall. It is a physically demanding job but they keep at it because it is what puts food on their family’s table. You could think that this daily grind was enough on Glenda’s plate, but then you would be dead wrong. Glenda is also a CKUP area coordinator, a Gawad Kalinga member, a member of the Church’s choir, a center person of the feeding program and a DRR cluster leader.

By the way, Glenda is also instrumental on 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 other factors other than mere availability at play here. Call it grit, commitment, time-management skills or sense of mission and priorities. Whatever it is, it sustains participation in works for the common good in the face of personal costs. And, more importantly, it finds time and it makes time.

So taking all of that in consideration, this is how Fr. Jun wants to proceed in the coming Parish Pastoral Assembly which is the key mechanism by which the Church determines where it wants to go and how it will get there. He wants DRR formally declared as the center piece 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” of the Catholic Church in the Philippines is that the leadership roles in the Ministries and Mandated Organizations are almost exclusively filled by people from the upper and middle classes. This is “understandable” given that people from the upper classes tend to rise above the huddle because of their superior language and people skills. However, this 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 to participate and then later to lead. Equally crucial is the re-evangelization of current leaders so that they actively participate in the empowerment of the poor and give way to them when the proper time comes.

Ondoy created an almighty mess, no doubt about that. And yet to people of vision and good-will, Ondoy was also a challenge and an opportunity to face the music and put our house in order. It was a rude awakening to the poor to get up and have a bash at building resilient communities. It was wake-up call for the barangays to become better at 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, standing proudly in the center of the community and yet it was very far from their hearts,” Fr. Jun thoughtfully declares. “But after Ondoy, they saw that the Church is actually there with them. So today, they see her now as a 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 nudged 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 to the informal settlers living in danger zones?

For that we would have to listen to Florence “Unso” Pastor, a leader from Dona Tomasa Riverside and an informal settler herself. Although her formal education was marked by abrupt stoppages and 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:  Holding 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 the rent on time, seeing their kids through school and staying alive.

Life for people living in extreme poverty is nothing but a sliver of misfortune. After Ondoy, that sliver just grew a lot longer so that the more they lived, the more they suffered, and the more they persisted, the more they were lowered and bowed by others.

But in fairness, Ondoy did not make that so.

Poverty in the Philippines sprung from a curious compost heap made up of massive failures of development initiatives, a globalization that favors corporations over states and peoples, the bungling inefficiencies of a feeble corrupt self-serving state and a dark history ruined 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 a short answer to that 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 Seminary and an SPI Board Member but he is the sort of person who is equally at ease around Cardinals of the Church as well as unschooled peasant children.

This is what he said, “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 on the head!

How can we put our backs into helping the poor rise above their poverty without that sense of 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 have broken with that basic connection?

Without that solidarity, the poor would never be part of our lives and concerns. They would forever be doomed to subsist at the margins like specters or ghosts, scooting in and out of our realities without weight or 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.

“So before everything else,” he continues, “we must first resolve to find and see for ourselves that which binds us all – our common humanity. This is probably the most important decision that we will ever make because on it rests the wellbeing of the world entire.”

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.

This is because the reality of travel has as much to do with enlarging the human spirit as with recurring botch-ups on itineraries, gaffes concerning foreign customs, misfortunes with exotic dishes and calamities on directions. And difficult as those enumerated ordeals may be to all and sundry, they’re screaming monkeys on the back of those of us who are are no longer in the prime of our lives.

So here’s the deal, I have just rotated back to Manila after a delightful two week stay in Bangkok with my wife and friends and I have decided to do a blog on that experience from the point of view of one who, let us say, constantly looks for his eyeglasses in all places except his forehead.

So here’s a list of indicators that tell you if old age is nicking away at that urge that dwells deep within all of us to see, experience and know the world. If you find that you are turning into a gross, cranky old horse, then it’s time to wake up and reclaim this sense of awe and passion for life.

Remember, appreciation of the world and joy in life not only enhance the pleasures of foreign travel, they are also authentic elixirs of youth. So be truthful now and see how you fare on this one.

You know you are too old for Bangkok when:

• “Getting lucky” means finding a Thai dish that you can actually eat

To food-lovers, Bangkok is a paradise crammed  with restaurants, food stalls, street food carts on 24/7 stand by to serve heaping portions of  sea foods, beef, pork or vegetable all generously zapped with a healthy dose of aromatics and spices. Unfortunately,  if you do not have the cast iron stomach for spicy foods, consider it your lucky day when you find something mild that you can actually eat.

Why? Because almost everything here is spicy.

That is the reason why when in Bangkok we do not say “bon appetit” before the partaking of meals; instead we say “fire in the hole!” and duck under the tables.

• You worry that the bikini-clad bar girls at Phat Phong might catch cold

At the foot of Sala Daeng Skytrain Station lies Phat Phong, one of the most vibrant and colorful areas in the buzzing metropolis. It is the home of the renowned night market and the city’s most boisterous girlie bars where tourists and locals flock for cold beer and fun.

