December 3, 2004 - Issue #24
Local News | Opinion/Editorials | Letters to the Editor
Perilous Journeys
In rural Philippines, a trip to the hospital
includes miles of walking and hours of driving;
most people do not survive
BAGUMBAYAN, MINDANAO, Philippines — After a two-mile hike on a moonless night through corn and rice fields, 60-year-old Mendeg Tilok, an indigenous Manobo elder wearing a white head wrap, entered a dirt-floor hut bustling with local officials, indigenous people, a Catholic priest, health workers and two lay people from Anchorage.
Without electricity, wicks, burning with kerosene and diesel fuel in glass bottles, lit Tilok’s face as he talked about what happens when people get sick in this remote area of the Philippines. His hilltop village of Salumanan, like most villages in the area, does not have a safe source of drinking water or sanitary latrines, no medical clinic or pharmacy. Tilok said diarrhea, malaria, tuberculosis, measles and influenza are treated with herbal medicines and traditional remedies.When those methods lack a cure, sick people set out on a long journey — walking the steep paths from their villages, then hiring a motorcycle or horse and later crowding into a jeep for a painstaking crawl down the lush mountains. After that, there’s still a two-hour drive on paved roads where wayward chickens and military checkpoints halt trucks piled high with dozens of people and even more 50-kilo bags of rice.Of all the sick people that have begun the journey, Tilok said only one in 10 have lived to return to Salumanan.This is also about the same route that two of the seven members of a delegation visiting the Philippines from the Anchorage Archdiocese made last month, guided by members of Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops’ overseas relief and development agency. The agency helped forge a “global solidarity partnership” with the Cotabato Archdiocese in Mindanao, the main southern island of the Philippines. The Anchorage visitors separated into small groups to learn from and live among the people outside of Cotabato City.
Zennia Manibpel, a 31-year-old dentist from Mindanao, helps coordinate a community-based health program supported by Catholic Relief Services in this agricultural area. Holding onto a handle inside a bucking pickup truck, she said an indigenous Manobo mother recently made this trip with her dehydrated child to a Catholic-run hospital in Cotabato City.When they arrived, there were still cultural misunderstandings to navigate. Manibpel said the mother thought her son was being tied up to be sold like a farm animal when she saw the intravenous tube implanted in his arm, perhaps like a rope strung through a water buffalo’s nose.To speak with people here in Bagumbayan — a region, or “barangay,” encompassing about 14 Muslim, Christian and indigenous villages in southern Mindanao — comments are sometimes translated into four different languages. People living only a few miles apart may not understand each other’s dialect, explained translator and Bagumbayan’s vice mayor, Ariston “Jun” Panaligan.Twenty-nine people — health volunteers, local officials and barangay police — spontaneously joined the Anchorage visitors and their Catholic Relief Services guides on a three-day immersion trip through five villages in the area. Panaligan left his office to spend two days transporting visitors on the back of his motorcycle, hiking the trails to Salumanan and sleeping alongside men crowded onto a raised bamboo-slat floor.In the glow of orange firelight while crickets chirped and mosquitoes buzzed, a local leader told the group he enjoyed seeing visitors from many different places “walking one behind the other,” for miles and miles on the trails, “the way the natives walk,” he said. “This is what we do.Bagumbayan is “well past the end of the road” said Neil Murphy, a St. Anthony parishioner from Eagle River. Murphy, a physician at Alaska Native Medical Center, said that people here suffer from “very preventable front-line illnesses that we (in the developed world) take for granted should be controlled.”But they also use any available resources wisely and efficiently to improve their quality of life, he said. Hollow bamboo poles double as rice-cookers boiling over a fire. Truck tires become garden planters. Colorful food labels decorate walls woven from nipa, a type of palm leaf.Pregnant Manobo women endure about an hour of labor after ingesting a certain plant, and after having three children, many chew another kind of tree bark that prevents them from conceiving more. The Philippine government endorses ten herbal medicines that many Filipinos grow, such as “lagundi,” for colds, the flu and asthma. “Bayabas” is a wound antiseptic and “akapulko” treats fungal skin infections.One villager approached Murphy with her 10-year-old daughter and opened a pouch in the girl’s hand-made white dress to reveal a transparent colostomy bag containing part of her daughter’s colon. The child was born without an anus and underwent an emergency surgery in a hospital four hours away where doctors created an opening in her abdomen through which her colon could empty into a bag. Unable yet to pay for at least three more needed surgeries, her mother cleans and changes the bag regularly.“It’s very clean,” Murphy commented to the mother; he said he was impressed with the girl’s care.“We have a huge amount to learn from the people there,” Murphy added — “appreciating the simple things of life — having clean water, toilets, uncontaminated food, and their basic strength and spirit. … I think in a way, through our modern conveniences, (we) have forgotten some of the basics of community on a personal level and family level.”
