Saturday, November 15, 2008 Editorial: Cultural sensitivity
THE United Nations Population Fund just released The State of World Population 2008 report last Wednesday where it underlined cultural sensitivity as key to successful development strategies, gender equality, and protection of human rights.
The report noted that for successful development of poor countries, culture should be a central component.
"Human rights are everybody's work, and being culturally sensitive and understanding the context is everybody's business," Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of UNFPA, was quoted as saying.
There is need for cultural fluency, the familiarity with how cultures work and how to work with cultures, to be able to develop culturally sensitive approaches, the report said.
"Communities have to look at their cultural values and practices and determine whether they impede or promote the realization of human rights. Then, they can build on the positive and change the negative," Ms. Obaid said.
There is much to learn from this report, especially today when the government of this poor country we live in, the Philippines, has set its sights on bringing its idea of development to the lush mountains and mountainsides where our indigenous peoples dwell; the same government that seemingly equates development with bulldozers and massive concrete structures. Where development is pushing aside nature so that the heavy equipment and the clueless tourists can roll in.
This culturally insensitive approach to development is manifested even in ourselves, who may have been living for decades now in Mindanao but haven't even explored the multi-faceted indigenous cultures here beyond the "indak-indak" of the Kadayawan Festivals and the dizzying clanging of the kulintangs inside malls.
Consequently, there is no appreciation of what history, heritage and nature has bequeathed us as we again bulldoze yet another tract of land to put up yet another gasoline station in between dropping some coins in the cans of the indigenous peoples who will soon be coming down because it's the season to walk around the city's streets.
"Culture is not a wall to tear down. It is a window to see through, a door to open to make greater progress for human rights," Obaid said.
How many of us have ever peered into the window of culture and not through our car window as yet another poor lumad taps on it during Christmas. Very few, and that should give us some insight into how we truly see ourselves, our future, our people, and our environment.
One thing is sure, if all we see of our disadvantaged indigenous cultures are those that we glimpse through our car windows, then we will remain in the same trouble as we are now -- an island always at war with its own people.