I want to make a comment or two about prostitution but then I remember it said that you can tell how old people are by the passion they revile the vices they no longer have the enthusiasm or enterprise to commit. So to keep the fat from the fire, I’ll just keep my mouth shut on this one.

Instead, I’ll just pray that God gives the bargirls money to buy  clothes.

• Upon visiting the ruins of Anachak Ayutthaya you remark, “Is this it? My apartment’s older and in worse shape than this!”

Anachak Ayutthaya is a Siamese kingdom that existed from 1351 to 1767.  In the sixteenth century, it was described as one of the biggest and wealthiest cities in the East.  Sadly, Ayutthaya fell to a Burmese invasion and was left in ruins.

What dropped on my lap is the idea that if tourists are willing to pay a pretty penny to see these ruins then maybe they would also do so to see my apartment.

If I am able to package this “heritage tour” right, I’m sure I’ll be rolling in money and living off the fat of the land in no time.

• Every time you climb up the BTS, you are a hair away from a heart attack

The SkyTrain is the single best way to beat the traffic that is a daily occurrence in Bangkok. Never mind that the trains get packed during rush hour or that the fares cost an arm and a leg, it still beats wasting an hour or so fuming in your gridlock-ensnared taxi.

The skytrain has two lines covering the central business districts of Sukhumvit, Phloenchit, Silom, and Sathorn and then going up to Victory Monument and out to Chatuchak. One of those stops, Ratchatewi, is just a stone’s throw from where we stayed so we rode the skytrains all the time.

The only trouble is that it’s an uphill battle (BTS is about 5 stories high, I think) to get to the train platform. And that’s what chaps my ass!  Believe me there’s no understanding of the dreaded term “terminal illness” until you crawl up the BTS terminal yourself.

Man that hike turns me green around the gills!

• You don’t haggle at the Chatuchak market because you’re too tired to care

If you are a shopaholic or a seasoned bargain hunter, then the Chatuchak Weekend Market is must-visit place for you. The sheer immensity of it – about 26 hectares of land  filled with over 8,000 market stalls overflowing with diverse collections of merchandise – will bring any shopper to his knees.

The one thing that grinds my gear though is that they overprice the items by a hundred percent or so thus it takes a coon’s age haggling with the vendors to trim down the ticket to its fair price.

• You’re scared shitless that the lions in Safari World will test the windows to see if they are indeed shatter proof

The 45 minute bus ride around Safari Park takes you to a close encounter with wild life in their natural habitat. It is truly a unique and special treat.

Call me crazy but why is it that it’s the old people – the ones circling the drain – who are the ones most paranoid about their personal safety?  Why are they always the ones who call out the dark cloud in the far horizon? Or come on hard whether the Safari bus can outrun a rhino or not?  By their dark demeanor, you’d think they’ve cornered the market on trepidation and horror.

I guess when you are very old, even butterflies and flowers scare the good Jesus out of you!

• You spend the entire Loi Kratong Festival mumbling “it’s too dark…it’s too dark”

The Loi Krathong festival takes place on the evening of the full moon of the 12th month in the traditional Thai calendar. In the western calendar that usually means sometime November and as luck would have it we were there at the right time – Nov. 21, 2010.

“Loi” means “to float” and a “krathong“ is a small raft traditionally made from a section of bread or banana trunk decorated with elaborately-folded banana leaves, flowers, old coins, candles and incense sticks. During the night of the full moon, Thais will float their krathong on a river, canal or a pond lake to pay respect to the spirit of the waters.

So there you are, you know Loi Krathong is celebrated on a full moon and that it is in honor of  the goddess of the waters and it involves floating candlelit offerings on waterways around the kingdom but when you get there, all you do is complain about how you can’t see anything because it is too dark!  What a crybaby!

• You frantically search for seat belts and rollbars in tuktuks

Tuktuks are three wheeled cabin cycles that you find everywhere in Thailand. They’re generally made of manufactured sheet metal body with closed roofs and open frames that prove irresistable to most tourists.

“Think of them as the updated version of rickshaws,” someone told me once.

Modern rickshaws? Yeah right! They’re more like motorized, juiced up, drug-crazed chariots from hell if you ask me. But what can you do? Sometimes there is no other way to get around this tourist town except on tuktuks so you call the dogs off and hop in.

What’s the experience like? Well let me put it this way, whenever we arrive safely in our destinations on a tuktuk, I owe God a little something more which I promised in return for His assistance. That’s how it’s like!

• You refuse to have your picture taken lest your image won’t fit the camera frame

Am I in shape? Of course, I am. I may be oblong, pear or apple shaped but yes I am in shape.

When your snapshots look like death warmed up, that’s the time to grab all the cameras in your group and say, “from now on I will be the official photographer ok!” That way no one can dish the dirt on you and your friends will think they owe you a big favor for volunteering to do the donkey work.