Murphy said the Catholic Church here plays a strong role in people’s lives by “looking at the whole parishioner.” Parishes in the Philippines are a network of “basic ecclesial communities,” or family groups. In the Bagumbayan region, priests teach parishioners about crop rotation and health practices and families rely on each other to share water as well as prayer.Father Ben Torreto leads an archdiocesan effort to encourage social action and justice and peace committees in parishes and is also helping to implement community-based health programs in Bagumbayan. As the sun set Nov. 4, he translated comments from a group congregated outside the home of a health volunteer.“There is no difference between the tri-people (Muslim, Christians and indigenous people), always respect,” he relayed as a woman spoke. “They are all the same. They each love and care for each other,” Father Torreto added.Then a man stood from behind a row of people and said in English, “We are all poor. Between tri-people, no one is poor, no one is rich.”Community-based health programs launched through Catholic Relief Services have taken hold in at least 14 other Philippine barangays and are getting started in Bagumbayan.In Manila, Mila Lasquety, Catholic Relief Services’ health program manager, told the Anchor that the agency trains local leaders to surface health issues so villagers can find solutions to their own problems.The goal is “building self-reliance in the community,” Lasquety said.Eight months ago, 14 Filipinos were elected by their Bagumbayan communities to become members of a local research team. The group of Christian and Muslim volunteers includes a college student, a 74-year-old man and mothers who leave their families and farms for a week at a time to hike house to house collecting health information and analyzing statistics.They are unpaid and receive only t-shirts that identify their positions and sometimes hats or umbrellas to shield them from the sun. There has been 100 percent attendance at all three training sessions in Cotabato City, a “big deal,” Lasquety said.“They’re a wonderful group. They’re really very poor; when they attend the training, they don’t even have a towel. We are very much inspired by these people,” she added. “They have not gone to college and we’re talking about research. They are willing to learn.”One member, Lilian Secil, lives in Danggoan, a Muslim village on the Kabulanan River made up of 63 households. Three-story-high rusty cables and unevenly spaced bamboo slats make up the 70-foot long bridge that arcs across the chocolate colored river.When it rains, overflow from the river contaminates the well and causes diarrhea. Stagnant water and dead worms are removed daily from the well. Between the river and well is the village’s one latrine. A blue tarp wrapped around four poles surrounds a plastic carton that empties into a shallow hole.To get to elementary school, children here leave at 5 a.m. and walk two-and-half hours over deeply rutted terrain packing a lunch of rice, sweet potatoes, bananas or corn. This is also the route to a solar cell that charges batteries that can light a 20-watt light bulb through the night or pick up one station on the radio.Danggoan also has a mosque, a nondescript open-air wooden building where a row of woven mats points east.Manibpel translated for Danggoan’s imam, Usman Lumenda, who speaks Maguindanao. The Muslim leader said he wants to “continue the partnership between Muslim and Christians no matter what. We don’t want war. We want development and education for our people.”
In each of the five Bagumbayan villages, people counted the number of high school graduates on one hand. Some knew of one person who had gone to college.Bagumbayan’s local research team leader, Joseph Sumatra, 24, was one of those people. He has dreams of serving his community as a police officer and was studying criminology at the Institute of Southern Mindanao. He was a point guard on the basketball team and an ROTC officer with a scholarship maintained by a high grade point average. But then word came that an infestation of rats had destroyed two of his family’s grain harvests. With no way to fund his $70 annual tuition, he returned to the farm to help his family, earning money shuttling up to four people at a time on a motorcycle from village to village.Sumatra said he still wants to finish college, and that he’s frustrated by the poverty that keeps him and many others from reaching their goals. But, he added, he’s committed to improving the quality of life in the region through the community-based health program.“The most common problem here is the poverty,” Sumatra said. “I cannot just leave the barangay and pursue my own dream,” he explained. “I’ve found other ways to help the people and continue to study and lead the people. … I’m equipped with the knowledge that others don’t have. I want to share that.”Back in Manila, Catholic Relief Services’ Lasquety said community-based health programs have “developed the spirit of cooperation” that communities needed to sustain more than just safe water projects but also health insurance programs and small income-generating projects.“We provide the funds,” the health program manager said, “but before we provide the funds … we need to have a solid organization.”She continued: “They can decide for themselves. They have the power to do what is needed. Now they are partners, not merely recipients of service.”
