Denis Murphy

Denis Murphy
Parangal Lingkod Sambayanan (Public Service Award) 2009

When as a young Jesuit, Denis Murphy returned to the Philippines in 1967 fresh from his Masters in Social Work studies at Fordham University, New York, Fr. Horacio de la Costa, S.J., then Provincial, assigned him to work with Fr. Gaston Duchesneau, S.J. at the Institute of Social Order. Fr. Murphy, S.J. was to help develop a strong Jesuit apostolate dedicated to the needs and aspirations of the urban poor. Given the leeway to explore possible locations for this work toward social justice over the next few months, and actively studying Tagalog, he settled on Tondo as the most complex, interesting and challenging of city neighborhoods.

Today Denis Murphy is solidly recognized in civil society circles as “the Father of Community Organizing in the Philippines”. Thousands of community organizers have been trained in “CO” and its many derivatives since the 1970s.

Currently the Executive Director of Urban Poor Associates, which he founded in 1992, he has enabled communities to resist and negotiate poor people’s rights to secure land tenure over the last 44 years. Some 50,000 Filipino families directly owe their access to land tenure to his creativity, dedication and facilitating leadership. Through effective community organizing, poor groups have learned to confront the inequities of urban land distribution, interact as equals with government officials, and utilize both pressure as well as bargaining tactics to become upstanding citizens of this nation.

Denis Murphy helped organized the Philippine Ecumenical Council on Community Organization (PECCO) in the mid-1960s, serving as a representative of the Catholic membership in collaboration with Protestant church representatives. Such an interdenominational alliance was unheard of before then. In the early 1970s he recruited the Catholic board members from academia, media, and the Church as well CO trainees for this new work, selected the Tondo Foreshore as the initial organizing area, and spent many hours “doing legwork” to convinced disheartened residents as well as some “know it all” authoritarian local leaders that democratic organizing could indeed lead to a better life for all.

The resulting Zone One Tondo Organization, which still thrives today, is living proof that informed, determined, and active poor people can, as organized groups, transform social power discrepancies and demand benefits not voluntarily allocated to them by the larger society. The results emerged in ZOTO’s victories around secure land tenure on the Tondo Foreshore and Dagat-dagatan, Navotas in the 1970s, the residents’ subsequent access to improved basic services, infrastructure improvements, and housing, and their ability to sustain these accomplishments and confront new challenges over time.

Denis Murphy’s vision and enabling leadership continues to move and shape Philippine society in the 21st century, giving empowered people a voice in their own destiny. As a result more enlightened government processes have emerged in the course of this “demand from below”. Today many housing officials in government are strong advocates for people’s participation in human settlements planning, having discovered that negotiating with organized poor groups who can articulate their perspectives and recommend workable solutions, makes their own work easier and more effective.

Soon after ZOTO was organized, “CO” spread to many other cities in the Philippines. So notable were these early developments that other Asian groups working with their own urban poor readily responded in 1971 to Denis Murphy’s advocacy for an ecumenical network, the Asian Committee for People’s Organization, each with its own national set of equivalent NGOs and POs. Remaining at the forefront of civil society initiatives in support of the urban poor in Asia, ACPO recognizes Denis Murphy as consistently having organized the Catholic Church’s participation in the work.

In 1976, he left the Jesuit order but continued his commitment to community organizing. His subsequent marriage to community organizer Alice Gentolia-Murphy created the well-known and formidable “dynamic duo” that has brought significant breakthroughs for people empowerment. He credits the Society of Jesus for protecting him when the Marcos Administration not only refused him permission to work with the Office of Human Development, Federation of Asian Bishops Conference (OHD/FABC), but threatened to deport him as well.

Safely back at the OHD/FABC a few weeks later, the bishops again asked him to concentrate on the cities and their growing numbers of urban poor informal settlers, disempowered and living in inhumanly degraded environments. This effort would include organizing the Bishops Institute for Social Action, with a major program that brought hundreds of bishops from Asia and other continents to the Philippines. The bishops met as a group to discuss what they had experienced and discerned in the light of the Gospel and the Social Teachings of the Church.