• You refer to all the backpackers in Khao San Road as “kids”

Khao San Road is distinguished from the rest of the tourist spots in Bangkok because it does not have big attractions. No “must-sees” to be found here, just a lot of sights and smells and sounds and backpackers. Kao San Road is haven to the low-budget traveler who is here for the general atmosphere, sipping beer, browsing through whatever the cheap stalls have to offer, walking around to no destination in particular. It is also a hop, skip and jump away from the Grand Palace.

The place is full of “kids” and because the denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the mental health of older people, allow yourself a disparaging remark or two about their appearance and personal hygiene. Well ok… an aside about how they refuse to climb the greasy corporate pole to the top might still be acceptable and within bounds.

But after that, for chrissake stop! To dwell on ridiculing the young only makes plain to all your age.  So put a sock on it and be cool!

• You’re always lost because your fading eyesight keeps you from reading maps properly
  

When I was younger, I used to say that half the fun of travel is in relishing the thrills of being in the state of “lostness.” What a bag of BS that sounds now! Because I am only good for a few hours without my antacids and siesta breaks,  getting lost like a ball in high weeds is now scary to me.

Here’s a tip on your next trip, bring a magnifying glass to deal with those small, fold-and-tuck tourist maps. And if that doesn’t cut the mustard, then grandiousely wave the map away and say in a loud voice ” I’d rather find my way by sniffing which way the wind blows if you don’t mind!”

• You need a vacation to recover from this vacation!

This one takes the cake. If you’re too tired coming back from your vacation so that you need another one just to recover, then man I am so sorry for you. You are indeed too old!

Leave foreign travels to the fortunate ones who still breathe. For you old one, I recommend  a rocking chair…. if you can still get that going.

Have you heard the old ditty “Help the Poor” by Robben Ford?

Because the circumstances of our trip to Indonesia were far from ideal, I thought that infectious song was going to be the soundtrack of our holiday in the cities of Jakarta and Yogya.

“Help the poor
Won’t you help poor me?
I need help from you baby
I need it desperately”

In the days leading to our actual departure, I was consumed by the ghosties and long-leggedy beasties of not having a bullet-proof itinerary, not having enough money to afford hotels, not knowing anyone in Indonesia to give us a “heads up!” And what made it worse was that  I honestly thought my fears were  invested with the authority of prophecy. (Goodness, I was so full of it that before long I was imagining that we would end up as whores in the rowdy streets of Malioboro!)

If that shows me as a pessimistic, pestilent fellow who pisses kerosene,  between you and me and the bedpost, I am really easy. In fact, my approach to life – if I may borrow from Van Morrison – is simply “to breathe in and breathe out, breathe in and breathe out, breathe in and breathe out and be happy.”

But having said that, I also long for a well-planned vacation that will not belly up when we are a thousand miles from home and at our most vulnerable. The itinerary need not be in perfect apple pie order; I just need some kind of a jerry-rigged blueprint to reassure me that as we drag our persons and luggage to the four corners of the world, the wild beasts of fortune won’t pounce on us tooth and claw.

My wife Kai, who organizes all our trips, is normally very capable at managing the thousand and one details that go in preparing for a foreign voyage. In fact, because we have done this a number of times already, she has got the routine down to a science. But for this one jaunt to Indonesia – I don’t know why –  she decided to set aside all the proven pre-launch procedures and bequeath the success of our holiday to the whims of the fickle universe.

For starters, she booked us seats – we were traveling with our office mates Tang and Nora – on red-eye flights that leave and arrive when you are so woozy from lack of sleep that you don’t know whether to scratch your watch or wind your ass. Unfortunately, those seats were right up our alley as they were dog cheap. Thus, we resigned ourselves to playing the roles of the suffering bums on the cramped planes of Cebu Pacific Airlines and Air Asia.

Nora with her favorite budget airlines

Tang and Kai waiting to board

Did I mention that our financial resources were limited and that we could hardly afford this holiday?

Kai and I both work for a faith-inspired, non-governmental organization that helps build disaster-resilient and empowered urban poor communities. We are not poor but we are certainly very far from rich. With our modest salaries, we live simply in a one bedroom apartment that we share with a few cockroaches. Our only extravagance, in fact, is to make it a point to travel together as a couple a few times a year.

Kai distributing relief goods to flood victims in Montalban, Philippines

So while most couples aspire to accumulate worldly things to fill up the gunwales of their ships, Kai and I travel. We cross the proverbial rivers that separate nations to immerse ourselves in God’s diversity and, in the process, accumulate wonderful shared experiences and memories.

For those who have not traveled, I will say this: pack your bags and just go! There is nothing quite like travel to bring you to the coalface of what life can offer. The experience will lift up your spirits and make you as robust and alive as a wealthy butcher’s dog.

The other thing Kai did that shook me was that she booked the flights without consulting me.  Well…. ok, so she sent me a couple of sms asking about my available dates and what I thought about Indonesia but she did so as as I was facilitating a workshop outside Manila. So in my mind my “yes dear” then did not really count.