Providence cuts Web links because of abortion info
Providence Health System in Alaska last week severed links to a portion of its Web site because of references to abortion and other procedures not approved for Catholic health care.The Web site’s former library component, Healthwise, had provided detailed information about thousands of alphabetized health topics. A Providence Alaska Medical Center spokesperson told the Anchor that Providence had been unaware that the library — a service Providence purchased and added to its site — included information about abortion, birth control and sterilization methods.“We looked at it and went, ‘Oh my gosh!’ ” Karina Jennings said. “That information should not have been on our Web site; it’s not appropriate.”
Jennings said Providence Health System, which operates in the four Pacific coast states, had purchased the Healthwise library about a year ago. It is possible that at least some of the problematic content was mistakenly added during routine informational updates, she said.Early last week, when Providence’s Alaska team learned of the problem, they alerted system headquarters in Seattle. The decision was quickly made to begin removing all references to abortion and other problematic topics from the Healthwise library, according to Jennings.However, by Wednesday before Thanksgiving, it became clear that the process of identifying each inappropriate item and culling it from the library was proceeding too slowly.By day’s end, Alaska’s Providence team decided to “shut it (Healthwise) off” until it could be thoroughly worked through by the health system’s Web technicians in Oregon, Jennings said.When the content has been reviewed and found to be “in alignment” with the U.S. bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, the Healthwise library will be restored, she said.Jennings said Providence Alaska learned about the problem via e-mail from several people who seemed “very passionate” about the inappropriateness of the content.Jennings told the Anchor that Providence appreciated hearing about the problem, and added that the organization “should have been and will be in the future more careful” about what appears on its Web site.Before Providence Alaska removed Healthwise from its site, the library’s section on abortion provided several pages of information about the procedure, which the Catholic Church teaches is always gravely immoral.The library said, “You should understand your choices, which are to: Have a baby and keep it. Have a baby and give it up for adoption. Have an abortion.”In a section on pregnancy, Healthwise provided information about various tests that determine fetal health.“If a birth defect is found,” the section read, “you can learn what to expect and make plans for having a child with Down syndrome or a birth defect, or you can decide to terminate the pregnancy.”The Anchor placed a call to Providence headquarters in Seattle but no one who could speak on the record about the Healthwise snafu responded by press deadline.However, as of late Monday this week, several of the Web sites for the system’s various regional facilities throughout Washington, Oregon and California still had links to the Healthwise library, and abortion had not been removed.
Bishops stayed busy during most
recent conference, Schwietz says
When the U.S. bishops met Nov. 15-17 in Washington, D.C., for their twice-yearly conference, there was plenty on the agenda to keep them busy, according to Archbishop Roger Schwietz.
“It’s an important time for us to make connections, to share what’s going on in our part of the world,” he told the Anchor. “It’s especially good for new bishops, who get advice from others.”
At the top of the agenda in November was the election of a new president for the conference. Bishop William Skylstad of the Diocese of Spokane, Wash., was elected president, and Cardinal Francis George of Chicago was elected vice president.
Bishop Skylstad just completed a three-year term as vice president, and Archbishop Schwietz said that although it’s traditional for the vice president to move up, it was still a “significant” election.
“Bishop Skylstad is only the second president of the conference who comes from the West,” he said. “And he’s the first president from Region 12,” the Northwest region to which Alaska belongs.
The “Charter for the Protection of Children and Youth,” which the U.S. bishops issued in response to the sex abuse crisis, was on the bishops’ agenda as well.
“We adopted the charter two years ago with the provision that it would be reviewed at this time,” Archbishop Schwietz said. The bishops decided that they would seek feedback on the charter from diocesan personnel, including staff, clergy and religious and diocesan review boards.
“We’ll be doing that in the next couple of months, then sending any suggestions back to the ad hoc committee,” he said.
The bishops also recommended a third round of independent audits to ascertain whether dioceses have fully implemented the charter.