This commitment to involving the Church directly in dialogues with the poor, thereby making the Gospel resonate in the everyday lives of marginalized groups, continues to be a part of Mr. Murphy’s mission now. He insists that the Church is the most reliable ally of the urban poor in their struggles for a better life, and that it is part of his role to help people make their faith a motivational force in community organizing.

As for his Jesuit brothers, some of whom remain his best friends, he believes that “A person can best appreciate the Jesuits if he knows them from within and from without. One point of view without the other is inadequate.”

Denis Murphy is also a prolific writer who expertly combines his social and humanities proclivities. Some 30 articles and poems of his have been published in America, the Society’s official magazine in the United States. His four volumes of short stories and his novel, A Watch in the Night, have been widely read. Although exercises in fiction, they are usually based on the real social issues he has confronted all his life. But perhaps he is best known among today’s reading public for his insightful articles in the Philippine Daily Inquirer as well as the now-defunct Manila Chronicle.

For his dedication to community organizing as a vital social force toward social justice in Asia;

For enabling thousands of urban poor families to achieve dignity by having a voice in their own secure future, for training and inspiring hundreds of young community organizers to be “men and women for urban poor others,” for assisting the Catholic Church to carry out its preferential option for the poor in the Philippines and Asia and to do so in ecumenical partnerships;

And for his contributions to social commentary and fiction rooted in social issues, the Ateneo de Manila University, in this year’s sesquicentennial anniversary of its foundation, is proud to confer the Parangal Lingkod Sambayanan on Denis Murphy.

###

Proclamations and Resettlement

This document is publicly viewable at: http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dhhqg4t6_115grjr6sgh

EVICTIONS and UNCESCR CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

This document is publicly viewable at: http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dhhqg4t6_65dq974tc8

A changing of the guard?

Commentary : A changing of the guard?

By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Posted date: September 26, 2008

In a small rented room in the Baseco Compound in Manila’s Tondo district that serves as the office of the people’s organization Kabalikat, some 20 leaders, mostly women, waited for the arrival of two young princes of Philippine politics, Senators Manuel Roxas II and Benigno Aquino III. Manila Mayor Fred Lim and former secretary of education Florencio Abad were also expected. The room is used for a tutoring class, so the people were squeezed into the children’s small chairs.

There is a countrywide consensus for a more democratic, egalitarian and participative government, but what would it look like in the concrete? People want a changing of the guard, an end to the “trapo” [traditional politico] system, but how would the new politicians act? People in that small room that morning saw some signs of what this new politics might be like.

Lim came first. He stayed on the street outside the room, gathered crowds of people, children especially, and gave them P20 bills until the bags of money he brought with him were empty. He talked to Roxas when the latter arrived, and then went away.

Roxas went around Baseco for an hour or so, an area of 56 hectares at the mouth of the Pasig River. It is home to about 10,000 families. One woman he met told him she paid P6 for a 20-liter container of water, which translates to about P300 for a cubic meter. Ordinary users of supply from Manila Water Co. pay only P10 a cubic meter. The poor pay more in every conceivable way.

Finally, the two senators and Abad came into the meeting room and spent the next two hours talking with the people. They listened as the people explained the problems they faced with light, water, drainage, incomes and schools, and how at present they feared they might be removed from Baseco, even though the land was proclaimed for them by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2002. They believe powerful and well-connected businessmen want the strategic area for commercial purposes.

The government cites a 2004 soil analysis that predicts the soil in Baseco will liquefy if there is a strong earthquake nearby. The study concludes that no homes are safe and all the homes must be removed. This is because the reclamation done in Baseco by the government used garbage instead of good soil and rocks, the analysis states. Other engineers say it is still possible to build safely one-story or two-story houses, provided ordinary building precautions in such a hazardous area are taken.

A cloud of secrecy covers the government’s real plans. Understandably, the people fear they will be evicted and sent 50 or 80 kilometers away, far from their work and the children’s schools, and that they will be replaced by offices, harbor facilities or houses of the rich.

The people told the senators they believed the proclamation gave them ownership rights, and on that basis they, with the help of Gawad Kalinga and Habitat for Humanity, built 2,000 neat, one-story houses. Another 1,000 families built in a government sites and services program. The remaining families have built as the poor have always built: shacks of secondhand materials wherever there was space. The people believe these steps strengthened the ownership rights, and they feel they cannot be evicted arbitrarily.