But of all the many “extraordinary” things Kai did for this trip, what  threw me over the edge  was that upon seeing that our meager funds preclude us from staying in hotels, she enrolled at couchsurfing.org.

In case you have been living under a rock somewhere in the deserts of bombed-back-to-the-stone-age Afghanistan, here is something about couchsurfing.org I copied from their webpage: “CouchSurfing is a network that connects travelers with locals in over 230 countries and territories around the world. CouchSurfing members share hospitality with one another. Hosts have the opportunity to meet people from all over the world without leaving home. ‘Surfers’ or travelers are able to participate in the local life of the places they visit.”

When it was first brought up, my initial reaction was: what a load of bs! Couch surfing must be an apparatus invented by a maniac to lure unsuspecting travelers to the ninth circle of hell!

Unfortunately, we were at our wit’s end as far as accommodations were concerned as all our attempts to secure rooms from our partner religious institutions in Indonesia have failed. So as the date of our departure drew nearer, we began to consider less preferred ports to call.

So let’s see…of course, we could always stay at a dog cheap hotel. But seriously, that prospect was so unappetizing to us that it will be a mighty long time before we touch these establishments with the end of a long barge pole.

Finally options and time ran out and we had to make a call.  So even with my many fears and misgivings that we will be left to hang, twist and dry in the fervent winds of Indonesia, we decided to give couch surfing a try.

I remember thinking to myself, “Let’s go see if this couch surfing community is the real deal or if it is just all talk and no trousers.”

Nichole and M of Jakarta

Although Nichole and M were born with silver spoon in hand, they chose a radically different life-path. They dedicated themselves to giving disadvantaged children a leg up so that these kids may achieve something valuable and meaningful in their lives that they can never accomplish on their own.

When I learned about that, I thought, “This couple will never be satisfied with the low hanging fruits. They want to move mountains! They are in the hunt for the pearl of great price!”

Right then and there, I knew in my bones that our couch surfing stint with this young couple will work out fine. We were in a good place and in good hands.

Kai with Nichole and M

I think it was very early on our first night’s stay in their home – Imagine this, M picked us up at the airport in the wee hours of the morn and Nichole  got up from bed just to greet us and cook some noodles! – when we realized that we are indeed kindred spirits, that we are all faith-inspired people who struggle to bring concrete life-blessings to the poorest of the poor.

The arresting 3-storey house is located in the center of the commercial district so it is a hop, skip and jump to restaurants, hotels, hospitals, malls and so on. Nichole and M gave us the run of three huge air-conditioned rooms with private baths that were clean and neat as new pins.

But more surprising to me than the free accommodation, was how, in the blink of an eye, they took in four roughly dressed strangers from Manila and embraced us as their own.

They generously shared their joys, sorrows, griefs, aspirations and life-stories with us. They brought us around to a country club, a mountain resort, several fancy restaurants, a seaside complex, and factory outlets in Bogor. We couldn’t believe our good fortune. There we were with interesting and inspiring hosts who were escorting us into the lap of luxury! How lucky can you get!

We of course offered to pay our way but they will not hear of it. For M and Nichole, the idea that we share in the expenses went down like a cold sick. It was simple and clear for them, they have got our backs and that was the end of it.

That really astounded and baffled me no end.

Reflecting back on it calls to mind what Pope Paul VI once said that Christians should live in a way that “unsettles” others and makes them wonder what compels us to unselfishly share our time, talents and treasures with others, especially the poor.

I don’t think M and Nichole have come across that exhortation by Pope Paul VI but their demeanor certainly invests it with palpable flesh and bones. Many people talk big but act small, wear big hats but have no cattle.  These two, in contrast, lead quiet lives  according to the immensity and power of their faith and conviction. And by doing so, they change the world.

To Nichole and M: You have “unsettled” me; may you continue to “unsettle” many others.

Wim and Phillip of Yogya

By the skin of their teeth, Wim and Phillip built this unbelievably attractive house marked by ubiquitous Koi ponds, intricate, stunning local architectural flourishes and an interior bedecked with fascinating artifacts from around the world.

Stunning as the place is at the moment, it is but the thin end of the wedge as far as the couple is concerned. They are hoping to build from what is something small now, a bigger and more considerable hotel-restaurant complex with a swimming pool by the yard.

Nora and Kai by an artwork of an entrance

Warm welcoming Wim

I have faith in them and I will wager that when they build and run that hotel-restaurant up a flagpole, people will come from far away to salute!

Wim and Phillip appear to me as joined in the hip; they are so closely connected and finely tuned to each other that spoken words are expendable. Unfortunately, their commitment to each other is deemed worthless by most people in Indonesia where even now the culture remains steadfastly patriarchal and anti-gay.

Even though we were only with them for a short time, we count ourselves fortunate to have experienced their graciousness. They housed Kai and Nora in a petite airconditioned bedroom with its own private toilet and bath ingenuously designed to draw the outside space in.

