FILIPINO OF THE YEAR: ANTONIO MELOTO
Inquirer: 09:14am (Mla time) 01/28/2007
IN the 1980s, the Philippines gave the world People Power—a gift that came forth from Edsa that has kept on bringing democracy the world over.
In the 1990s, there began what the world has come to embrace as the next, necessary, follow-up to People Power as political action. If People Power was a means for reclaiming freedom, something would have to address the need to build a thriving, substantive democracy.
What began in 1999 with an effort to build a single house for the members of the Adduro family, who were living in a shanty of rusted GI sheets, cardboard boxes, plastic sheets and old tires, is now known as Gawad Kalinga. In this first decade of the present century, it has grown to represent the Philippines’ next gift to humanity.
Gawad Kalinga is becoming a global template for development—one that has expanded to Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Cambodia, and that will soon open in East Timor, India, Nigeria and Nicaragua.
And while Gawad Kalinga is about many people, its public face is that of one man: Tony Meloto.
Any person is not only the product of particular circumstances but also the result of institutional forces, of a history that is as much one person’s as it is a nation’s.
The Tony Meloto so proudly pointed out by fellow Filipinos today is the product of the influences of his time, and of previous times.
His circumstances have surely been duplicated in many others, yet are unique in having inspired a way forward for so many. It is a way forward others have tried to find for generations.
Building communities
In internal exile in Dapitan, Jose Rizal set out to build communities—the best preparation, he felt, for a new nation.
The Katipunero Pio Valenzuela claimed that Rizal had once told him: “Tell our countrymen that, at the same time that we are preparing for a war against Spain, I desire to see a college established in Japan which will be converted later into a university for Filipino youths. I shall be greatly pleased to be the director of said college.”
To the end, the First Filipino refused to be the Philippines’ first politician.
What would have happened if the great reformers—Raul Manglapus, Manuel Manahan, Francisco “Soc” Rodrigo, to name just a few—had refused to enter politics and done what Rizal set out to do, and Tony Meloto has done?
In the 1960s, the reformist was scorned (“clerico-fascist” was a term often used). In a sense, the same skepticism continues to reign in radical circles.
But in 1967, the year Meloto entered the Ateneo de Manila, a transformation was taking place. It had its first glimmerings in the “work a year with the people” program to bring doctors to far-flung barangays, which was begun by Manglapus, another Atenean.
And just as Manglapus’ efforts would find political vindication only decades later in the careers of barrio physicians such as Juan Flavier, so did the Gawad Kalinga of today find itself born out of the contradictions of 1960s Philippine society.
Genuine stewardship
Speaking to a younger generation of Ateneans last year, Meloto described the insight he had gained—and, thus, the core belief that now animates Gawad Kalinga.
“Because we love our children, not pity them,” he told his audience, “we do not give them charity and abandon them after doing so. We sacrifice and invest in their future. With the way poverty is growing in this country, they will not be safe or secure here unless we move from charity to genuine Christian stewardship and bring our people out of poverty. Neither will they be whole anywhere in the developed countries, where they will be seen or feel second-class even if they are rich or successful, as long as the Philippines remains poor and corrupt, because we are viewed collectively as a people.”
What Meloto did was to resist the urge to involve only people like himself; what he accomplished was to bring together those previously assumed as mutually incompatible.
When he first began, he worked not to change the nation but, rather, to improve the lives of a few—the Adduros.
In helping them, he did so with concrete goals in mind but a limitless vision nonetheless: If it will work for one family, it will work for many more.
And work for many more it has.
The Adduro model
The Adduros were composed of the father, Enteng, jobless at that time; the mother, Mode, a laundrywoman; and all five of their children. (In 1999, the children were out of school, and two of them were gang members.)
Gawad Kalinga provided Enteng a job. Mode became the head of the neighborhood microfinance effort, and all the children went back to school. Four have since graduated from college (two with a 2-year degree in computer science); the youngest is in his last semester.
The Adduros’ home has expanded through their own efforts to become a 92-square-meter house where once they were content with a 30 sq.m. dwelling of more permanent materials.
Their community, the first Gawad Kalinga community, sponsored by Filipinos from Northern California, has grown to include 2,000 homes in 18 villages in Bagong Silang, Caloocan City—places that provide a decent life for 10,000 Filipinos who thought seven years ago that their lives would never change.
And as Bagong Silang has gone, so has the nation: The 1,000 Gawad Kalinga communities all over the country directly affect the lives of half a million poor Filipinos regardless of location or religious creed. (For example, Christians and Muslims are working side by side in building the 25 Gawad Kalinga communities for Muslims in Mindanao.)
P8B in 8 years
And the army of volunteers who give their time and talents to the cause give so generously that their efforts can now be quantified.
Developmental experts estimate the total development generated by Gawad Kalinga at more than P8 billion in a little over as many years (P3 billion for houses, P0.5 billion for schools, clinics and other infrastructure, P2 billion for land and site development, P2.5 billion for social preparations, donated professional services and volunteerism, programs for health, education and livelihood).
The major sources of funds are corporations and sociocivic groups, the national and local governments, Filipino organizations abroad, schools and universities, and philanthropic families and individuals here and overseas.
While the sources are many, they have common characteristics— they are not subject to graft, are neither liable for misuse nor susceptible to abuse in aid of electioneering, and are devoted to the common good.
And the resources transcend borders. The government of Canada has been giving aid directly to Gawad Kalinga, especially for calamity victims; American companies like AIG USA, Fedex, UPS and Proctor & Gamble send funds from their head offices.
Neither does it for diplomatic or commercial advantage.
View the scale of the resources raised in these comparative terms. The entire budget of the Department of Agrarian Reform (P1.9 billion) plus the capital outlays for the Department of Education (P2.9 billion) plus the budget of the University of the Philippines system (P4 billion): The figure only slightly exceeds what Gawad Kalinga has raised.
Disproving truisms
To understand the significance of Tony Meloto requires seeing that he has disproved two truisms—that change can only come from reforms imposed from above, and that it can only be accomplished through a revolution from below.
He has dispelled an assumption central to both truisms—that change requires force, either political will or force of arms.
He has shown that brute force or pragmatic politics need not trump principles. He does so because he has harnessed People Power to fill in the gaps that politics can never fully address.
Gawad Kalinga is a potent force of 200,000 volunteers—a force that dwarfs the entire strength of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, which is 130,000 strong.
Meloto has mobilized those numbers because he knows that all mobilizations, if they are to last and have a beneficial effect, must appeal to the practical but be based on self-sacrifice.
Partnership, peace
The independent life of our nation has been a story of strife, but people like Tony Meloto have shown that an alternative lies in partnership, and peace.
To be sure, what Meloto set out to do is nothing new. What is new is that he has forged ahead and has something to show for it.
Turning principle into practice, and practice into a recipe for success, is his authentic, trailblazing, achievement.
