Crossing the mountains which separate Iligan City and Talakag, Bukidnon last week, I saw a solitary house by the side of the highway which had no power lines and I decided to get off to give way to my curiousity on how rural families could live without the most basic services like electricity and water.
Living in the house is a Dumagat farm worker, one of the tribes in Northern Mindanao, Lorenzo Dejos, his wife and their two children. He receives P4,000 a month from the owner of the still forested area.
His house has no electricity and drinking water comes from the rain stored in small tanks. For their household needs, water is fetched from a spring not very far from his house.
There is no TV and the celphone signal is faint.
But unlike other Filipinos who complain about the slightest shortcomings of government, Lorenzo Dejos, seems oblivious of the absence of the basic services which other families could not live without.
With his P4,000 a month, he dreams of sending his children to school and he was able to buy on installment a motorcycle which is his only means of transportation when he goes to town to buy other basic household needs.
There are so many Lorenzo Dejos in the hinterlands of our country who lead simple lives and never complain.
I met somebody like Lorenzo Dejos when I was Governor of North Cotabato many years ago, a corn farmer named Arnaldo Berber who lived in a mountain village in Magpet town.
Berber planted corn using a shovel because he had no work animal or plow and when I told him I would give him a Carabao, plow, corn seeds and feftilizer, he just stared at me in disbelief.
I delivered what I promised and when I saw him again two years later, he was no longer wearing tattered clothes. He was able to buy a house in the village proper and his children were in school.
There are many more Lorenzo Dejoses and Arnaldo Berbers living in the countryside dreaming of the day when government will finally reach them and touch their lives.
In the case of Arnaldo Berber, it was a carabao with plow, corn seeds and fertilizer which changed his life, things whose cost is tinier than the COVID 19 virus when compared to our annual budget of P3.7-trillion.
These small things, however, could change the lives of poor families thus reducing poverty in the countryside and at the same time improve productivity.
But we really have to walk unmapped roads and sail uncharted waters to discover what are these little things which many poor families need.
This is the reason why I moved a lot around the country when I was Secretary of Agriculture and why I travel for long hours around Mindanao today in my new assignment as Chairman of the Mindanao Development Authority, even reaching the farthest island of the Philippines, Turtle Islands.
This journey will continue for as long as I am in government tasked by President Rody Duterte to reach out to people in the farthest areas of the coutry and make them feel that government cares for them.
We have to climb mountains, cross rivers and creeks and travel long distances because this is the essence of government service. This is our reason for being.
#TouchGroundFeelThePulse!
#GovernanceIsCommonSense!
#ClimbMountainsCrossRivers!
(This video material is a Special Feature of the program Beauty & Bounty of Mindanao produced by the Mindanao Development Authority Media Team.)
https://fb.watch/aJKFSwqUzP/
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