We are on a monitoring visit, visiting one of our Partner NGO's area of intervention. It wasn't the first time for me. I've visited this particular site several times in the past. What makes it special this time, however, is the fact that I am with two photo journalists who are also from Davao. We have an upcoming event come March and part of which is featuring the lives of some women farmers and women fishers. This morning, we are there to interview one of those women.
Without necessarily pre-empting the whole thing, Manang Dolores' story is really compelling. Hers is that of a single mother, giving all she's got in order to ensure the well being of her children. Living in the rural areas, the opportunities are not exactly abounding. She had to make do with subsistence farming in order to make ends meet. The good thing about her -- and the number of women like her in their area who involved themselves in rubber farming -- is the fact that they did not just stop and contend themselves with what life dishes out at them. Instead, they started creating opportunities for themselves and for their families.
During my first visit in the area I was already amazed at the kind of spirit that these women have displayed. But my admiration for them grew even more when I got to know them more intimately.
Rubber is a long gestating crop. With proper handling and following the right protocols, one can only start earning an income from it after five years. That's long alright, especially when viewed against the daily subsistence needs of the children and families of these women. Feeding their children is a daily concern. Sending them to school is a daily concern as well. Attending to the well being of their families is something that these women contend with everyday. It is not something they could postpone for five years -- the same amount of time they would spend waiting for their rubber trees to start becoming productive and bringing in income for the family.
And yet, despite this, these women persevere. After attending to daily household chores, they would walk 2 to 3 kilometers in order to visit their farms and tend to their growing rubber trees. One of the women even shared to me how precious their rubber trees are to them. She pointed out that at times, she had to leave her little children behind just to tend to her rubber trees. That made me wonder. How come these women put so much value on their rubber trees so much so that while they obviously have certain misgivings about leaving their children behind, they would do so, just so they could religiously tend to their rubber farms. Then I suddenly remembered attending several FGD sessions with these rubber farmers (both women and men) a few months back. I remembered how a good number of them have shared that for them, the rubber trees are their "ticket to the future." A good number of the participants had then shared that they look at rubber as something that would ensure the future of their children and even that of their grandchildren. To these women (and men), the rubber trees hold far more significance than its promise of income in the next five years.
I can't help but admire as well our partner NGO for having successfully instilled such value into the people in the community. I've seen several projects and programs in the past and instilling this kind of ownership in the partner communities is something that I very rarely see. More often than not, the energies of the people are only fuelled by their sense of obligation or some kind of gratis to the organizations funding their projects. Once the organizers leave, the projects also die down and the energies of the people are no longer sustained. But this, this is different. The people are totally sold out to the intervention and are giving more and more of themselves into the activities of the project.
I thought to myself that the reason for this is simply because to these farmers, the rubber trees represent their dreams of the future. It was impressed upon them that if they will not do their share, give their best, there is no way that these dreams will ever materialize. These realizations made me appreciate more our Partner NGO's efforts. It made me realize as well how development work, when use properly, can really motivate people to work hard for their dreams. If one manages to do that, to convince even one person to do just that, then I think he had already accomplished more than enough.
It had been said before and several times already in the past but I will nonetheless pen it down again: that development work is really not just about handing out formulas or "solutions-in-a-box" to people to help them achieve success and improve their quality of life. This experience taught me that teaching them how to dream, and to impress upon them that they also needed to invest in that dream by giving all they've got in order to achieve it, is actually doing them more good and would eventually lead to creating a greater impact in their lives. I salute the kind of development workers who are mindful of this and who dedicates time and effort into the whole "enterprise." To me, they are dreamweavers, planting dreams into the heart of people and teaching them to once again hope in the future...
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