Tsinelas.org - Articles

Undaunted that the association did not have a centavo to its name when it consulted the Lut-od community last summer, the core group of eight professionals dipped into their own pockets and approached “friends and friends of friends.”“CUADERNO (notebook).”

This was a grandmother’s answer to a volunteer group that asked how they could help high school students in Lut-od, a farming community three kilometers off the poblacion of Pinamungajan, south of Cebu.

Josephine Villa said that the students’ needs—classmates shared a ballpen, students brought makeshift chairs--made her group realize that the absence of basics masks a worse inequity: the deprivation of education and a chance for self-upliftment.

The Tsinelas Association Inc. moved to plug this lack. Undaunted that the association did not have a centavo to its name when it consulted the Lut-od community last summer, the core group of eight professionals dipped into their own pockets and approached “friends and friends of friends.” The group’s faith in people’s “abundance in kind and spirit” was affirmed when last June, the association facilitated 10 scholarships for Lut-od National High School, notebooks and other basics for all its 198 students, with enough to spare for students in other deprived mountain barangays.

Reflecting that everyone has the right to education, Villa stressed a sentiment shared by the founding members of Tsinelas Association Inc.: the help extended shall not burden the recipient with any obligation to the giver.

However, Tsinelas secretary Annie Tenebro recalled a student volunteer wondering about other effects of the aid on Lut-od residents’ self-worth. Tenebro said that it is the association’s overarching intent to remove perceptions of inferiority, self-pity and dependence in the students. She added that the association’s thrust in recruitment is addressed at involving volunteers who can help in the “holistic formation of the students through values formation and personality development seminars.”

If there is one indispensable lesson that can be distilled from decades of government and non-government efforts to alleviate poverty, it is that self-help is the only sustainable form of development.

While philanthropy, volunteerism and corporate responsibility are unrivalled in the mobilization of resources, the community’s participation is crucial for maintaining that it is authentic development—not a deceptive dependence—that is taking place. Workers have argued that even language has to be sensitive to these nuances. Viewing the poor as “partners in development,” not “targets of,” is not just strategic but authentic in affirming that even those who are marginalized are not too debased to help themselves.

While material assistance is essential during the early stages of assistance to meet immediate needs, individuals and organizations must realize that they can help best by working towards the obsolescence of their intervention. This does not only foster independence in the assisted but frees up resources needed by other marginalized communities.

Partners should encourage a community to participate in all phases: from articulating and prioritizing needs to identifying solutions, contributing their counterpart (in terms of commitment and available resources), networking with other institutions, and monitoring their organizational development.

People’s involvement does not only affirm that their decisions count, their stake is personal (for the individual) and political (for the group). In shaping their own future, a community gives this process its moral mooring: their values, ideals and aspirations.

Development debacles underscore that a material improvement does not automatically reflect in an improved way of life. More money from the farm will more likely buy a karaoke player, not books. A fishermen’s cooperative can survive the rough seas of organizational formation, only to fall prey to a local fondness for cards and bag-ong dawat (sweet, newly harvested coconut wine).
More than the resources and time they shower on their partners, groups like Tsinelas Association Inc. will be tested by their advocacy: their success in steering Lut-od residents past the shoals and depths of seeking their authentic selves.



By Mayette Q. Tabada
Sun.Star Cebu, September 6, 2004