It’s been a long time coming.

More than a year ago, at an evening meeting in Barangay Villar, inside the Aetas ancestral domain, we shared our dreams which started with our partnership for Aeta learning and leadership. After a lot of discussion, they agreed on one priority – water for drinking and for irrigation. But the spring source was 100 meters below the plateau where their huts and farms were.

Fortunately, we got to know about the ram pump technology which has been refined and further developed by the Alternative Indigenous Development Foundation Inc.

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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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