The secret of Synergeia

For a woman of her accomplishments, Milwida Guevara admits that she is given to tears – but never in public, and so this would hardly qualify her as the original iyakin. As chief executive officer of Synergeia, she was recently named Haydee Yorac awardee for helping uplift the Philippine educational system where it is most critical: from far-flung rural areas to urban depressed communities, in both the primary and secondary level.

In an interview at midweek in Synergeia offices at the Ateneo Professional Schools in Rockwell, Makati, Guevera, whose name must come from a calendar or opera singer, relates that she had just been to Calatagan the day previous with the wife of Enrique Zobel, one of their partners in the outreach program.

She said the trip to Batangas was successful in that they were able to institute mechanisms for teaching teachers and feeding, as well as identifying the missing link on how to improve the education system there.

“We want the children to read and write well, and do their math,” Guevara says, outlining the basics. “We want them to become good persons who have a sense of history, and pattern their life after the great Filipinos, like Jose Rizal.”

She laments the lack of awareness of Rizal among school children today, nostalgic for the days when public elementary schools had at least one textbook on stories about Rizal for every level, as well as the Philippine Readers series by Camilo Osias.

“The children know that the hero’s birthday is June 19, but when asked if they knew a story about him, they couldn’t say.”

Not only are we raising a distracted generation, but one altogether detached from culture, she says.

That’s where Synergeia comes in, which since 2003 has been trying to bridge the learning gap, from obscure barrios in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, to the tough neighborhoods of Tondo, Manila.

The non-government organization also extends its focus on educating the parents, too, and has published workbooks on parenting funded by the local government.

“Parents should really lessen their TV watching, because that time could be better spent helping the children with their homework,” Guevara says. “When the parents watch TV, then the children also watch, setting their school work aside.”

She says lesser distractions like television in rural areas could be the reason that children from the provinces have higher aptitude scores than their counterparts in the cities.

“There’s a saying that it takes a village to raise a child,” she says, adding their work includes instilling in parents that the children’s education should not be left totally to the school, and that the LGUs should also put priority on education.

When told that the President had just signed the trillion-peso national budget for this year with the largest chunk for the Department of Education, Guevara, a former finance career official, says: “It masks the problem.”

She says the bigger problem is providing reasonable salaries to teachers, since volunteer teachers today subsist on a starvation wage of P1,500 a month; and sourcing funds for the apt instructional materials, as each community is unique and has its peculiar needs.

For example, she cites a public school in Nueva Ecija whose last teacher training was held in 1986 – 22 years ago.

“Money is the least of our problems,” she says, saying the fault is mostly systemic and setting the right priorities.

Either can it be solved through the Cyber Education project, she says, because the broadband can only do so much and the problem is different in every community: child labor in one village, noisy karaokes in another, overcrowded homes in yet another.

Not to mention the benefits of having a real live instructor before an impressionable child.

“That is why Synergeia works with communities, to empower them by giving them resources,” she says.

Among these resources are giving them seed money for teacher training and helping cope with overpopulated schools, where there can be more than a hundred students to a class, down to the nitty gritty of putting a roof over the makeshift classroom ceiling.

She says teacher training is crucial to erase the low view of teachers, many of whom are hired through political patronage even in this day and age.

“We want to give dignity back to the public school teachers,” she says, by installing support systems such as the giving of incentives.

Synergeia also draws up several lesson plans for the core subjects, substantially reducing the teacher’s workload.

She says teachers should teach math as pupils encounter math problems in everyday life, and the basic gift of storytelling is important in catching the attention of the class.

Then there are the little things that boost the morale: a mayor in ARMM provided pentel pens, manila paper, cartolina; a governor outside Metro Manila shouldered the cost of teachers’ end of school year outing at a resort; a newspaper columnist writing a check to buy slippers for school children who have to walk quite a distance to school.

Guevara describes as a “carrot and stick approach” the Food for School program of the DepEd, saying it is the parents’ duty to send their children to school with or without a kilo or two of rice in exchange.

“It is still very paternalistic,” she says, recalling how one champorado vendor in Metro Manila vowed to see her children off to school everyday even if it meant getting up before dawn to sell her wares in the streets.

Then again the root cause, she says, is poverty, and the government should help address this by providing livelihood programs for the parents. Add to that overpopulation, which spreads thin resources.

Life wasn’t always like this for Dr. Milwida – reaching out to the grassroots and surveying the corners of classrooms in the farthest provinces – as the former grade school teacher who consistently finished at the top of her class also spent some time in Kyrzygstan to assist the former Soviet state in its tax system.

It was a welcome idyll in eastern Europe, after unsuccessfully going after industry giants and pillars of alleged tax evasion who, however, had many politicians and journalists in their pocket.

Until, that is, she broke her arm and she took it as a sign for her to return to the Philippines, first to work for Ford Foundation that was like a precursor to her work with Synergeia.

Now she describes working outside government as a “liberating experience” because one doesn’t have to think inside a box, and solutions to problems can be as creative and innovative as possible.

She stresses the importance of collaboration with the LGUs, which can turn the partnership with her NGO into a “win-win” situation by having local officials print their picture at the back of workbooks they’ve funded.

Partnerships with the private sector, meanwhile, can be relied on for counterpart funding without having to go through bureaucratic red tape.

“You should have the patience to listen to what the communities have to say. Tatlo lang naman yan: Ano ang pangarap nila, ano ang problema, at ano ang gagawin natin together para dito (There are just three things: What are their dreams, what are the problems, and what we will do together).”

These days the Synergeia CEO still tries to find time to visit her hometown of Obando, which she describes as always flooded and the most neglected in Bulacan.

On a Wednesday morning in Rockwell, however, she remembers the first and only time she met Yorac. It was in 2000, on a flight to the United States.

“I don’t think she knew me. I kept following her through immigration, and we ended up in a counter with goods to declare.”

She says Yorac gave her a hamburger, probably sensing that she didn’t have much money on her.

Eight years later, Guevara is the second to be named for the award that bears Yorac’s name, after Gawad Kalinga founder Antonio Meloto.