The contract

The women turned up early, so they joined Rodelyn and Lolita who were preparing the food for our shared dinner. Lolita had chosen four friends – “not good to have too many!” she had explained to me earlier. Beatrice Tayaban, Aniseta Pagal, Mary Ballabong, Grace Fontainillo and Lolita Adagna were the names later signed on the Animal Sponsorship Contract (Swine).

Connie and I had been late to the trustee meeting, trying to get the agreement and project plan finalized and then find somewhere to print it. It was Saturday and that was market day in Lagawe, so all the central roads were blocked with stalls and tents. In the end we split up, and I found an internet café with a printer while Connie took the Styrofoam cooler to the ice shop. We were still well within “Filipono time’ and only Ben was already waiting for us when we arrived at the guest house in Burnay. But we were closely followed by another trustee, Jovencio Dipia-o. He was late because since he was also a trustee of the Lagawe organic coffee growers coop, I had asked him to organise 20 kilograms of roasted plunger coffee packets which I could take back to New Zealand the following day and try to sell as a fundraiser.

When Nora arrived we started the trustee meeting since we wanted to hear first about the preparations for the livelihood project. Nora had been talking with the group to discuss the project and to also get to know them a little better. “They each have between 3 and 7 children and one is a grandmother. And one of them has a deaf-mute child for whom they have not been able to find any schooling.”

Nora had found out that the women were experienced with raising pigs and chicken, but only Lolita had been involved in the kind of larger scale project we were starting and they were very excited about that. “They live hand to mouth and are never able to save enough to build up livestock and to generate regular income.” Lolita was just about to slaughter the 7 pigs she had reared for the wedding of her daughter that was coming up the next week. That had only been possible thanks to her adult children contributing money. But after that she would be back at zero.

The aim of the livelihood project was to sustain income by returning part of the profits from livestock sale directly to feed the next round of piglets, produced by breeding sows kept in the same stable. The women knew that they could keep growing pigs once we had kickstarted the project with purchased piglets and feed for two breeding rounds. We would just have to find financial supporters that would put in the NZD 300 per pig needed for the first year. After that, the women expected to be raising at least 20 pigs per year with the money they themselves would earn.  

At the same time, probably twice as many piglets could be produced. The agreement with our Ifugao Community Support Trust stipulated that half of these, but not more than the twenty they would receive during the first year, would be returned to the Trust every year, in compensation for both the use of the piggery we were providing and the funds raised for the initial investment. Those pigs would then provide stock to extend the program elsewhere in Ifugao Provinces, which was the plan for 2015 onwards.

Before signing the agreement, Nora and Connie sat down once more with the women and went through the fine print, paragraph by paragraph. The contract was in English which is the official language in the Philippines, so Nora carefully explained each clause in the Ifugao that the women spoke at home.

Then all of us went up to the stables and discussed the repair work that the women would do, or that they would get their husbands to do, before the project could be started. And since there was space to start other projects later, we looked around and talked about raising chicken, growing vegetable and cropping mushrooms, using composted pig manure as fertilizer. It was exciting talking about what could happen here and we continued planning over the dinner that was waiting for us below at the guest house.