FOUR years of broadcasting the Second Cordillera Highland Agricultural Resources Management Project (CHARMP) School on Air (SOA), and I wonder why the program is aired in the Province of Abra, all these years with best results.
The scene and setting of the broadcast is the vastness of the Cordillera interior. Designed to broadcast course lessons and news updates on livelihood programs for highland communities, hardly reached by government extension work and services, the SoA reaches listeners through an inter-agency participatory approach. The identification and preparation of course lessons is done by the project in collaboration with ResearchMate, prospective listeners, local government units (LGUs), and peoples organizations (POs). Its management and implementation involves the CHARMP2 and its partners to include the local government units, barangay officials, provincial based radio stations, and project hired community mobilization officers now upgraded as community development facilitators.
In Abra, after several graduation ceremonies, I have noted good practices that contributed to its consistent successes in implementing the SoA courses, the details of which, I will leave to a study group to validate and make a report on. But there is one aspect, I am free and oblige myself to talk about. I refer to the art of interbeing among the characters involved as they implemented a difficult program that nourishes or oils the light of hope in a very challenging environment.
Interbeing to me and in reference to the SoA broadcast is seeing oneself in the struggles of others, being committed to their welfare, help them reach their goals as much as you help yourself realize your own with them. This state of being compels its participants to be committed to their words so that together they thrive and attain quality lives in community in a given space or setting of their related lives.
The SoA broadcast depends so much on the quality and strength of the frequency of a radio station in reaching the far corners, nooks and crevices of the highlands. Still, radio frequency strength is not enough.
In Abra, our SoA radio station, the Catholic CMN DZPA, believed in the importance of the SoA lessons to the lives of their listeners in the highlands of Abra. Here, the DZPA make its commitment alive with sacrifice.
On several occasions, the management upgraded the broadcast frequency to reach SoA listeners by monitoring the broadcast themselves where the enrolees live. They need not do this, mind you. DZPA is the number one radio station in the province with a vast listenership in the lowlands including Ilocos Norte, Ilocoas Sur, some parts of Benguet and Mountain Province.
Our key contact at DZPA is its manager, Ms. Merla Ruiz. She has been present in all the graduation ceremonies of the SoA graduates, making sure that she shook their hands herself in behalf of DZPA. Mr. Arnel Valdez, a staff at the Provincial Planning and Development Office (PPDO), and full time anchor for our SoA Programs says that Ms. Ruiz, has been “very responsive to suggestions from the field about the radio’s frequency and change in the schedules of broadcast time. It really entails sacrifice on their part but they followed through with our request which shows care on their part for our needy brothers and sisters in the highlands who must be reached by the livelihood SoA courses, aired three times a week for thirty minutes” he said.
I count Arnel as another key character of our SoA program in Abra. He turns out, to me, as the program’s coach and strategist. He sees himself representing the Provincial Planning and Development Officer and Project Action Officer. He works the plots, integrates it with the provincial plans and development activities. Most important is how he coordinates and integrates the other actors in making the SoA succeed by calling on them to do specific work. As the most experienced SoA implementer and broadcaster now, he coaches the subject matter specialist to deliver the message well, say on voice tone and naturalness, time of delivery, among others.
Actually, it was Mr. Jessie Dioayan, subject matter specialist for the SoA Course on Livestock, who brought the point home to me with regards Mr. Valdez. In his testimony during the recent graduation of 114 graduates of the SoA livestock course, he said, “If it were not for Mr. Valdez, I would have failed in delivering the course to our farmer students.” Mr. Dioayan has learned much from his four months experience under the SoA. Following his stint at the SoA, the provincial government asked him to handle a morning broadcast in a government station in Bangued.
I recommend the SoA broadcast in Abra as model for the other provinces of the Cordillera, not so much on the strategies and approaches being done, which is basically the same, but on how the team members have given of themselves to make the broadcast succeed in their very challenging environment that brings light and hope to their fellow Abrenians. I pray that their tribe will grow in strength and numbers. I pray yet they will sustain what they have rooted among themselves, “interbeing” with a measure of emphasis.
These are days that imposes disconnects, puts emphasis on focus and specialization on limbs, organs, bits and pieces instead of the whole.
Yet these days bring yet its contradictions making us contrarians to our own specializations. Speaking of wellbeing, we cannot live and deal in bits and pieces but that the whole body is generally well.
On rural development, communication and information cannot sustain a message of disconnect and be part of the consequences that follow. A message that puts great emphasis on agricultural production makes its carriers unnecessarily liable with the rest who are engaged with mercenary service to lands turned acidic or abandoned as a direct consequence, especially when solutions are not very forthcoming.
I see the same in governance where love and balance is devoid. There is too much focus on infrastructure contracts and mercenary service becoming the message and meaning of what it is all about, which is not. Governance is balance in its support and stewardship of integrated community development for all sectors in each and all aspects without disconnects in the evolution and formulations for quality existence. In a beautiful park, let us not behave like we are a couple alone there, let us share the good in us, the message of interbeing in a SoA broadcast.