HOW did the small town of San Remigio manage to feed a multitude?
In a one-storey building just 7 x 20 meters in size, the centralized kitchen at the San Remigio Central School in Barangay Poblacion cooks for 2,640 children in 11 of the town’s 27 barangays.
“It was the Industrial Arts building for the Grade 5 and 6 students. We just transferred the students because the building didn’t contain any tools for the building of crafts anyway,” said school principal Alan Tubigon in a mix of English and Cebuano.
It was last year that the town embarked on the ambitious program to feed 5,256 children daily in its 27 barangays under the Kusina sa Kahimsug ug Pag-amuma (KKP), a Gawad Kalinga program anchored on the use of a centralized kitchen.
The town split the job between two schools: this one in the northwestern tip of the town, and the other one in Barangay Tambongon closer to the town’s center.
Operations
Gawad Kalinga team leader Aiza Lampera said each kitchen has five people: four from the local government unit (LGU) and one cook from Gawad Kalinga.
Workers from the LGU chop the vegetables, pack the meals and clean the area with the help of 15 volunteers who are beneficiaries of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) and the Modified Conditional Cash Transfer (MCCT) program, both conditional cash transfer anti-poverty programs of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).
Pantawid beneficiaries are households that belong to the poorest of the poor, had a pregnant woman, and children zero to 18 years old at the time of the National Household Targeting System survey, and commit to meet the conditions for receiving the program’s monthly education and health grants.
MCCT beneficiaries, on the other hand, are families in need of special protection, including street families, indigenous peoples in Geographically Isolated and Disadvantaged Areas, families with a person with disability, and families displaced by disasters.
The volunteers are transported to the site by their barangay officials.
Each kitchen has 10 burners, cauldrons and two rice steamers.
Lampera said the 20 healthy recipes rotated—with the meat component being chicken, fish, then pork—over the 120-day feeding period have kamunggay (moringa) as a staple ingredient.
Kamunggay is considered a “superfood” for being rich in Vitamins A, C and E, potassium, phosphorus, iron, protein, calcium, fiber and anti-oxidants.
Kitchen operations run from 3 to 11 a.m. Dispatch starts before 8 a.m. because some day care centers have sessions until 10 a.m. only.
Better attendance
Tubigon said the feeding had improved the attendance of the children in his school.
“For our identified wasted and severely wasted children, the number one reason for their absences was the lack of food. Before the feeding, the children would have an absence every week. But with the feeding, they would now skip class only if they weren’t feeling well. The children now come daily because their parents also prod them to come to school because of the feeding,” he said.
More than 100 wasted and severely wasted (too thin for their height) children from Grades 2-6 in his school joined the feeding. Including the kindergarten and Grade 1 children, whose feeding was universal, the number of the children covered in the school was about 200 in school year 2017-2018.
After the feeding, he said, the wasted now had normal weight, while the severely wasted had improved to merely being wasted.
But Tubigon said it would be better if the feeding could be done the whole year round because their experience for years now has been that when the school feeding ends in March, the children are fine. But on their return from their two-month school break, they are wasted again.
Teaching parents
He suggested that Gawad Kalinga (GK) educate the parents on low-cost, nutritious food they could serve their children from ingredients accessible in their immediate surroundings.
“Vegetables are supposed to be readily available in their homes, but there are some parents who won’t plant even just kamunggay,” he said, shaking his head.
In the mornings especially, parents prefer to just serve something instant, like noodles, he said.
Instant noodles are loaded with sodium, saturated fat and additives, including preservatives, increasing one’s risk of developing heart disease and diabetes, say Harvard University researchers.
Lampera said GK would have an orientation with partners in every school this school year, with GK sharing the recipes it prepares under the KKP program with the parents.
Tubigon said the children’s malnutrition was also linked to their parents’ lack of values.
“Most of our beneficiaries are beneficiaries also of Pantawid,” he said. “In Pantawid, isn’t there P500 per family for the food sustenance of the children? But instead of going to the child, it seems it is being used as a source of income for the whole family. One even bought a TV with it.”
“Some Pantawid beneficiaries even pawn their cash cards, so that when it is time for the payout, all they do is sign but someone else collects the money. The money is supposed to be spent for the child’s health, nutrition and education,” he lamented.
“If there had been better monitoring of the Pantawid beneficiaries, the children would have benefited,” he said. “They are required to go to the health center monthly to monitor the child’s health.”
