Posting some pictures for a workshop on Alternative Learning System in Edinburgh.

Using the “Context-Content-Method” framework we developed in 1986-87 for popular education, one of the contexts I selected is “sustainable development of Aetas’ ancestral domain.”

I visited Barangay Villar inside the ancestral domain. In a community assembly, Barangay Chairman Palab identified water supply as their most important need. I told them about the ram pump technology developed by Auke Idzenga (who would later win the Magsaysay Award for his work).

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What happened at 10:30 pm on June 15, twenty years ago?

In fact, something stopped happening at that hour, on that date. According to scientists, that was the official end of the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo.

What happened since then has become part of one  “most significant story”  in my life – my lifelong journeying with the Aetas, the “first people” of the Philippines.

The eruption forced the Aetas to leave their homes, farms,  and hunting grounds on the  slopes of Mt. Pinatubo.

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Christopher “Butog”Domulot is a young Aeta who has been studying at the Asian Rural Institute in Japan. In a few weeks, he will be returning to the Philippines, to apply what he has learned. The following is his last “morning talk” to his classmates at ARI.

At this time I want to be slightly serious in as much as this is my last morning gathering. Everyone knows I’m naughty. Yes I admit that I acted as a naughty boy. But this is my own way to express my closeness with other people and provide little comfort though.

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For two days and two nights, I had a non-stop conversation with Aeta leaders of LAKAS and PBAZ inside their ancestral domain.

We planned our trip to be a “visioning walk and talk,” and we did talk a lot about the future. But our conversations also shuttled back and forth, to the past, the present, and the future.

That may be the reason why on the first night, before falling asleep in the hut of Mulo, I recalled Philip Zimbardo’s book The Time Paradox. His thesis is that people can have three time perspectives: Past-oriented, present oriented, or future-oriented.

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October 11-12, I joined 25 Aeta leaders of LAKAS and PBAZ to visit their ancestral domain. We crossed the river of mud and lahar on a three-hour trip to Barangay Villar, and had an evening assembly to discuss their priorities. The next morning, we went on a two-hour hike to Yamot, one of their original sitios, to visit the hot springs where they want to plant a sacred grove and build cottages for a Wellness Center.

Last stream to cross before Barangay Villar and a welcome merienda of camote and cassava

We went down to a spring water source of drinking water, the priority of the barangay.

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