They told the senators that they should be told what the plan is, and if there is no plan then government should put that in writing and continue instead to upgrade the area as the proclamation states. The senators promised to help them find out what they could about the government plan.

As the morning went on, there were signs of a changing of the guard, from the old-style politician, or trapo, to a newer, more democratic style.

Lim may not be the best example of the trapo, though he very often refuses to meet with groups of poor people. He does help in his own way. In a more democratic style the senators visited the poor, they listened patiently and they offered to do what the people wanted them to do.

The senators took part in a dialogue with the people that was informal, friendly, one in which each side treated the other with respect. Perhaps that’s the essence of new governance: respect, willingness to enter into dialogue to form solutions, and cooperative action. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, however. Everyone hopes the senators will maintain their opening to the poor.

There were signs within three days after the meeting that the senators had begun to do what they promised.

The experience of Mayor Jesse Robredo in Naga City and Mayor Tomas Osmeña in Cebu City shows that the urban poor will vote in overwhelming numbers for the candidates who have helped them between elections. The poor are a more reliable constituency for a politician than the business and special interest groups they usually serve.

It would be wonderful if politicians took the poor seriously and won their votes, not by handouts, but by performance, by solving the very serious problems the poor face.

Is there hope of a changing of the guard?

Dennis Murphy works with Urban Poor Associates. His email address is upa@pldtdsl.net.

Copyright 2008 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Teaching kids to dream beyond Baseco

By Tarra Quismundo
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:53:00 08/03/2008

THE MINUTE HE EXPERIENCED MAKING art with crayons on a clean sheet of paper, sixth-grader Rodel Candano started to dream about becoming an architect.

Though still in grade school at age 13, Mayka Rosaros learned she could aspire to be a doctor.

From their crowded regular classrooms, a select group of elementary school pupils from poor families has been chosen to take remedial instruction in a study center at the Baseco Compound in Manila. Here they learn to aim big with the help of two tutors who make up for what their regular schools lack.

Regarded as mentors more than tutors, Laarni Salanga and Ivy Espineli, graduates of the University of the Philippines, are providing a hands-on learning experience to a select group of Grade 5 and Grade 6 students in the port village.

Salanga and Espineli take turns teaching morning and afternoon tutorial sessions in English, Math and Science at the Edukasyong Kabalikat Para Sa Kaunlaran (EKK) learning center, a one-room facility established by Kabalikat, a Baseco people’s organization, and Urban Poor Associates, a nongovernment organization, with a P300,000 donation in 2003.

“Sometimes when we ask kids what they want to be, they say ‘I want to be a seaman, a porter, a vendor in Divisoria.’ They do not dream of bigger things. Nobody said ‘I want to be a doctor.’ But we tell them this is not all of the world. There’s a bigger world outside Baseco,” said the 25-year-old Espineli.

EKK’s thrice-weekly sessions (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays) with 25 students per grade level are helping to bridge the learning gaps for low-performing students of Baseco’s public elementary schools.

“In school, they average 70 to 90 students per class, so only those in the front rows get to understand their lessons. If you’re in the back, you will be left behind. That’s what we notice. That’s why children lose enthusiasm for going to school,” said Salanga, 29, who finished English Studies at UP Diliman.

Tutoring pupils at the center has become a mission for Salanga and Espineli who have shunned better opportunities normally available to young people of their age and accomplishment.

Espineli, who majored in Social Science at UP Manila, started work at EKK three days after she graduated in April 2003.

Family obligations made Espineli, the third in a family of four children, take a three-year respite from EKK to take a teaching job in Thailand. She taught at an exclusive, all-girls school in southern Thailand and later became assistant director of the Thaksin University’s Institute for Foreign Languages.

“I had to go there to support my youngest sibling’s [nursing] studies. He graduated in March, that’s why I’m back. My obligation is over,” she said.

Salanga, who was looking for a part-time job to support her graduate studies, joined EKK the year that Espineli left. She said it was the kind of challenge she had long been looking for to escape a “boring” job at the family printing business in Caloocan.