Tang and I, on the other hand, were put up in the space behind the entertainment center where an elaborately designed divider gave us some privacy. The main wall in our make-shift room was framed by gigantic shelves oozing with books. But one need not catch a glimpse of the impressive collection of books to realize that the masters of the house are well read and have active, inquiring, curious minds; a 5 minute conversation with any one of them would accomplish that.

Good food, fine company

To top it all, for a marginal amount to take care of the costs of gasoline and the driver’s stipend, they lent us their car to take us to the main attractions in Yogya – Prambanan and Borobudur.

Prambanan is a temple complex constructed in the tenth century during the reigns of kings Rakai Pikatan and Rakai Balitung to memorialize Hindu triumph in Java Island. Borobudur, on the other hand, is a 1,200 year old Buddhist temple with over 500 statues of the Buddha. Borobudur, by the way, has the distinction of being included in the very exclusive list of World Heritage sites.

Borobudur, what a joy to finally see you!

Against the sky and light, beautiful nevertheless

Prambanan by the fading light

I yearned to visit these temples since I first read about them ages ago so this was indeed an immense moment for me. Likewise, I am acutely aware that we could not have pulled this one off without the assistance and kindness of people we had just met.

So to Wim and Phillip: It might not be worth a tinker’s dam but our earnest gratitude for everything you did for us. We really appreciate it.

Can I take this home pretty please?

Looking good by the over-looking

Because I don’t want to dwell on the other details of our latter-day adventures like our visits to the Sultan’s Palace, Water Castle, Fort Vredeburg, our memorable stay at Puskat, our shopping sprees in Malioboro and so on, then allow me share my newfound take on the couch surfing experience to end this story.

Kai and Tang at Sultan's Palace

With my best bud Lord Ganesha

When we embarked on this adventure, the deck was stacked against us and I was certain that our holiday in Indonesia was doomed to catastrophic failure. We did not have a surplus of resources, we did not have local contacts, we have never been to this country before and so we were truly flirting with the prospect of crashing down like lead balloons.

Thanks to the couch surfing community, however, we managed to pull the rabbit out of the hat and we had ourselves an enjoyable, fun-filled, memorable holiday. Thanks to Nichole, M, Phillip and Wim, things not only worked out for us but things actually went over very well.

So from the deepest place in our hearts, may couchsurfing.org and the couch surfing community continue to boom and inspire disadvantaged travelers to take to the open road to search not only for beautiful sights and wonderful archeological treasures but also for that which binds us all – our common humanity. Peace!

I have yet to come to an open gate that I did not enter



Standing a few meters outside the high gray walls that surround and partially conceal the five building complex, it is difficult to suppose that it is anything other than what it actually once was – a characterless, unremarkable high school in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.  But as you walk inside the sun-cursed compound, you notice crazy Alice in Wonderland objects that wallop the familiar shapes, forms and hues of sanity clean out of your mind. Rusty iron bars frame each and every window….twisted contraptions to inflict indescribable pain litter the yard…… jagged razor wire strung everywhere so that it chokes and dims the sun.

“Where am I?” you wonder.

And very slowly, it sinks in that you are in S 21, the infamous prison and interrogation center of the Khmer Rouge where 20,000 people were tortured, sliced and exterminated in a swill of screwball communist genocide.

You absentmindedly follow the tourist trail and enter a building where all incoming prisoners were photographed and “required” to give detailed autobiographies. Pack rats that they were, the admin-zombies kept extensive records of everything so thanks to their diligence, you come to a row of huge rooms lined from floor to ceiling with black and white photographs of victims of this ghastly porno.

Stunned incredulous

There is no escape from noticing that the Cambodians look like Filipinos and that trebles the horror and makes it more real and personal.  You try your best not to take in the 5,000 black and white mug shots of 5,000 ex-human beings now reduced to ghost images frozen in picture frames. Why it’s almost like looking at your dead parents, uncles and grandparents!

So you steel your heart and imagine you are a camera that simply looks and records data.  If in an unguarded moment you unwittingly see the victims, you can actually taste the unbearable despair with your eyes and you automatically protect yourself by switching off and rambling along minus any thought or sentiment.

From these rooms the prisoners were taken to crudely built cells so small that you could hardly twist your torso to pop the nagging crick in your back. Here in these dark shoeboxes, prisoners were shackled to the walls or the cold concrete floor and instructed not to make the slightest sound. In the larger cells found on the ground floor of the buildings, they were collectively shackled like matchsticks to long pieces of iron bars in alternating head to foot manner. In that state they were kept – bound, immobilized, silenced – waiting for their imminent doom.

With Maguid, a fellow traveler and friend

Within two or three days upon check-in at S21, prisoners were taken for “interrogation” which is the military-speak for foul torture that lasts until the captors get what they want or the prisoners die. You enter the interrogation rooms and despite bracing yourself for the worst, you involuntarily grasp at the machines they used to make prisoners confess to whatever heinous war or sex crimes they were charged with by their captors.