Not our children
Emmalyn Morada, family development focal person of the Pantawid program in the DSWD 7, replied: “We’ll still need to validate if those children are really Pantawid beneficiaries. The program started some 10 years ago, so more than 70 percent of Pantawid children in Central Visayas would already be in late elementary school or high school by now.”
DSWD 7 officials said the Pantawid program in Cebu started in Cebu City in 2008, later expanding to other cities and towns in Cebu in 2009, 2010 and 2011.
They said the wasted children might be part of Pantawid households but not be the child beneficiaries themselves. There is a limit of three children per household for inclusion in the program.
But Pantawid regional program coordinator Raquel Enriquez said that in Cebu Province, 327 Pantawid households had “severely underweight” children 0-5 years old, based on the Social Welfare and Development Indicators (SWDI) 2016 results, its latest SWDI results.
Underweight is determined by measuring weight for age.
Morada also clarified that while the education grant of P300/month/elementary school child or P500/month/high school child was intended for the children who attended classes at least 85 percent of the time, the P500 a month subsidy was a separate grant intended for the whole household.
The household gets the P500 health grant if it avails itself of all the health center’s services and attends the monthly Family Development Sessions. Aside from this, beneficiaries can also get free vitamins at the health center.
She clarified that under Pantawid, only children 0-5 years old are required to go to the health center monthly. Older children are not required because deworming is already facilitated in schools for children six years old and above.
“School nurses are available in schools to take the weight and height of the children,” said Melinda Cañares, DSWD 7’s Supplemental Feeding Program focal person.
Gardening
Under Pantawid, household gardening and Gulayan sa Barangay are promoted so families can have access to low-cost, pesticide-free and nutritious food, which they could sell if there was a surplus.
Families must plant at least three to five kinds of fruits and vegetables like kamunggay, alugbati (Malabar spinach) and papaya. Families with more members are encouraged to have more variety and volume of plants.
But Morada admitted that in highly urbanized areas, where space is tight, the beneficiaries cannot meet this minimum.
“Some tried container gardening, but neighbors ask for their kamunggay and tanglad (lemongrass). This happens in Metro Cebu,” she said.
In Central Visayas, 243,103 Pantawid households have a garden, while more than 13,000 don’t. The ones that don’t are in Metro Cebu, like in Lapu-Lapu, Mandaue, Cebu and Talisay cities, she said.
Morada added that Pantawid has a health and nutrition module on preparing low-cost meals full of nutritious content such as protein-rich food vegetables that was already cascaded in the first quarter of 2017, with review sessions. Along with that, the gardens are monitored.
The DSWD’s counterparts in the LGUs—the municipal links or city links who run the program at these levels—do the monitoring. Each municipal link is in charge of 800 households in the town.
The 800 households are divided into subgroups of 30-35 members each. Parent leaders in the groups report to the city or municipal link. But this gives the task of monitoring to the parent-beneficiaries who might not be as judicious in this task as government personnel.
Stubborn
Morada said it is Pantawid beneficiaries in the city, rather than those in rural areas, that present problems.
“In the city, the people are exposed to survival na panginabuhi (whatever means just to survive), so they are stubborn and hard to manage. They’re exposed to influencers like neighbors with vices. The mothers would rather work, like do part-time cleaning, than join the Family Development Sessions. They are hard to catch because they are always out,” she said.
On complaints that some Pantawid beneficiaries misused the cash grants they received, Morada said DSWD 7 has a grievance redress system for the program, aside from the city and municipal link.
There has to be a complaint that the grant was used to buy the wrong item. The beneficiaries have to keep official receipts on what they bought with the money they received (for example, school supplies) in case someone will report them. The DSWD 7 will validate the report.
In Cebu Province, 61 households were tagged to have misused their grants in 2016. The number was 203 in 2017, and it’s 77 households so far this year.
Enriquez said first offenders get a warning. For the second offense, their grants will be put on hold for two months, and the third offense will result in their delisting.
“So far, we have reached only up to the second offense,” she said.
Is food enough?
Back in San Remigio, principal Tubigon related how children’s truancy, which prompts their teachers to make home visits, often leads to the discovery of the stark circumstances their families are in.
To help students in his school not covered by the KKP, he partnered with the Angels for Children Foundation to feed 40 students classified as borderline wasted. The alliance began in school year 2016-2017 with a smaller number of students.
One free meal a day may not be enough to entice some parents to send their children to school, however.
Tubigon said some students live as far as three kilometers away from the school, and get to school by walking or taking a tricycle, which costs P6 one way for the student and P8 for the parent.
That’s P28 for the pair both ways, no small change for the poor defined as those living on less than P60/person per day. CTL
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