Today we divided up. I went to film a loan collection with SEED and to interview Edwin from Space while Anna Louisa went to do an interview at the Virlanie Foundation.
SEED in Cavitas.
The loan officer was a handsome young man who used a motorbike to get around, which I was lucky enough to get a lift on. He was collecting loans from a small group of women who had taken out individual loans of around 1000 – 1500 pesos and were all repaying varying amounts. They were mostly small-scale retailers and this was their second loan cycle. The ladies were all full of beans, very funny and alert and certainly seemed to be benefiting from and delighted by the service. They claimed they were better at managing money than their husbands, who were, they declared laughing, ‘full of vice.’
At Virlanie, Anna-Louisa interviewed social worker Mildred Malate about the case of 18 month old Leanne. The intention had been to interview Leanne’s mother but on entering Virlanie’s mother and baby unit, it transpired that she was a mute, who had herself grown up in Virlanie’s disability home. She then became a prostitute. Leanne is the product of a liaison with a Canadian client. The Canadian has nothing to do with either Leanne or her mother. Virlanie are now trying to have Leanne declared as abandoned by both her parents so that they can put her up for adoption. With her father absent and her mother unable to care for her, Leanne’s story is sadly typical.
Back in Cavitas, I have finished filming and now I “speed” back into the city (an hour’s taxi journey) to the very lush Manila Peninsula hotel so that we could meet Lizzie Zobel and her assistant, Clarissa, for an introduction to ‘Readers Transform’, a programme that helps to provide books to schools and to train teachers to help students read more. The point here is that literacy is the ability to spell out the letters that make up a word, but that comprehension is the ability to understand what is written and in the Philippines, 11% of school students have very low comprehension levels. Four years ago, grade 6 students were tested: of the 1.2 million students tested who were supposed to have ‘high school readiness’ only 8000 students passed.
Lizzie and her partner thought that the cheapest form of intervention to improve basic comprehension was to increase reading – as she puts it, “to transform from children learning to read, into children reading to learn”. Her Sa Aklat Sisikat Foundation intervenes at different levels in order to create a classroom full of readers. They have teacher training programmes funded by the Philippines International schools and distance teacher training which is a pilot project run in partnership with the Boy Scouts of the Philippines. Once teachers have been trained, 60-80 books are delivered to their classrooms and students are monitored for the next two years.