“For an English Studies graduate like me, there are many opportunities. It’s easy for me to go but I do not feel like it. I feel like there’s no need for me to leave. And what’s good here is we get to express our creativity,” said Salanga.

They receive compensation that they regard as better than what other schools would pay, but they consider the experience of becoming more than a tutor to their students a far greater reward.

“We are able to provide individual attention and the child sees that the teacher is concerned. Once you get their trust, they will already share with you what’s happening in their homes, they will open up. They treat you as a friend,” said Espineli.

The center, which follows the regular school calendar, annually admits 25 of the poorest performers—or those with a grade average of 79 percent and below—in the last two grade levels whom they prepare to enter high school.

A token fee of P1 is charged for each session. The idea is for the students and the parents to have a “sense of ownership” of the program, said Espineli.

The job of selecting those that need help falls to the Baseco parents who identify barely passing elementary school pupils in the community and enroll them at EKK. Salanga and Espineli said they sometimes have to knock on doors to encourage participation.

The tutors hold three-hour sessions for each grade level, dividing the time among English, particularly reading and grammar, basic Math and Science. Fridays are reserved for art and music lessons which many of the kids enjoy the best.

And throughout the sessions, the pupils are taught to observe good manners.

Once, a student who came in 15 minutes late for a Friday afternoon session had to apologize to the group, to which a classmate replied in English: “Next time, come early.”

Encounters with Baseco kids have opened the tutors’ eyes to “realities” that are peculiar to the place.

In the port village, a former shantytown that had been dismantled many times before by fires and demolitions, sixth-graders often include students old enough for high school.

Finding the answer to 5 minus 4 is a stretch for fifth-graders, and graduating students struggle to read “run” or “fun.”

“You wonder whether there was a student who could read well,” said Salanga, adding that sessions at times had to go back to primary-level lessons.

Many also go to school with empty stomachs.

“You’d see that immediately in the child. You’d think he’s just not that smart but you realize that hunger is the reason why he performs poorly in school. It’s either they went to school without eating, or they were beaten by their parents,” said Salanga.

To enhance comprehension, the teachers would use the pupils’ experience to simplify the lesson.

“In addition or subtraction, we ask them how much will be left if you take P2 from P5. And most of them immediately understand because at times their parents make them hawk [items] in Divisoria,” Salanga said.

But what would prove to be useful in class was also a factor for pupils missing the sessions. The teachers note poor attendance in the months leading up to Christmas, traditionally the peak selling season for Divisoria.

“Sometimes, parents would rather that their kids sell plastic bags in Divisoria, at P5 for 100 pieces, than go to the center. Or they are made to sell vegetables, or take care of their siblings,” said Espineli.

To persuade the students to return, the tutors have to visit their homes and talk to the parents.

Despite the challenges, the young teachers are buoyed by the EKK’s successes.

Vanessa Vega, who was in the first batch of students at the center, graduated First Honorable Mention in 2004, after lagging behind in her class for a long time with 70-percent grades.

Roughly 90 percent of EKK “graduates” have also proceeded to high school, helping to cut the high elementary-to-high-school dropout rate among Baseco students.

The extracurricular activities at the EKK have helped to pull up Rodel Candano’s average by a point -- from 79 percent to 80 percent -- in the last school year.

“Here we get to draw, we sing and dance and go on field trips. We went to the Planetarium where I saw stars and Parks and Wildlife where we got to play in the open ground,” said Candano.


Copyright 2008 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20080803-152300/Teaching-kids-to-dream-beyond-Baseco

Tutoring for grade school students

Inquirer Opinion / Columns

Commentary : Tutoring for grade school students

By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Posted date: July 13, 2008

MANILA, Philippines—My 7-year-old niece who studies in Mater Carmeli School in Novaliches heard her father talking about high prices and told him: "Don't worry, Papa, I can stop schooling. Anyway, I finished Grade 1." Her parents assured her there was enough money for school and that there was much more to learn. When they tell the story, people laugh.

