Burning the Road to Barangay Good Governance AMONG Zamboanga City’s 98 barangays, Mariki is unique and different for at least one reason. More than 90-percent of this all-Muslim village’s houses are built on high wooden stilts, with shallow seawater swirling underneath them where mostly bare-chested young children frolic about all day long to gather shells, starfishes and recyclable flotsams the tides carried in from the outer sea. A cool breeze blows all day long through this picturesque scenery of blue sky, green sea and brown bodies, and water, wind and sun conspire to transform the signs of squalor into something all too human and, therefore, too beautiful. A network of concrete and decaying wood bridges serves as the village street, spiced here and there by small turo-turo shops that sell cooked Muslim foods and delicacies. At the end of this bridge network is found a beige-painted concrete building that serves as Mariki’s barangay hall, with a multi-purpose hall and mosque “floating” at one side and facing the structure the leafy edge of hundreds of hectares of mangroves. Morning of Saturday August 31, Mariki barangay chairwoman Palma Hasim found herself in the waterworld barangay hall to welcome 25 of her barangay officials and other community leaders to the Barangay Peace Consultation. The consultation is one of the 20-barangay peace-building initiatives of Peace Advocates Zamboanga (PAZ) designed to foster human security and welfare among residents of the target communities. Mariki’s was the 12th to be conducted by the program that will end this year. In the consultation, Mariki’s community leaders were refreshed on how to gather their fellow residents on a regular basis to discuss local issues, plans, and projects. The meetings help promote transparency, accountability and good governance, plus stimulating women empowerment and participation as a crucial factor to overall community development. PAZ’s day-long dialogue-workshop lays down the principles and framework by which the community will subsequently develop a barangay development and peace plan. Once the action plan is done, PAZ grants a P40,000 “priority development assistant fund” (coming from the Spanish government and NOT from Filipino congressmen and senators) to kickstart an selected project. PAZ’s partners in the program are the Department of Interior and Local Government’s Zamboanga City Office, Interreligious Solidarity for Peace and Zamboanga-Basilan Integrated Development Alliance, Inc. (ZABIDA). Hopefully, the PAZ initiative will help boost locally the Bottoms Up Budgeting system that the national government has started this year as a strategy to combat countryside poverty. The hardworking PAZ team who guided the consultation in Mariki consisted of executive secretary Sr. Emma Delgado, community organizer Rosie Montojo, documentor Albert Arcilla, resource person Jeff Kimpa and facilitator Jennelie Cabugsa. Keep the fire burning, guys! (Peace Advocates Zamboanga)
Posted on: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 09:41:15 +0000
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