Aussies lead cleanup brigade in Tondo

While foreigners may be a dime a dozen in malls and beaches in the Philippines, you don’t really expect to see them doing manual labor in the middle of the working-class district of Tondo in Manila.

And yet, that was where no less than Ambassador Rod Smith, and a handful of his fellow Australians, were last Wednesday: Painting classrooms in one of the most notorious tough as nail neighborhoods in the National Capital Region.

The Australian Embassy-initiated activity at Tondo High School was part of the Department of Education’s annual Brigada Eskwela program, which taps the local community, school staff, volunteers and partner organizations to conduct a weeklong sprucing-up of dilapidated schools before classes start in June.

On Wednesday, around 80 volunteers composed of Australian Embassy staff and their kin, mostly Filipino, trooped to Tondo to help paint walls at the local high school and General Vicente Lim elementary school.

A newcomer to the Brigada Eskwela project, Smith gamely took to painting a classroom at the 40-year-old high school, joking that his work won’t likely win him any painting award.

His towering presence, however, was highly appreciated by the diminutive school principal. A cheerful Principal IV Arnulfo Empleo took one look at a hard-to-reach corner near the ceiling, turned to Smith, and said: “I’ll leave that part to you,” before turning his attention to painting the lower half of the wall.

It is the embassy’s second time to join the Brigada Eskwela project. “We think this is a fantastic initiative to help clean up schools before the new school year starts, and also a way of building community pride,” Smith said.

“Schools aren’t just buildings but ways for communities to come together around this critically important concept of education. It’s a critical building block for communities and economic growth,” he added.

Premium on education

The Australian government puts a premium on education in its aid program to the Philippines, allocating P2 billion to the sector out of its P4.7 development assistance program for 2011.

For the 2011 Brigada Eskwela, the embassy committed around P70,000 worth of aid each to 50 schools—20 in Metro Manila and 30 in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

“We provide cash grants to schools to help them buy needed equipment that will provide the best possible learning environment for students,” Smith explained, adding they will also be farming out cleanup and repair volunteers to at least eight schools in Metro Manila and six schools in ARMM.

The embassy’s Brigada Eskwela stint is just a small part of their campaign for better education in the Philippines. Smith said the Australian government this year will be providing support in teacher-training, school-based management practice, education planning and management systems; providing 120 scholarships for higher education; assisting in developing culturally-responsive education curricula; and building school facilities, “especially in Muslim Mindanao where we see the need is greatest.”

The public school’s facilities  aren’t as dismal, but it has long suffered the wear-and-tear of having too many students, currently pegged at 4,750: Vandalized walls, worn wooden armchairs, old  chalkboards, broken windows and iron-grill doors, broken electric fans—a general “lack of resources,” Empleo admitted.

He expressed his gratitude to the foreign volunteers who chose to invest their money—

and their time—in their school, painting the second-floor classrooms, repairing facilities and donating materials.

Volunteer Dennis O’Leary, whose wife works for the Australian Embassy, noted that while he “has seen worse classrooms” in the Philippines in his year’s stay in the country, there didn’t seem enough classrooms and resources for the thousands of Tondo High School students.

Not hard work

A teacher himself in Australia, O’Leary was glad he could help in his own way. “Volunteering isn’t very hard work. I can help a little and it doesn’t hurt me, so why not?”

“In a place like the Philippines, education is fundamental. Anything that can change the state of education is positive,” he added.

For Teresita Aquino-Tuazon, president of the Philippine-Australian Alumni Association Inc. (PAAAI), a group of former Australian Embassy scholars, volunteering with Brigada Eskwela was a way of sharing the blessings they received. The PAAAI has committed to cleaning up 10 schools, and donating school materials like chalk.

In 2007, Tuazon was one of the government employees sent by the Australian Embassy to the Land Down Under to pursue a year-long scholarship. She took up masteral studies in Administrative Law and Public Policy at the University of Sydney.

“When we returned, we were inspired and thought we could effect changes in our government in our own small way,” she said.

Shortly put: “We got envious!” Tuazon said. But it was envy put to good use: Now, the PAAAI holds seminars and forums for transformational leadership, and has started gift-giving in schools and building libraries patterned after what they saw in Australia.