My Trip to the Philippines, July 24 – August 5, 2017
By Sharon McCart, Chair, DisAbility Ministries Committee of
The United Methodist Church
I met with Joy in a nondescript chain restaurant. I had been
wanting to go to the Philippines since 2009, and when she invited me as one
recipient in a mass e-mail, I wondered if this might be the time for me to go.
There in the restaurant, she told me about the planned trip. I asked questions.
It was an ordinary conversation until she said, “Part of this year’s trip will
be to help the faculty of a school learn how to better include students with
disabilities.” Suddenly the noisy restaurant seemed to go silent. I didn’t know
what to say and I just looked at her. She knows how passionate I am about
inclusion for people with disabilities. She had just answered my unspoken
question, “What can I contribute to this team?”
Joy is the chair of the Philippines Task Force of the
California-Pacific Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. The Task
Force has sent teams nearly every year for about eight years now. The purposes
of these trips have been fact-finding and to stand in solidarity with the
marginalized and those working for justice in the Philippines. Until that
moment, I wasn’t sure if that was something I was called to do. I was
sympathetic and supportive, but that wasn’t enough to get me to sign up. I
needed the trip to connect with my call to advocate for inclusion of people
with disabilities, both within the Church and outside of it.
Suddenly, I found it did. And I knew I would go.
The entire trip was incredible, but my focus here is disability ministry, so I will restrain myself to that topic. One evening we
went to dinner with two United Methodist deaconesses, Zarla Raguindin and Norma
Dollaga. I had met Deaconess Zarla in Louisville at UMW Assembly 2014 when she
attended the workshop I co-taught with Lynn Swedberg. She is doing great work
in disability ministries, holding trainings and events and even travelling to
Jakarta and Indonesia to share her knowledge in those places. Deaconess Norma was
instrumental in raising funds to build the school we were going to visit, among
other accomplishments in her work for a justice organization called “Rise Up.”
We met a number of deaconesses during our trip, but connecting with Zarla was
important to me because of the disability ministries connection. It was
encouraging and exciting to learn about her work and talk about ways we might
support each other. She will be in China for the next three years to earn her
PhD. Her research topic is on best practices for advocacy and I look forward to
reading her thesis very much.
Joy and I then travelled to the state of Mindanao. On the
way to the school where we would spend four days, we stopped to tour St.
Genevieve Hospital, which is currently under construction in the town of Tagum.
There are no medical facilities specifically for the indigenous (Lumad)
peoples, and they typically encounter less than welcoming attitudes at other
hospitals, so the Mindanao Foundation for Medical Disaster Preparedness and
Response, Inc. decided to build a hospital to serve their needs. The
administrator, Asha A. Mendez, RN, and I talked about the great need to provide
psychological counseling as well as medical care for the Lumads who have been
exploited by foreign corporations, targeted by the Philippine military, and
denied assistance from their own government when they were starving because of
drought.
From Tagum, we travelled through acres and acres of banana
plantations to the Community Technical College of Southeastern Mindanao (CTCSM),
which is a Lumad school. Previously the Lumad people have remained illiterate
or they were educated in schools with the purpose of pursuing careers away from
their own communities. This residential school prepares them to help their own
communities. It is culturally sensitive and includes education in organic
farming and herbal medicine. Traditional dancing and music are encouraged. Despite
the word “college” in the name, the school educates children from preschool
through high school. Next year they will add college classes.
Part of the culture, as in many places, holds a stigma about disability. The school administrator and the faculty were not completely forthcoming
about disability in their community. It was not until the end of our time there
that I sat down with the lead clinic worker, Jill, and we talked about the
needs of the students. There are students with ADHD and learning disabilities
and other needs. Jill gave me a list of resources that would be helpful. This
made me feel that I was doing at least some of what I had come to do.
There are also many students who have Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD). This is understandable because many of them came from
militarized areas where there is daily conflict. Some of the children saw a
school administrator shot in front of them. Others heard bombings and gunfire
daily at the schools they were at previously. Some had lost parents and
siblings to the fighting between the indigenous people and the military. The
political situation there is violent, and the children pay a price. The faculty
is getting training to help with this. There are a number of students on
medication for anxiety and other mental illnesses, but the teachers still need
to know what to do when a student is struggling. I was grateful to know that
this training is taking place.
After four days at the school, we returned to Manila. When
we were in Manila the week before, we had met Jenn Panelo Ferariza from the
United Methodist Women’s Board, a conference-wide board. She had proposed
gathering a few other women from the board and meeting with us before we left
for the United States and we had eagerly said yes. The last day of our trip, then,
we met with Jenn, who had invited Liza Adamos Cortez and Pastor Marie Sol
Villalon to join her. They shared with us about the work they were doing to
help the victims of human trafficking and to translate Vacation Bible School
curriculum, including adding Philippines-relevant stories. When they finished,
I gave them each a packet of disability ministry information and resources
and talked a bit about the work of the DisAbility Ministries Committee of The
United Methodist Church.
We also talked about Deaconess Zarla’s work. Soon I found that
we were planning to have a Disability Ministries Consultation in Manila in the
summer of 2018 and I realized that I would return to this country that had
shown me both its beauty and its hardships. Dates will soon be set for the
Consultation and we will begin planning in earnest.
The conversation then shifted and the women spoke for
several minutes in Tagalog, which I do not understand. When they stopped, they
looked at me and said, “We were just discussing which conference board the
Disability Committee will be under.” The Philippines Central Conference does
not have a Disability Committee yet and they were deciding to propose one! This
is great news! A centralized committee to provide trainings and resources will
help the churches of the Philippines to become more welcoming and accessible to
people with disabilities!
This is how my relationship with people in the Philippines
has begun. I can hardly wait to see where it will go!