“Are we capable of such evil?” you wonder. The instruments of torture whisper back the retort “of course you are, of course you are.”

Waterboarding Devices

Low tech toys for Sadists

The vibes haunting the rooms impart despicable tales of how thousands of human beings were beaten, suffocated, raped,  shocked,  flaggelated, waterboarded, mangled, burned and hanged till they were stripped empty of their humanity and longed for  death. The heaviness of the memories hang profoundly in the air and it soaks your skin shiny wet so you soil your clothes.

Although many died while being interrogated, the out-and-out killing of prisoners was officially discouraged. What the Khmer Rouge really wanted were confessions to war crimes and lists of conspirators and traitors plotting or working against the regime.

Through torture, lists of traitors who were the prisoners’ relatives, friends, colleagues, or acquaintances were extracted, formed, shaped and mass produced with frightening competence and organization. Those in the manufactured lists were in turn arrested and tortured till they confessed and produced a further list of traitors. And on and on it went.

It’s an ever-escalating, self-fulfilling, self-nurturing swirling hurricane of sadism and violence that gobbled up and annihilated everything in the event horizon.

As you stumble around this Museum of Horrors, you feel the life squeezed out of you and you are unable to breathe from the immensity and weight of the discarded lives. You look around and notice that other tourists are equally stunned stupid as if they too had been gassed and pacified by policemen who are maestros in the art of crowd control. Everyone is in a daze and is fumbling for a coherent, commonsensical thing to say in the face of the mind-boggling madness. But words fail all of you and the only eloquence that prevails is the articulacy of silence.

And then you come to a room full of skulls.

That’s it, you have seen enough! Your brain bubbles over like instant noodle soup left too long in a microwave oven so you leave the room in a puff and greedily gulp down fresh air outside to compose yourself. You sit by the curb, cough to clear your head and desperately try to get a grip.

Part 2: I am witness

I am here in Phnom Penh to attend an Interfaith Conference that brings together “engaged practitioners and researchers who have an active interest in the dynamics of religion and international development.”  The gathering is led by Georgetown University and it intends to “take stock of the ongoing work by different faith-inspired organizations and the policy implications from their interactions with development organizations.”

When the Conference finished, we had a free afternoon to explore the city so we quickly grabbed our cameras, shoved a fistful of American dollars in our pockets, hailed a tuk-tuk and made short work of the tourist spots around agreeable Phnom Penh.

S21 was one of the items in our mini-bucket list.

In a way, I am glad I visited this Genocide Museum because a brush with evil, no matter how slight and minor, compels us to come to terms with it, to deal with it lest it drives us to utter helplessness and despair.  Difficult as this process may be, it can be a refreshing relief from our normal “long hair, don’t care” attitude to tell you the truth!

The run into with S21 brings to mind something I read ages ago – sorry the author and the name of the book elude me – that talks about the 3 forms of human presence in a world marked by evil: victims, tormentors and witnesses. Allow me to convey these forms according to the S21 context.

Victims

In the beginning, most of the victims were soldiers and government officials from the  Lon Nol regime which the Khmer Rouge overthrew. Later on they included doctors, professionals, students and monks – the so called “new people” who were the embodiment of capitalism and the enemy of agrarian communism that the Khmer Rouge was trying to establish.  Finally, the communist party’s paranoia turned cancerous and it went after its own members in bloody purges that decimated the Party.

Tormentors

The entity responsible for creating and orchestrating the genocide is the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the political movement behind the Khmer Rouge. It is made up of a motley crew of half-baked, ignorant, communist fanatics headed by Nuon Chea or “Brother Number Two,”  and Saloth Sar or Pol Pot who served as chairman of the party and supreme leader of the Khmer Rouge.

Directly responsible for guarding, interrogating and killing the prisoners in S21, however, were the 300 armed guards and interrogators of the facility. When asked later after the liberation why they followed the unspeakable orders of their superiors, they replied that they had no choice. If they shilly-shallied or refused, they would have been arrested, tortured and killed they said. So they committed crimes against humanity because that was the price of the ticket to stay alive. In a sense, they claimed, they too were victims of the regime as much as the 20,000 prisoners they actually tortured and slaughtered.

Witnesses

To keep the facility humming, S21 employed a staff of 1,400 workers to grow food and cook for the prison, to transcribe tape-recorded confessions,  to maintain records, to take photos of prisoners and so on.

These employees clearly saw the inner workings of the facility. They were witnesses who could have either stood up to ruthless power or remained compliant by the shadowy sidelines. Like the facility-employed tormentors, they too were scared for their lives and so they chose not to resist. In the end, because the madness went almost unopposed, it swelled and devoured 1.5 million of their fellow Cambodian citizens before it finally blew away.