“The process will be somewhat modified,” Archbishop Schwietz said, explaining that dioceses nationwide can now be divided into three groups. Fully compliant dioceses will do self-reporting, dioceses that need to act on one or two recommendations will be audited on just those recommendations, and those dioceses not in compliance will receive full audits. The Anchorage Archdiocese falls into the second group, according to the archbishop.
One controversial topic that didn’t receive much of a public airing but was discussed privately by the bishops was what Archbishop Schwietz termed “the role of faith in politics.”
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., the chairman of the task force on Catholic politicians, submitted an interim report on the topic to the bishops.
In the report, Cardinal McCarrick said the subject has “generated more discussion than perhaps ever before about what it means to be a Catholic and a citizen of the United States, a believer and a voter.”
His report went on to say that the common statement, overwhelmingly adopted at the bishops’ June meeting in Denver, that “bishops can come to different prudential and pastoral judgments on how to apply our teaching to public policy” serves the conference well.
The U.S. bishops, according to the report, will develop a “Reader on Catholics in Public Life,” and two of their committees will look at the subject of church teaching about the reception of Communion, both for Catholic politicians and for all Catholics.
On another issue, Archbishop Schwietz said the bishops discussed the merits of streamlining their meetings, including the number of documents presented to them.
“The whole conference has to discuss each document, and it becomes a tedious process,” said the archbishop. Instead, the bishops would like to spend more time in dialogue on subjects like the role of the church in supporting the family.The bishops also discussed committee assignments, and Archbishop Schwietz was elected to his second term on the advisory board for the North American College in Louvain, Belgium. He continues on as the bishop liaison to Teens Encounter Christ, a national retreat program for youth that he introduced to the Archdiocese of Anchorage.The bishops’ conference is not unique to the United States. Each country in the world has a bishops conference, Archbishop Schwietz said, and each conference sends its president to Rome twice a year to meet with the Holy Father.
‘Gifted by God’ stewardship project lauded by participating parishes
Slight but sensible shifts in parish stewardship efforts can have a big impact, according to participants in an eight-week stewardship rejuvenation project.“Gifted by God, Responding With Gratitude” was implemented in three Anchorage parishes: Holy Family Cathedral, St. Anthony and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. It aimed to help church leaders talk about stewardship differently and conduct ministry fairs and commitment drives in new ways.“We’ve done time and talent fairs before, but nothing as all-encompassing as this,” said Maureen O’Neill, co-chair of the parish stewardship council at the cathedral. She praised the pilot project’s emphases on educating parishioners about the meaning of stewardship and following up with them to make sure everyone has an opportunity to share their time, talent and treasure.Stewardship talks and ministry fairs are not new concepts, but the “Gifted by God” project helped the parish stewardship teams approach the concepts differently to make them more effective.Instead of a pastor or lay witness addressing the topic one weekend a year or publishing a listing of parish needs, the pilot project had parish leaders talking and praying about stewardship every Sunday. Instead of urging parishioners to sign a commitment card during a ministry fair, project coordinators suggested eliminating sign-up sheets at the fairs so parishioners could look over all the available ministries without feeling pressured to sign up on the spot.Parish leaders also learned to become more nuanced in how they talk about stewardship, participants said.“It’s not about guilt, it’s not about obligation, it’s not about raising money for the roof,” said Holy Family stewardship council co-chair Elizabeth O’Malley. “It’s about enhancing people’s relationship with God, and everything else flows from that.”Father Craig Loecker, pastor of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, is no stranger to stewardship, but he said he has a new understanding about how to effectively spread the idea in his parish.“Stewardship is not a once-a-year thing — it’s our way of life throughout the year,” he said. He plans to use a calendar that has frequent suggestions for keeping the stewardship message in front of the people in the pews.Over the course of the project, coordinated by the archdiocese’s Stewardship and Development Office, parish stewardship workers also provided input for a manual that the archdiocese will make available to other parishes.Stewardship, the sharing of time, talent and treasure, has never been implemented uniformly in the archdiocese, although now-retired Archbishop Francis Hurley decided to adopt the stewardship model nearly a decade ago.“When we started, we didn’t require a standard procedure,” Jim Caldarola, director of the Stewardship and Development Office, told the Anchor. “Some parishes embraced stewardship completely, others did not. Over the years we’ve seen some complacency.”The pilot project was meant to rejuvenate stewardship and make it easier to implement in the diverse parishes of the archdiocese, he added.The basic message of the project was “acknowledgment that all we have are gifts from God, and we in answer to our baptismal call are obligated to recognize those gifts, and to use those gifts for the benefit of our church and community,” Caldarola said.Too often, people consider stewardship a euphemism for financial sacrifice, Caldarola said.The project did include information about money, but again, with a new twist. It emphasized planned giving, which requires a thoughtful approach as opposed to “giving whatever happens to be in your wallet that week,” according to O’Malley.O’Neill said that the manual that is being developed will be a great help at Holy Family and other parishes seeking to enhance stewardship“Now we know what needs to be done,” she said.
