"WHEN things are investigated, then true knowledge is achieved; when true knowledge is achieved, then the will becomes sincere; when the will is sincere, then the heart is set right; when the heart is set right, then the personal life is cultivated; when the personal life is cultivated, then the family life is regulated; when the family life is regulated, then the national life is orderly; and when the national life is orderly, then there is peace in this world." ~ Confucius
Social and community problems are complex and require many different interventions.
In the Cordillera and through the IFAD-funded Second Cordillera Highland Agricultural Resources Management Project (CHARMP2), we have indeed become all too wary with the “one-size-fits-all quick-fixes” mentality in rural development that does not work in our mountain communities.
The CHARMP2 was designed and tailored to the entire system of development work in marginal highland communities based on broad-based stakeholder engagement rather than a handful of authoritative voices.
Early on, the project required our community development workers to be flexible and innovative.
Nobody said the implementation of the project was going to be easy. Since most of us come from the Project’s coverage communities, we understood that we have to work with our knees too.
More important experts from outside engaged by the project, did not take the “social divisions and factions” within, whether artificial or normal, against the locals and natives. Anywhere in the Philippines, these social and geographical conditions exist and it is anti-community development to use it to advance personal or group ambition, ideology or sentiment.
“Best practice,” is a concept ingrained in the early language of my being, what we refer to as, “gawis ay ikkan wenno angnen,” in English, “good ways and practices to pursue.”
Learning and understanding “best practices” as a tool for community development work from the perspective of a development project is rather new to me.
At the CHARMP2, we embraced the concept to “contribute to the improvement of system performance and outcomes through effective knowledge management (KM) in highland agriculture development” Furthermore, its utility seeks “to maximize the impact of explicit and tacit knowledge, including agricultural research and experiential knowledge, through effective knowledge sharing and application.”
In our practice, best practice is defined as “a technique or methodology that, through experience and research, has proven reliably to lead to a desired result.” It appeals to “knowledge about what works in specific situations and contexts, without using inordinate resources to achieve the desired results, and which can be used to develop and implement solutions adapted to similar agricultural development problems in other situations and contexts.”
The pursuit of best practices encourages the acquisition of knowledge about lessons learned and to continue learning about how to improve and adapt strategies and activities that could be related to the implementation of programs, projects, policies, legislation, strategies, activities, manual of operation, among others.
Walfredo R. Rola, PhD and University of the Philippines (UP) economics professors, in coaching the CHARMP2 in documenting its best practices said that the study of “best practices” and their practice enable rural and community development workers to: Avoid “re-inventing the wheel;” Learn in order to improve performance; and, Avoid the mistakes of others.”
I reckon the evolution of best practices in rural and community development in the Cordillera was and is never easy. It is encouraged by adventure and the quest for meanings. It is experienced and acquired in sweat, blood and tears. The best and real ones are gained by groups of people than individual achievement.
Most often we feel inadequacy in our desire to explore and document best practices from past experiences and activities. It normally comes with the desire to highlight best practices in developing communities in simple, pure but sublime expressions that teach, captures and influences the interest of the reader in the pursuit of sustainable and best ways of mountain living.
Personally, what I feel in this endeavor makes me cry and at times, sets my imagination to theorizing on how the mountains were first inaccessible and foreboding. I see our early ancestors settling them in their lonesome or in droves, pressing deeper and deeper in uncontaminated lands.
The way my grandfather settled on a plateau informs me how it all began, first by building a log cabin to satisfy an inner need to live in the spare beauty and abundance of a plateau – a constant and abiding moral, physical, spiritual beauty of land and life – a lofty green space of worship and sublimity shared by birds and wild life in the middle of endless towering mountains.
Second, he built rice terraces and garden patches; and third, brought his wife and children to live with him.
But why did he go there? Why did he remove himself away from the usual human community in exchange for the absolute?
The absolute that he highlighted in this enterprise brings to mind the community of Tacadang in Kibungan, Benguet and all the other inaccessible communities of the Cordillera until now. These places can only be reached by strong healthy limbs, heart and great will. It is always a great surprise and awesome to discover these places for the first time, the houses and how the people rebuilt a harsh land to feed and house its occupants. To go and live there can only be the great adventure of the hike, deep and pure as infinity, the eternal round of sky and rock, a universe of plunging heights and deeps, life and death, joys and sorrow and lots of prayer.
The quest for best practice goes on with its cycles of beginnings and ends in the same setting in our mountains. The language of these experiences is about change transmitted to satisfy the acquisition of more knowledge. With more of them documented and coming, they lose their taste and meaning. If its food, I did not like it prepared and served to me buffet style, grabbed from the refrigerator, or poured instantly from cans.
Best practices as human experiences are parables of good living whose flavor comes in the life of prayer, as the old folks have known them in the “I-thou” first person relationships they had with the spirit world and fellow human beings, seen in their expressions with the beloved (Son-Mom; daughter-dad; God-man) that develop the human condition.
The essential sauce of this life and its language that makes it special and uniquely Cordilleran in its mountain setting is constant hunger, bruises, sunburns, aching muscles, thirst, crystal clear waters, cool refreshing wind, a sense of failure transformed into success, and unceasing appeals to the “seen and unseen.” This is mixed with the touch of loved ones, and happy faces contributing to the plowing of the land, the grilling and cooking of memorable meals of existence beside the rice fields, rivers, or on top of the rocks.
The current outlook of course prevail: more information, more publicity in a language of description and persuasion – explaining what was there, urging what could be – the language developed and used in schools - language that sometimes make us assume people come to our gatherings to hear and listen to our enlightening speech and compositions.
No they don’t.
In the Church, convicted believers do not actually come to hear sermons by the priest or pastor. They come to learn how to talk, or how to pray to God their father. In the halls of learning, we better realize that people gather to learn how to live out of the experiences they share with each other in the language of prayer (“I-thou”).
In talking about best practice and doing something that matter for others, it is best to think like the way Confucius does: “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance,” he said.