In the Baseco urban poor area at the mouth of the Pasig River, hundreds of poor children drop out each year from the Hermenigildo J. Atienza Elementary School. Some 918 children began Grade 1 in June 2007, but before the end of the school year, 101 had dropped out: 11 percent of the class. Nobody was laughing. These are 6- or 7-year-old children who are now finished for good with school and thrust into a highly competitive world where even factories require a high school diploma, and fast-food shops require some college education. Some years the figures were worse: in June 2006 the first-grade class began with 943 children, but only 702 finished the year, a dropout rate of 25 percent.

In June this year, 378 children finished elementary school in Baseco. There were 715 when they began in Grade 1 in June 2002. Over the six years of schooling, 47 percent of the children dropped out.

The children drop out for many different reasons. Parents can't afford the school expenses, or they need the children to work to make money, for example, by scavenging, or the children feel they don't fit in or can't keep up with the studies, or the parents just don't care. As a result of all this, almost half the children of Baseco will wind up illiterate, which is equivalent to a life-long sentence to poverty.

No one blames the principal or teachers. There are classes in Baseco with 91 and sometimes more children in the room. How can a teacher handle such a number? Just to keep a modicum of civilization is quite a work. There are two children for every textbook (government figure). There are children so bright they do well despite all the obstacles, but most children are average and below average and these children wind up in the 5th and 6th grades unable to read with any ease in English or Tagalog, and unable to do simple math. If you ask a 6th grade boy or girl in Baseco, how much is 29 plus 15, they will most likely go into some sort of abacus on their fingers. Fingers may be useful for simple addition and subtraction, but not for the math needed to deal with credit cards, bank accounts, bills from utility companies, tax forms and the like. The children will be numerically illiterate.

What to do? The usual suggestions for a bigger education budget, higher salaries for teachers, smaller class size, etc. are all good, but what to do now?

A small tutoring venture in Baseco called Edukasyong Kabalikat para sa Kaunlaran (EKK) has had some success and, in the process, came upon what may be the prime missing ingredient in the present overcrowded school system, namely, the lack of any individual care. It's not a new discovery, of course: good teachers have always known the importance of individual attention to children.

EKK is a small tutoring effort run by the parents of Kabalikat, a people's organization in Baseco, that takes children for six hours a week (two hours a day, three times a week) after regular school. There are classes for 5th and 6th grade boys and girls and first graders. The program only takes students whose academic averages are under 80 percent: the very bright students don't need tutoring and the very slow won't benefit. It is a difficult triage for kids to undergo. Mayette Betasolo is in charge of the EKK committee of parents.

The program focuses on reading (English and Tagalog), math, science and religious values. The classes always have less than 25 students, allowing the young teacher to give some individual time to each student. This individual attention makes a great difference in children's progress. In individual instruction, the teacher can discover what prevents the children from doing their best. The problem may be a serious one, dyslexia, for example, or a much more common one, lack of confidence, shyness, or the inability to form certain sounds. Sometimes it's enough to move a child who has trouble hearing from the last row in a class to the front where he or she can hear the teacher. A good teacher or a good part-time tutor can solve most problems.

Ivy Espineli and Lala Salanga, two young women, both UP graduates, have been EKK's main teachers. They have been successful. All 96 children who finished the 6th grade tutoring over the past four years have passed the government exam for entering high school. All were average students. Of the 96 who have gone to high school, all but five are still in high school or have graduated. EKK is now into its 5th year. The usual percentage for finishing high school is about 20 percent. EKK's graduates may reach a 90 percent graduation rate if present trends continue.

Ivy has given up a well-paying work in Thailand and Makati to tutor in Baseco. Lala is getting her master's at UP.

The Baseco parents who run EKK say there are three reasons for the success EKK has had: one, it focuses on reading, math, science and values and stays away from the other subjects that crowd children's days in school; it gives time for individual attention; and, finally, there is the commitment of the young teachers.

How can we provide similar tutoring for many other children? It need not be six hours a week. If there are only two or three children in a class, maybe two hours a week would be enough. Maybe one hour a week with one child would do. We have thousands of children who need tutoring. We have potential tutors in our college students, young professionals, retired elderly people, the children's parents themselves and older students in the urban poor areas. How do we put students and tutors together? Is there some person(s) with the calling to do this?

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His e-mail address is upa@pldtdsl.net.

Copyright 2008 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


More children out of school