About 500 tourists a day visit S21 and I was one of them. We are witnesses too.  Thanks to the Genocide Museum, we have as well come face to face with genocide and sniffed its fetid breath. That hard line experience obliges us to respond. We must boldly expose and denounce the bankrupt ideology and political circumstance that gave rise to this madness so that this nasty plague never comes to visit humanity again.

We are all Witnesses

Of course, it is much easier for us now to say “never again” because there is no piss-pot dictator who will slit our throats when we do. But if we were under such a regime of terror, will we be more courageous than the S21 employees I wonder? Will we stand up to pure wickedness even if it means our certain prolonged and painful deaths?

I honestly don’t know. But I pray we will.

Victim, tormentor, witness – the three forms of human presence that represent the possibilities open to us.  In a world filled with the manifestations of evil, which form of human presence will prevail?

The answer to that is, of course, up to us.

Let us, therefore, take into serious account that when the day arrives when evil once again rules supreme and we have to choose which human presence to offer as response, on our decision hangs the curse or the salvation of the world entire.

Scratched on the walls by a tourist who could not take it anymore "Nunca Mas"

As we wind down our relief operations with Christian Aid, COPE, UPA, ACT, the Embassy of Japan and HECS, we gear up for the rehabilitation and rebuilding stage which will grab our attention for the next 4-5 months.  This video shows our relief operations in the urban poor communities in Bagong Silangan, Sabah and Kasiglahan.

The Embassy of Japan with Christian Aid and its 3 local partners, Socio-Pastoral Institute, COPE and UPA brought assistance to over 400 families from Suburban, Montalban who were affected by typhoon Ondoy.

In a joint undertaking with Christian Aid, the Japanese Embassy and HEKS, our office and two other NGOs, UPA and COPE will bring relief and livelihood support to a couple of urban poor communities in Metro-Manila that was ravaged by Ondoy. Here’s a video made by my wife who is part of the relief team to Bagong Silangan as they conducted a rapid assessment there.

Here’s a slideshow of our vacation in the island paradise of Coron, Palawan. It’s eye-candy everywhere you look. Truly amazing!

We go through life totally consumed, singularly attentive to our issues that often times we fail to notice the situation of others around us, especially the less fortunate. Are we really that disengaged and uncaring of each other? Or is it because we have no profound experience of suffering hence cannot commiserate to the pains of others?

I could have remained in that poignant state of ignorance to the situation of the handicapped my entire life had Sr. Auring Zambrano not asked us to produce an audio-video presentation on the workers of “Tahanang Walang Hagdanan.” This 3-minute AVP is intended to help raise money to build houses for the wheelchair bound workers of this institution which is incidentally a sibling of Lionel Watt’s “House without Steps” in Australia.

“Tahanang Walang Hagdanan” is the monumental handiwork of Sr. Valeriana Baerts, ICM, a Belgian missionary who worked as a volunteer nurse here in the Philippines. Most of the facilities and structures in the center are courtesy of the Belgian government while the substantial real estate is through the kind consideration of the Diocese of Antipolo, Rizal.

The center literally means House without Steps because steps, ladders and stairs, as you know, denote difficulties and physical limitations to handicapped persons. The center strives to uplift the lives of the severely disabled by helping them realize the productive life, hence, the center’s intensive training in metalcraft, woodcraft, information technology, papermaking, needlecraft as well as special education from elementary to college levels. On top of that, the center also provides temporary shelter, medical and welfare assistance to the severely disabled.

Like Sr. Valeriana, Sr. Auring Zambrano is also an ICM sister and an avid advocate of full human development with preferential slant for the poorest of the poor. Sr. Auring is connected to the Urban Poor Foundation for Human Resettlement, Inc or UPFHRI that is collaborating with “Tahanang Walang Hagdanan” to build a community of homes for the severely handicapped working at the sheltered workshops. The genius of this project is that the homes will be built in the lot adjacent to the center. This is of immense significance to the handicapped workers because to go to work, most of them have to push themselves in their wheelchairs from their rented rooms – some as far as a few kilometers away – through busy and dangerous main roads.

Walking around the center, talking to the handicapped workers, sniffing around at the busy workshops, laying a hand on the finished products, I felt strange gears catching, tottering and rolling in my bowels. On the one hand, we asked a lot of questions and were bombarded with loads of information – relevant information that we need to produce the AVP – but on the other, there was something about being in the same room with people bound to wheelchairs struggling to go beyond their obvious fractures that sucked us in. As for me, their courage and determination to make the best with what life dealt them inspired me no end and was worth more than the googles of information for the AVP.

At one point in the long interview with Virgie, an Administrator of the center who is herself confined to a wheelchair, I asked if there was a moment in her hard, grueling life when she lost hope. She paused for a moment to reflect because this was obviously not a typical question that comes her way and then in so many words she told us this. “I have never lost hope,” she said. “My disability made me realize that the world is full of kind people, people of good will who are always there to help others and that God is merciful, faithful, forgiving and steadfast.”

