AT THE close of the recently-concluded meeting of the African Caribbean Pacific (ACP) European Union meeting in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, the 79 delegates were apprised of the union's aspirations to alleviate poverty and bring prosperity for the region.

Hans Winkler, co-president of the European Union, had stressed that "fighting poverty and bringing prosperity could be achieved through respect for the dignity of the human being, good governance, democracy and the respect for human rights and the rule of law".

Mr Winkler further said, "I think these are the common values that we both share, which are a good basis to build upon in the future".

While the 79 delegates sat there staring at Mr Winkler and listening to his remark, they must have been wondering how those words could be transformed into the reality of sheltering the homeless and creating sustainable sources of livelihood for these families.

As representatives of their nations sent to the conference to find out how poverty could be licked, they returned home with ardent hopes that whatever recommendations they were to discuss later with relevant government agencies would find listening ears and pursued.

They had seen poverty all around, an anomaly that had been with them since they were young kids. So it was about time that the picture of economic deprivation was changed for the better.

In more ways than one, however, their proposals on poverty alleviation would soon gather dust, the same fate that had befallen other ideas in the past. If those well-thought of strategies by the experts many years ago were ever carried out by their respective governments, how come poverty had remained pervasive in their own countries?

But those delegates who came to PNG don't need another elaborate and expensive international junket to take up once more how this social and economic divide could be bridged.

The answer to their quest for a solution could be found in the Philippines - the miracle that is called Gawad Kalinga.

Loosely translated as "to give care", Gawad Kalinga is a community development movement that is raging like forest fire across the country. Through Gawad Kalinga, the private sector, the common people, the professionals, the experts, the students, the small and giant local and top foreign corporations and local government units are working hand in hand to develop new communities and provide decent homes alongside sustainable livelihoods to the country's poor.

Because Gawad Kalinga is quantifiable, it represents a concrete vehicle for change, thus producing concrete results - the number of homes and communities built, the number of hectares of land given or donated, and the number of poor families sheltered and given sustainable sources of income.

Launched only in 2003, the movement to date has developed 731 economically-self-sufficient Gawad Kalinga communities across the Philippines and provided decent homes to 17,144 indigent families - the former squatters - that included our Muslim brothers on the war-torn island of Mindanao.

And everyday the numbers of new homes are increasing, thanks to the growing number of donor-partners from the Philippines and overseas that provided the money and time to help advance the cause of poverty alleviation.

It's main funding arm is a group of Filipino expatriates in the US, Canada, Austalia, Europe and Asia who rallied themselves behind Ancop or A Network of Communities of the Poor with an aggregate available funds of close to US$25 million as of last year waiting to be tapped for building new communities in the Philippines.

The ACP member-countries' community development planners could visit the Philippines, pick one particular Gawad Kalinga Village as their working laboratory and learn from the residents there how such a community built upon a mountain of rubbish could become a sustainable community of happy families who had also regained dignity and pride as human beings.

It was for this reason that last May 19, the Asian Development Bank headquarters in Manila, in partnership with the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), sponsored a "Leadership Enhancement and Advancement Programme". It invited ministers and mid-level executives of local government planning units in six Micronesian countries to a conference focused on both leadership and using that leadership in an environment where poverty is prevalent.

The regional delegates came from Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuato. Specifically, those invited from these countries were the ministers of planning departments, private sector representatives, and leaders of civil society organisations in North Pacific developing countries.

Awed and moved by the miracles that Gawad Kalinga continued to create across the Philippines, ADB had invited as main resource speaker to address the regional audience the movement's founder, Tony Meloto, who is Gawad Kalinga's founder and international executive director.

The ADB course target points were very specific. It wanted the participants:

1) To know practical insights, approaches, and tools to ensure effective implementation of strategic plans and programmes; 2) To develop their own perspectives and models for successful implementation within their respective contexts; and 3) To design action points to enhance implementation of plans and programmes.

ADB had engaged Mr Meloto to share the history, the principles and mechanics of Gawad Kalinga to the officers of other countries afflicted with poverty how a youth programme for Christ in December 1995 grew to become the most successful and dynamic engine of community development in the Philippines.

The institution was aware that the three target points of the workshop course were all well-embodied in the successful implementation of Gawad Kalinga across the Philippines.

ADB wanted the delegates to hear from Mr Meloto stories and learn from them about how one squatter relocation settlement in Metro Manila - the Bagong Silang (newly-born), in Caloocan City - formerly a notorious haven of city criminals, became one of the most successful self-sustaining Gawad Kalinga communities.

Or the once rubbish dumpsite in the city of Manila - the abandoned BASECO (Bataan Shipping and Engineering Co) shipyard - which was converted into a bustling community of close to thousand colourful homes occupied by self-sustaining families who used to be rubbish dump scavengers themselves.

They were only two of more than 700 bustling GK communities around the Philippines and the ADB delegates had the rare opportunity of visiting them at the end of the conference to see for themselves the miraculous transformation since GK came into these two places.

Barely three years since the launch of its bold campaign of GK777 (700,000 homes in 7,000 communities in 7 years), Gawad Kalinga is being recognised by the Philippine government, the business sector, the Church and the media to be a powerful force of change.

It is rapidly transforming the physical, social and cultural landscape of the Philippines.

What drives the flourishing spirit of GK may be summed up in four things:

· First, the movement is fired up by a grand vision that awakens the dying spirit of patriotism that lives in every Filipino. That is why advocates, partners and volunteers of GK work and move with a passion and a love for the Philippines that is infectious.

