Barangay Pananawan, Masbate

To reach Barangay Pananawan, one must travel down a long, lonely dirt road to the south western coast of Masbate and then take a short banca ride through a thick mangrove. Here, some 345 families live on the edge of the Visayan Sea. In their coastal isolation, they make their livings mostly by fishing in nearby waters or farming in the interior mountains.

Among the barangay residents is Rose Marie Cabigas. A 40-year-old housewife, Rose Marie devotes her time to her eight children including 7-year-old Eugene and 4-year old Seny Rose. A typically curious second grader, Eugene enjoys his lessons in the nearby elementary school and also makes time for his favourite past-time, drawing. Like any other boy, he enjoys climbing trees with his friends and recently had to be taken to the health centre for a nasty fall from one of his latest adventures. With shy eyes covered by brown hair lightened by the sun and sea, Eugene was also born without legs and must pull himself across the hot, stony ground of the village on his thin arms.

Rose Marie’s husband, Senin, tills the land of a non-resident of Panan-awan, earning a percentage of the rice palay harvest. When the season begins to slow down, he also fishes and looks for odd jobs to help put food on the table. Recently however, he has had to leave Rose Marie and the younger ones to attend to the burial of his mother in another island.

While previously, Rose Marie might not know where her and her family’s next meal might come from, she now breathes a little easier with the assistance extended to her from the government’s Filipino Family Social Welfare program (4P) and conditional cash transfer (CCT) initiative. Since December 2008, Rose Marie has been receiving P1400 ($28) a month as part of the government’s conditional cash transfer program.

“It’s a big burden off my shoulders. I no longer have to borrow money to just buy even the necessities,” Rose Marie says in Cebuano. While empty fishing nets would have meant that Eugene, Seny Rose and their siblings would have had to go to bed hungry, Rose Marie can now always make sure that the family has at least three meals a day.

In addition to food, Rose Marie has also been able to pay her children’s tuition fees for the coming term, buy the necessary school supplies and medicines for her family. While Eugene is excited to return to class with his clean new notebooks, his little sister Seny Rose will begin attending the newly built day care centre in the village.

With additional guidance coming from parental effectiveness and financial literacy seminars, Rose Marie has also been able to set aside a small amount each week. “I save about 20 pesos a week, every Saturday. I’d like to be able to save more as time goes by. Maybe 50 pesos a week, and then maybe even P100 a week. But no Saturday goes by that I don’t set aside at least P20,” Rose Marie says.

Her dream is to finish building their little wooden home and hopefully begin a business, such as selling food. She also hopes that a high school will soon rise in or closer to their barangay before Eugene graduates so that he won’t have a difficult time travelling to attend school in the neighbouring village. In the meantime, she hopes to find a pair of crutches for Eugene so he can move around more easily and build his self-confidence. Although Eugene enjoys school and his teachers single him out for his enthusiasm, he is also a sensitive boy not immune to the teasing of his classmates. Sometimes, he would rather stay at home to avoid their hurtful remarks, Rose Marie says.

While the future is still uncertain, Rose Marie is more confident about facing the challenges ahead with the skills and attitudes being fostered and developed by seminars implemented by UNICEF together with the CCT program. Even though two older children had to stop school to help their father, Rose Marie is now confident that Eugene and Seny Rose will be able to complete their studies.

“We’ll become more used to handling money and when the 4Ps is finished, I think we’ll know what to do,” she said.

However, while the CCT program is helping some families such as Rose Marie focus on the future; some families are still overwhelmed by their current situations.
Delia Moralde and her husband Domingo live in a small hut along with their nine children near the village’s coastline. Their hut is divided into two sections; a sleeping area and a cooking area. Firewood is stacked on one end of the home, near a crude oven. Thin native chickens pick at fallen grains of rice on the dirt floor and used foil sachets plucked from the sea have been placed strategically between beams to support the makeshift roof. Inside the sleeping area, an elevated portion of the hut blocked off by horizontal wooden planks, seven-year old Arnel lies stretched out observing the sights around him. The size of a one-year old, Arnel was born with Down Syndrome and is unable to walk or talk. While survival continues to be a challenge for the Moraldes, the family at least now has a fighting chance. Before the introduction of the cash grants, six of their children died due to preventable causes such as measles and hepatitis. Now, all their children have been fully immunized.

Domingo earns about P150 a week, mostly by ferrying people up and down the estuary and to nearby islands. Lately, however Domingo has been sick and unable to earn the needed funds to keep his family afloat. While Delia receives P1400 a month in assistance, the money is already stretched to pay for her children’s food and schooling and to take care of Arnel.

Delia however tries to ensure that they always have rice, which she mixes with corn to feed the family. A large portion of the assistance meantime goes to buying sterilized milk for Arnel who is unable to digest solid foods. Out of the P7000 she received in the last five months, P4000 has gone towards the children’s tuition fees, supplies, and clothes while the rest went for food. With all the financial pressures bearing down on her to simply get through another day, Delia has no opportunity to save even a fraction of her funds.

Sensing her parents’ helplessness meantime, Baby, their 16-year-old daughter who is in the fifth grade says that she would like to stop her schooling so she can work as a helper in the city to earn some money for her family and herself. Baby and other adolescents like her, are the target of UNICEF life skills seminars that aim to prepare potential migrants to live and work in the country’s larger, congested cities where trafficking and child exploitation still run rampant. Aside from instilling “street smarts” in the children, the seminars would also provide vocational skills training to expand their job options beyond the realm of domestic help.

When asked what their dreams are, Delia and Domingo just laugh sheepishly, searching the air for answers before settling into silence with resigned smiles on their faces. When the assistance stops coming, they’ll just do whatever it takes to survive, Delia finally says quietly. In the meantime, dreams for the future have no place in this seaside hut, where every ounce of energy and resources must go towards getting through the day.

Delia and Rose Marie are just two of more than 100 CCT beneficiaries in Barangay Panan-awan. But more than just the beneficiaries themselves, the community as a whole is benefitting from the social welfare program and the values they promote. For example, Barangay Panan-awan officials have become more receptive to new ways of improving their community and are no longer deterred by obstacles to pursue the important projects that will benefit the families of Panan-awan. Even the youth are getting involved with the SK willing to put up a P50,000 counterpart for the renovation and construction of school rooms in the community. Barangay officials meantime are also gaining valuable experience in resource mobilization, planning and collaborating with different levels of government.

With the CCT helping to provide for many of the families’ basic needs and stirring a spirit of entrepreneurialism and a new realization that the cycle of poverty can be broken, Barangay Panan-awan is a village hungry to develop themselves and use the help they’ve been given to become more self-reliant.