A trip to the Philippines

A while between posts thanks to a continued strenuous travel schedule. Combining work travel with ICM travel can be a bit of a challenge. Anyway, I thought you might all be interested in one of my recent trips to the Philippines working with ICM. David Sutherland (Chair of the ICM board and a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley) and I travelled to the Philippines to meet with a variety of people in a variety of places. We arrived in Manila on Thursday afternoon, and spent the evening meeting with the ICM executive team in the Philippines. It is always an interesting collision of cultures when people used to working in Investment Banks work with those serving the poor in the slums. Generally always a positive learning experience for us (in many ways), and this meeting was no exception. We were spending time before our budget meetings (coming shortley) discussing the vision for the future. How we continue to improve our programs, what things we do well, what things need to change. So many ideas, but so few that we can practically implement. On the Friday morning we met with Dylan Wilk from another NGO in the Philippines called Gawad Kalinga (GK) specialising in slum re-building. If you have time, checkout their website: http://www.gawadkalinga.org/ We were meeting with Dylan as we are doing our best to strike a partnership between ICM and GK. This partnership has great potential, but comes with great challenges. For example, GK is an organisation stemming from the Catholic organisation "Couples for Christ". From my experience a wonderful Christian group. Unfortunately co-operation between protestants (such as the ICM team) and Catholics in the Philippines can be difficult (to say the least). We believe the meeting was one further step forward in this reconciliation, and in the eventual partnership we hope to form. We are looking to completely re-build one of the worst slums in the Philippines. The slum is in Bacolod City (Google Earth directions - "Bacolod" lat=10.674907, lon=122.951934) and is across the road from the original home of ICM. If you scroll in on google earth you can see the many slum dwellings. After this meeting I met with a man who was suggested as a good contact in relation to our potential move to the Philippines. He currently sells helicopters across the Philippines, and has opened a call centre and is in the process of opening a McDonalds in Dumaguete (the most likely city we would move to). This was a very encouraging meeting for many reasons. Not the least of which was that we got some comfort that if we moved, life for the kids wouldn't be too bad as there are a number of quite good schools in that city. It was also very interesting to me as I have been considering opening a small IT development centre to provide a level of income while we live there. He was very interested in a possible partnership - so there is potential ! In the afternoon on the Friday we met with a fabulous woman, Ruth Calinta, who runs a micro-lending organisation called "the Centre for Community Transformation" (CCT). Check out their website if you're interested http://cct.org.ph/. Again the purpose of this meeting is to organise a partnership to strengthen the work of both organisations. CCT specialises in micro-loans to what are considered "the entrepenerial poor", however have rarely tried to deal with the "ultra poor". ICM deals almost entirely with the ultra poor. The ICM program selects the poorest 25 families from a community. These families join the "feeding program". This program aims to provide food and eduction (spiritual and health) for a period of 6 months. We see great change in these people. They come into the program without hope, and finish the program with hope. It is at this point that we desire to give these people opportunity to join the CCT program. Given the number of people we reach each year, we (and CCT) are very excited about the potential of this program. On the Saturday we flew down to General Santos city in Mindanao. Our goal was to meet with local government who had been assisting us with various ventures in that city. In particular we have recently opened a computer training school aimed at teaching a well recognised qualification to homeless "street kids". The mayor of General Santos was kind enough to meet with us and we better still, we had some outstanding meetings for the majority of the day with the head of the local Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). We were very encouraged by the openess of the DSWD to work with us - in particular in relation to the schools we plan to open in that area. Then on Sunday we flew from General Santos (missing out on bombings and racial troubles) to Bacolod City. We went to a local church, met with a number of the elders and then met with a local businessman (Bob) who is very involved in GK. We talked at great length about how to move the slum reconstruction program ahead. Initially, the government had committed 1 hectare of land for this purpose (which was a start - but not enough). Recently, out of nowhere, the government granted another 5 hectares for this project. Very exciting. Bob was a genuinely brilliant man, and we could see why this program was moving forward. Bob then asked us to come to dinner on the following night with the Mayor of Bacolod. While this was a short meeting, it was helpful for the foreigners (us) to demonstrate our intent and commitment to the mayor in the hope of return commitment. Its coming up to election time there and so commitments are coming thick and fast. Finally, on Monday we drove for several hours into the mountains for the formal opening of the Don Salvador Benedicto (DSB) Integrated Farming School. This is a venture targeting the rural poor with the hope of educating them to better utilise the land they have access to. The vice mayor of DSB attended the ceremony, as did many of the local town leaders (referred to as Barangay Captains). This was great as we have had problems with some of these people in the past, so a showing of support was helpful. Tuesday, we flew back to Hong Kong and went directly to work. A well deserved rest. Anyway, I thought I'd log this on the blog as it was a very exciting trip for me. Many great hopes being built of the partnerships we can achieve and therefore the help we can give to the poor. God Bless Harry