Tuesday, January 15, 2002

Battery-Powered Radios Bring Basic Courses to a Rural Philippines Town By JEN LIN-LIU Manila On a good day, when it isn't raining and the traffic in Manila is moving smoothly, it takes two hours to drive from the University of Santo Tomas here to the village of Malasa. For the past eight years, faculty members from the university have been making weekly trips to the village to teach women how to read and write, grow better crops, and care for their children. The road that leads to Malasa runs past rice paddies, a sleepy town that used to be occupied by the American military, and fields strewn with ash from Mount Pinatubo's last eruption, 10 years ago. It's a pleasant drive, says Jose Cruz III, an instructor in the university's College of Nursing, but it's also a drive that the university hopes to eliminate by creating a new distance-education course to cover the topics the weekly visits have covered until now. "We don't want to be hindered by time or distance," he says. The new program, which begins this month, will use battery-powered, two-way radios to teach rural villagers, who live without electricity. The program faces obstacles -- like a lack of resources and a typhoon that recently knocked out its radio-transmission system -- but the university already has plans to expand the program to other villages, and it eventually wants to deliver classes over satellite television. Mr. Cruz says that community service is as important to the Roman Catholic university's mission as education and research. He is the director of the university's community-development office, and he believes that by using technology -- even simple technology like radio -- he can help bridge gaps in economic equality. "We're trying to help alleviate the suffering of the poor through education programs, by giving them the tools to develop themselves and to develop their community," says Mr. Cruz. Two other instructors are accompanying Mr. Cruz on the journey to Malasa: Aguedo Jalan, Jr., a religion instructor who will teach the new distance-education class, is quietly dozing in the back of the minivan. Casimiro Hernandez, an assistant professor of engineering whom Mr. Cruz simply calls "Engineer," is riding in the front passenger seat. An hour later, the van pulls up a dirt road on a hillside dotted with thatched-roofed homes made of woven tree bark and hardened mud. Children run to greet the professors outside the home of Lucy Acosta Guya, a woman in Malasa who is the designated assistant teacher for the class. Several mothers in the village pile into Ms. Guya's small living room, which is dimly lit by the sun shining through the small windows. About a dozen more women linger around Ms. Guya's front door, some cradling babies in their arms. After attending pilot sessions last spring, they have been anxious to find out when the classes will officially begin. The hardest part of the program's development -- which will cost about $24,000 over the next few years and is paid for by the university's community-service office -- is the technical aspect. Mr. Hernandez spent a couple of days building a 300-foot radio tower atop a hill near the village. Because there isn't any electricity in the village, a power generator had to be brought in, along with a big, bulky radio transmitter. "The signals have to be good," says Mr. Hernandez. "That's the most important thing." After the equipment was set up, the pilot sessions of the classes went off without a hitch. Mr. Cruz had planned to start the course in the fall, but it was delayed because of a typhoon that hit Malasa last August. The storm flooded the village, destroyed homes, and tore off the roof of the village's learning center. Mr. Hernandez estimates that the university will spend more than $1,000 to build a new center that is being erected next to Ms. Guya's house. Ms. Guya attended college for one year and speaks fluent English. She serves as a translator for the other villagers, who speak the main dialect of the Philippines, Tagalog. She says the female villagers were suspicious of the radio technology at first. "They didn't think it was going to work in the beginning," she says. But once the pilot classes began, the women adapted quickly. "Once in a while, they'd have to excuse themselves to breastfeed their children or cook their rice," says Mr. Cruz. But he found that the women otherwise paid close attention to what they were learning. The class is aimed at women because most of the men are busy farming during the day. Many villagers here grow rice, papayas, yams, and other vegetables, relying on subsistence farming to feed their families. Mr. Cruz estimates that most of the villagers ended their formal education after three years of primary school. While a professor will guide the distance version of the class from a teleconferencing room on the campus in Manila, Ms. Guya will help the class follow along in Malasa. The university will provide the students with books, and the lessons will offer everything from spiritual advice to advice on how to make an effective compost heap to instruction on how to write. The classes will meet for two hours, twice a week. "Before the class, I didn't have any self-confidence," says 39-year-old Lolita Sivwmaug, a petite, dark-skinned woman with curly hair. "I didn't have any friends because I didn't leave my house. Now I'm learning how to read and write, which makes me feel more confident." Mrs. Guya says there was only one lesson that wasn't a success during the pilot program. "We were taught how to raise pigs in one class," she said. "We were brought pigs so that we could learn how to raise them, and they were underfed, so they remained very skinny pigs." The program is the "biggest, most ambitious" project he has ever undertaken, Mr. Cruz admits. Even so, he has more ambitious plans in the coming years. "We're scouting for four more villages where we can expand the program," he says. The university is also in talks with a private company that will provide a satellite hookup for two hours every day so that classes can be delivered via television, says Mr. Cruz. On Mr. Cruz's wish list is connecting these rural communities to the Internet, but he realizes that he must take things one step at a time. "We have to keep in mind there's no phone lines in Malasa. And electricity is problem," he says. But considering that he's gotten the radio distance-education program off the ground, Mr. Cruz can't help being hopeful. "Maybe," he says. "Maybe." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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