Editorials
Young’s rhetoric silly, point irrelevant
Don Young is taking some deserved heat for his silly remark last month about global warming.In response to the finding — in the most comprehensive global climate study to date — that “human influences” have now become the “dominant factor” in global warming, Alaska’s lone congressman said in an interview: “I don’t believe it is our fault. That’s an opinion. It’s as sound as any scientist’s.”The fact is, Rep. Young’s opinion is not as sound as a scientist’s, much less the common opinion of the roughly 300 scientists who studied global warming for four years before releasing their Arctic Climate Impact Assessment.Rep. Young argues (as do Sens. Stevens and Murkowski) that more research is needed before the human impact on climate change can be determined conclusively.Conclusive evidence is not the point. The mountain of science now in hand — though not conclusive — has more than enough scientific consensus to warrant swift action. The full strength of American ingenuity ought to be aimed at developing more efficient vehicles, cleaner energy and better carbon-sequestering methodologies. Keep studying climate change, too, if you want.Unfortunately, Alaska’s most powerful politicians are taking their cues from the Bush administration, which also reacted coolly to the impact assessment.President Bush has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, the international accord that requires nations to cut heat-trapping gas emissions, arguing that it could harm the nation’s economy.That reasoning ignores the potentially enormous economic costs of rising sea levels and more violent storms that the scientists say will come with a warming world.Besides, potential harm to the economy is not a good enough reason to discount the scientific consensus about global warming. The administration should get back to the negotiating table on Kyoto and get creative about finding solutions. With sensible incentives and research grants, we believe industry can meet the challenges.This mostly Christian nation should be leading efforts to preserve and protect the creation God entrusted to humans, especially considering that America emits 25 percent of the world’s warming gases despite having only 5 percent of the world’s population.It would be foolish to ignore the massive scientific consensus on the human role in global warming, just in case the scientists are right and Don Young is wrong.
Crack down on the so-called fans, too
In all the hubbub over Ron Artest, the professional basketball player who leapt into the stands and attacked a heckler, too little has been said about the problem of hecklers. We can criticize the unruly fans without condoning players’ violent reactions.It seems the NBA is eschewing — sensibly, in our opinion — calls to install protective barriers around basketball courts. Financial and possibly criminal penalties are the way to handle these violent outbursts.Artest will reportedly lose about $5 million due to the game suspensions handed down by the NBA. No one should doubt the power of persuasion in that. But fans need to be held accountable as well. The problem is that too many people in the stands treat the players like objects of entertainment instead of human beings who can be hurt, and provoked, by vicious words. Racial slurs, foul language and threatening taunts shouldn’t be tolerated.Troublesome fans should be fined and kicked out. That would punish and protect them as well as preserve everyone else’s right to a peaceful experience.(It also makes sense to keep beer out of the stands.)Just because these athletes are paid huge sums of money doesn’t mean fans can treat them like purchased commodities. No one should resort to violence over words, but no one should resort to violent words, either.
Letters to the Editor
Put ‘Mass’ back in ‘Christmas’When we look a the word “Christmas,” it is clear that “Christ” is already in “Christmas!” What is incomplete is, “Mass.” I therefore ask you to help spread the following: Put the Mass back into Christmas! Christ is there in the breaking of the bread! (Lk 24: 13-35). Thank you in advance.
Anchorage
My sisters in Indiana have seen the new movie “Therese” and feel it needs to seen by everyone. It is very uplifting and is based on the life of St. Therese. Many of us have been trying to get this movie to come to Anchorage for two months and now it will be at Century 16 starting Dec. 3. Hope you enjoy this movie.
Joe Shaw
Anchorage
