'I Want a School for the Lumads' …michael bengwayan

I Want a School for the Lumads

…michael bengwayan

One working morning  in the hinterlands of Marilog, Davao in 2014, I watched the boys bring down the basket we raise on a high bamboo pole that contained our cellphones (to be able to get signal). One of the youngsters handed me my phone saying  “Sir, may message po kayo”

The message was from the Vice President for Environmental Operations of Aboitiz Power , Socorro Patindol. It said, ”Big Boss Erramon I. Aboitiz,  Chief Executive Officer and Director of Aboitiz Power wants you to join him for dinner tonight”.

Now I work in the mountains of Namnam, some three  and a half hours away from the city center and evenings, one can get stuck in Davao city’s traffic. I have to hike some two hours to get to the Bukidnon-Davao (Buda) highway in Marahan, meet my driver at Nanay Soleng Duterte’s (mom of PRRD) farmers’ training center  (put up by the gov’t of Brunei) where most of my things are.  It meant  I had to start going back  that very morning to Davao city to my hotel if I am to scrub and be clean for dinner.

I bid my cats, chicken, trees and vegetable plants goodbye…be going back to Baguio the day after , “see you guys after a week”. I left my shanty open. It is always open to welcome anyone.

I know nothing of restaurants, of expensive food and menu I could hardly spell or pronounce so when my driver Anthony said we were to meet Don Ramon  Aboitiz in an expensive Japanese restaurant , I was as naïve as a sheep to a slaughter.

The top brass of Aboitiz Power were there,  big names, powerful and elite. I kept mum most of the time. I was seated next to the Big Boss himself.  All of a sudden , amid the cacophony of discordant conversational voices and food fit for kings,  he asked me, “Dr. Michael, what would you want the Lumads in your area to immediately have?”

I  thought of the barefoot young girls and boys,  taught by a volunteer  under a torn canvass and dilapidated GI  sheets that barely can protect them from the tormenting heat and rain. Children deprived of education because the nearest school was destroyed by an earthquake and landslide, the next nearest school some 16 km. away.  I thought of those kids.

“I  want a school for the children. Build them a school”, I told Don Ramon Aboitiz.

Aboitiz turned to one high ranking Aboitiz Mindanao officer whose name escaped me. “Build them that school,” he ordered. “In less than a year”,  he stressed.

In 2015, nine months after the dinner, the two million pesos worth of school enough for 40 children, complete with a farmers’ storeroom, kitchen, toilets  and powered by solar energy to energize lights, a computer set and  generator was completed.

I looked at the school and the apprehensive school children. It was a good day. 

God is good.