· Second, GK presents a striking perspective on poverty and human behaviour that surprises even the most stalwarts of sceptics. Its insights strike deep within because they inherently ring true while questioning the very tenets that the modern world has been built upon.

· Third, GK breeds a radical culture. The spirit, the passion and the commitment of its people - the way they move and the way they act - while rooted primarily on Christian values remain generally relevant and true on a universal level because of shared values of nobility and humanity.

· And finally, its operational successes can be attributed likewise to the fact that its inspiration moves equally from the ground up. From the very beginning, the major shifts and major directions of Gawad Kalinga have been led by experiences and realisations from the ground.

GK started out as a youth programme of Couples for Christ (CFC) in December 1995, at one of the biggest squatter re-location areas in Metro Manila - Bagong Silang, Caloocan City. A group led by Tony Meloto, inspired by the call of Christ to serve the poor, initiated a weekend camp among the youth with hopes to rehabilitate gang members and drug addicts raised in the slum areas - to transform them before they become the next-generation criminals of Metro Manila.

It was through their direct and constant contact with the youth, and concurrently, with the communities where they lived that they stumbled upon key insights that made them realise that they were facing an even greater challenge.

The CFC learned that no matter how intensive the rehabilitation of the youth, should they return to live within the same slum community, it would be difficult to expect a sustained transformation of their behaviour. It was imperative then that the solution involves the entire community and hence, the mandate was raised to the transformation of slum environment, community after community, town after town.

To achieve its vision of transforming slums, Gawad Kalinga has mapped out a simple strategy of development in building its communities.

· Land for the landless. It is the aim of GK to provide security of land to each poor family. The poor are driven to squat in the cities and in rural areas because they do not own land to build their own homes. Without security of land, the poor will continue to live under the threat of an uncertain future, bereft of hope, dreams, and aspirations that they could work for.

· Homes for the homeless. By building beautiful, sturdy homes, the basic unit of the society - the family may now be built on solid ground.

· Food for the hungry. A hungry man is an angry man. It is GK's goal to provide each of its GK communities with a food sufficiency programme through either backyard or communal farming and food processing.

· Water for the thirsty. The lack of flowing, clean water may lead to unsanitary conditions and debilitating diseases that strike down primarily the young.

· Light for those in darkness. It is both a practical and pastoral tenet by which GK communities are built upon. Through adequate physical lighting, the living conditions are transformed - children can properly study at home, people can walk the streets without fear.

In Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, a new community of former squatter families is gradually rising up to achieve the economic sustainability that would lift the indigent resident families above poverty. Called the Gerehu-GK Village that was started last year, it will be the template for community development that Gawad Kalinga country will use in building future new GK communities, with funding help from a group called CFC-Ancop-Australia, based in Sydney.

The Gerehu -GK Village has the initial 10 houses now occupied by poor beneficiaries. The next batch of 10 new houses under construction now has been funded by a local GK partner, the supermarket Super Value Store (SVS).

Ancop-Australia will build the rest of the 20 units as soon as the SVS-funded homes have been completed.

This strategy for developing a sustainable community is being seen for the first time in Papua New Guinea where the wailing cry of poverty reverberates from the highlands down to the coastal villages.

It's about time that the PNG Government have a look and learn something from it for the sake of its millions of poor citizens.

Email the writer: jarahdz500@online.net.pg

alfredophernandez@thenational.com.pg

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• Gawad Kalinga - a template for poverty alleviation By Alfredo P. Hernandez
• Out of the Lions' Den By Perfecto Yasay Jr.

Quiplash!    says:

The most recent cluster of human cases of H5N1 infection (bird flu) in a village in northern Sumatra, Indonesia, was remarkable for three very worrying changes to the H5N1 virus:

1. This was the largest cluster of human cases to date (8 people). Another 50 or so are still under observation for development of symptoms.

2. The United Nation's WHO (World Health Organization) has said that human-to-human-to-human infection was likely in this case, where 7 out of 8 people died. The index case (a mother) infected her nephew, who in turn infected his father. Each time the virus makes another "-to-human" link in its chain, it means it is becoming closer to a pandemic virus.

3. A May 31, 2006 report in the reputable scientific journal Nature states that this version of the virus differed from past Indonesia cases, in that the people who were sick and died had much higher viral loads in the throat and nose instead of lower down in their lungs. Of course, this is VERY bad news, since this makes the virus more easily sent from person to person.

Even worse, there appear to be ANOTHER two clusters of human cases in Indonesia:

The first cluster in Pamulang has at least 6 people: a brother and sister have died, and their parents and two more brothers are possibly sick too.

The second cluster is in Bandung/Tasikmalaya--3 siblings became sick and 2 of them have died, and now one of the nurses treating the patients is being treated for bird-flu-like symptoms (health-care workers getting sick is one of the criteria WHO said they would use when raising the pandemic alert level from 3 to 4). Additionally, in the neighboring village 2 people are sick. They may or may not be part of the same cluster.

If you haven't started preparing to self-quarantine in your home with at least 6 weeks of food, water, and medications, now would be a good time to start. DON'T WAIT, DO IT NOW. The last thing you want is to be caught at Costco when the other 95% of the population is prepping all at the same time.
Originally posted at 1:13pm, 2 June 2006 PDT ( permalink )
Quiplash! edited this topic 3 days ago.