Everything was going down smoothly with me up to the point she said “God is merciful, faithful, forgiving and steadfast.” Right about there my cynical mind, my wise guy mind silently asked, “Why is it that the only people who know that to be absolutely true, who know that in their bones to be true, are those who suffer?

And with that thought, came the sharper question. “Could it be that God is a contrivance conjured by the masses to make life more bearable?”

I struggled to come to terms with that question although I know it is a hopeless abyss whose depth I can never ever hope to conquer. To tell you the truth it is a question that has been nagging me for ages but I have always found pleasant distractions or important concerns as handy pretexts to dodge it. But this time the question stuck as if it was branded by a hot iron on my skin and I knew I had to deal with it lest it sits and weighs heavy like a piece of immutable furniture in a corner of my psyche. Thanks to her testimony, Virgie has inadvertently taken me across the Rubicon from where there can be no turning back.

All through the 40-minute drive back to the office, I was in a cocoon, captivated by the experience. My stream of thought was only momentarily interrupted when we drove by Sta. Lucia complex. Looking out the car’s windshield, I saw something strange, something I have not seen before. For the first time, I saw how many people of disabilities were around us, living amongst us, crossing streets, going to restaurants, trying to hop on buses.

“Have they always been this many or is there a mall-wide sale on wheelchairs and crutches?” I mumbled to myself in jest.

So this must be what it was like when Neo woke up to the true reality behind the Matrix. It’s jolting to suddenly see something for the first time especially because it has always been there just a few hairs beyond our noses. “My God, how can we miss not seeing them? They are everywhere!”

Already at this early stage, a change; I longed for more! I felt like a rock at the edge of a cliff, full of potential energy and raring to tumble down to the mysterious, un-chartered valleys below. I was tense and apprehensive but game and up for more. The visit to the center has enlarged my perceptual field but I also want to come to terms with Virgie’s statement about God and suffering. I really need to scare up a satisfying answer to that one.

“Is it the dire need of people, their need for respite that creates the experience of God?” was ricocheting in my innards in the most uncomfortable of ways.

To tell you the truth, I wrote this blog without a clear idea of how to answer that. But I figured since it’s been percolating in my unconscious for a while now,  the answer will reveal itself in the writing. My fingers often know beforehand what my mind has yet to grasp.

So I am really hoping that today, this mysterious process of drawing words locked deep in the body will provide an adequate answer to that niggling question. Or at least offer an initial rejoinder that can tide me over for a while. All I know is that the concept of suffering figures prominently in the answer but beyond that, everything else is dodgy and up for grabs.

So here goes.

We are all truly brothers and sisters because each and every one of us will grow old, suffer infirmities and die. Suffering is the common fortune we are heirs to; suffering is the thread that bounds our destinies. Awareness of the universal truth that life is suffering, that all sentient beings crave happiness and abhor suffering – that is the path to authentic wisdom. That is a vital insight because through it, we develop compassion for all.

Suffering is, therefore, a narrow passageway that leads to a higher spiritual ground. It is actually an invitation to see the world with a new set of eyes that is ever vigilant against causing suffering to one’s self and to others. It is a persuasion to live a life marked by compassion that shares all one’s gifts, in justice and love, with others.

In addition, suffering obliterates smugness, complacency and airs of entitlement which are the main obstacles to astonishment – the main portal through which we encounter and engage paradox, mystery, the unknown and God.

Devoid of awe, we will forever fail to enter this dimension of life that lies beyond the practical and pragmatic, beyond the sordid day to day business of getting on in this world. Without astonishment, we will take for granted our umbilical relationships with this multivalent universe. Without profound wonder, our senses will dull till we lose our awareness of the sacred that is around us. Without amazement, we will squander our interest on things behind the veil.

It is not that God is only accessible to those who suffer but that God is accessible most to those whose suffering stripped them free of smugness, complacency and the mind-set of entitlement. It is not that justice is only comprehensible to those who suffer but that justice is most concrete to those who see and experience the evils and sufferings brought by greed, oppression and marginalization. It is not that the care of the earth is only to those who suffer but that the care of the earth is most urgent to victims of environmental destruction.

So in a sense suffering is grace because if you engage it, if you allow it to take you to an inner journey, it leads to compassion and astonishment. It initiates us into this concealed world of vulnerability that makes it possible for us to move away from our petty full-of-ourselves universe to a larger more inclusive one marked by just and responsible relationships with others, with the universe and with the supreme Other.

The brief venture in “Tahanang Walang Hagdanan” enabled me to see the reality faced by persons with disabilities and Virgie’s testimony about her faith put me to the knife-edge of experience. She opened the door a crack through which I got a glimpse of what was to me a distant, alien world of extreme vulnerability and as I squinted and focused my eyes, to my surprise, I saw an abundance of strength and hope.

It was a grace-filled moment for me and although the road ahead is dark and narrow, with Virgie and others like her to open my eyes, I know that somehow I will find my way and that I will be fine.