Hustling Over Veggies

Tagaytay’s tracks and motivating profile...

It is one of the barangays of Magsaysay in province of Davao del Sur. It has a total land area of 1,433 hectares. The soil type is clay and sandy loam, which is best, suited to agriculture. The area is 10-20 percent rolling and 70 percent mountainous. The barangay’s water resource includes nine rivers, 16 creeks and 13 springs.

The barangay has 213 households with an average family size of six. The community is composed of five tribal groups namely: B’laan, T’boli, Bagobo, Kalagan and Manobo. The dialect spoken by the people is B'laan although majority could also understand and speak Cebuano. Six in every 10 persons of the community are literate, being able to read and write at least in the dialect. The high illiteracy rate, poor health services, unsafe sources of drinking water reinforced the sorry state of the people in Tagaytay.

The predominant diseases that oftentimes led to death in the area include malaria, diarrhea, cough and colds with fever, ulcer and pneumonia. The barangay has one complete primary school with only four teachers serving grade school. It also suffers occasional flash floods and soil erosion due to denuded forests.

At the onset of development, problems and concerns on economic enterprise were noted to include the following: insufficient capital to start a business; inadequate alternative source of income other than farming; ineffective trading and marketing support; lack of transportation facility to market farm products and lack of farm to market road. The farmers also mentioned that there are some agri-infrastructure needs that have to be addressed. These include post harvest facilities, warehouse, solar drier, corn mills, and irrigation system and spring development. These needs somehow impede in the economic and agricultural production of the community. As a result, the agri-production is low thereby affecting the income of the farmers.

Despite the odds…

“Hustling over a vegetable enterprise, despite the odds” is a fitting description of the Tagaytay experience. To hustle is to toil and work. This is what TUFAWA, the upland barangay association in Tagaytay did. Theirs is a story of how people manage to organize and unite to address their issues and concerns. However, the road to development is not easy for there are challenges to meet along the way.

The association was organized in 2000 under the auspices of the UDP and was officially registered in the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004. It operates as an association offering loans and savings services to farmers and workers. It has a membership of 190 people mostly belonging to B’laan tribe and distributed among four sitios.
Through UDP assistance, the association has formulated its vision and goal statements. The association conducted trainings and activities along diversified farming system and agro-forestry. These trainings made the barangay residents realized the importance of protecting and restoring the environment while at the same time promote and develop sustainable farming system and eventually increase farm income. Presently, the association offers vegetable production loans to farmer members. It collects the loan through its selling scheme of P1.00 per kilogram of vegetables. Other than this, it has a current cash position of P12, 000 pesos generated from the labor payments in the road rehabilitation activity funded by UDP.

The association took charge of implementing the various activities jointly planned by the different stakeholders in the community with technical and financial assistance from UDP. Among the projects it implemented include the rehabilitation of the farm to market road and the barangay foot trail.

The business development and planning workshops resulted to the development of a business plan entitled the “TUFAWA Vegetable Production and Marketing Enterprise” as well as the formulation of the operation manual. The system installation and coaching facilitated major activities and installed the appropriate system, which includes simple recording and bookkeeping for officers and members become familiarize with the actual business transactions.

In its first three months of operation, the trading center has facilitated the trading of vegetable with an average 16 tons of vegetables monthly. This operation of the trading center was made possible due to the enforcement of the municipal ordinance requiring all agricultural commodities coming from the other barangays to be traded at the ‘Bagsakan.’ The same ordinance requires all traders/ producers conveying vegetables through the municipality to present a pass slip from the trading center.

A significant portion of the vegetable supply from the producing areas is traded and consumed locally while the surplus is marketed directly to Davao City, bypassing both Bansalan and Digos City.

In the assessment study conducted, it was revealed that Tagaytay is a producer of a range of vegetables that have sufficient market demand. Production scales maybe relatively small but there is still much room for expansion both in terms of potential production areas as well as market absorption capacity.

At present, it is apparent that TUFAWA does not have the requisite capacity to effectively engage in a vegetable trading despite the enthusiasm, willingness and the presence of entrepreneurial additives. But the community’s dream and willingness to pursue are still on.

The Last Temptation of Christ

The Last Temptation of Christ
Originally uploaded by vince3166

When I was young at 16 going on 18, I was suffering to become legal. To be officially permitted by my parents to do things my way. Sometime when the going gets tough at the university I wouldn’t be compelled to hear mass on Sundays. My weekends should be reserved for me to do some making up to whatever I think is necessary. It would be my own freewill whether to attend church. They wouldn’t think as if, I’m sacrilegious when I couldn’t make it. I thought that part of my struggle is profoundly normal, and as parents they should understand me and love me even more. I’d assured them of the hope they pinned on me.

What this has got to do with Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ? Well, they said, we all have our crosses to bear. I’d got the book The Last Temptation…actually it was loaned to me by a professor at my creative literature class. The novel seemed to me the effort of an ordinary man to understand Christ’s sacrifices as an insider and to experience it as his own. In order to speak to us, Jesuses or Jesi (?) since he only become Christ after crucifixion, must be made to bear the infirmities of modern times-the doubt, the angst, the fear and trembling, the existential dread, and yes, even the sexual obsessive-ness. At this age of complacency Christ must be tempted not only by evil desires but by the possibility of a life of ordinary pleasure as well-not only by extravagance but also by the life of middle-class satisfactions.

As it was customary in my family to eat together every Sunday after hearing mass, they reiterated the sermon to me since I was absent, as usual. They told me that the officiating priest berated a movie, The Last Temptation of Christ (I’m writing a separate review on this). They said the priest also told them that the author of the book from where the movie is adapted was excommunicated by the Greek Orthodox Church. As Roman Catholics, even if I pointed out that they couldn't be because we're Filipinos they still insisted to be called as such, they warned us not to watch the movie. They’re infuriated even more when they saw me reading it, they implicitly understood me, and, they hated me? I said to myself that the controversy was somehow helping to make it a bestseller.

I knew that their reaction was temporary since I knew they couldn’t forsake me for so long. I was constrained to read the novel to the finish. It seemed astonishing though that in this time of too much self-assertion and spiritual greed, of increasing list of rights and escalating demands for titles, the theme of self-sacrifice should be so clearly presented, without regret, without disdain, without trivializing. I and many readers of the book have shared these experiences to some extent and it could seem odd that Christians (I’m inactive at that time) should want to condemn the works that brought that about.