Training Center – Page 11 – Goducate … Go And Educate!

2015-01-022015-01-07

GTC Graduation

Dec 19, 2014, saw the graduation of the 5th batch of trainees attending the Goducate Training Center (GTC) in Iloilo. These 30 community development workers (17 ladies and 13 men) successfully completed 6 months of training to prepare them to serve Asian communities, especially needy communities.

This batch was unique in several ways:

Firstly, unlike previous batches that were trained by both university lecturers and community workers, the teachers and trainers for this batch were all seasoned active community workers.

Secondly, this batch was exposed to much more community work than previous batches. The large amount of real-life opportunities for these trainees was largely the result of Super Typhoon Haiyan’s destruction of thousands of villages.

Thirdly, unlike previous intakes, which were limited to college graduates, this batch included non-graduates who had shown an interest in serving the poor.

Fourthly, this batch took in 8 trainees from Sabah, all of whom were “undocumented aliens” (aka illegal refugees) who had fled from southern Philippines to Sabah. All these 8 trainees had been through Goducate Learning Centers in Sabah.

Every one of the 4 above “firsts” was assessed to be good and will be continued in subsequent batches. The next batch starts training this month.

About half of the graduates of this batch have volunteered to continue serving the poor villages that they were assigned to during their training. A few are planning to serve other needy Asian communities and are in the process of getting their passports.

We are proud of these 30 newly graduated CDWs. We believe that they will keep up the good name of Goducate Training Center wherever they serve and continue to help needy Asians help themselves.

2014-08-22

Goducate Training Center holds barangay captain’s lunch

Goducate Training Center (GTC) which is located in the middle of 4 municipalities in Iloilo— namely, San Miguel, Oton, Alimodian, and Leon. A municipality is divided into barangays (the smallest administrative division), which contains territorial enclaves known as puroks (those in urban areas) and sitios (those in rural areas). In the 3 years of its existence, GTC has built strong relationships in 7 barangays (including 5 sitios withing these 7 barangays) through various projects such as the moringa project, vermicomposting, massage, sports, remedial classes, and hog-raising.

On June 14, GTC held its first Barangay Captains’ Lunch Gathering. Seven barangay captains and their officials attended this event. The purpose of this gathering was to update them on what is happening in their own barangay and to discuss with them how we can best help them attain their vision for their communities.

Goducate Philippines’ Over-all Coordinator spoke about how GTC hopes to provide sufficient community development workers who are creative, ready, able, and sacrificially willing to do their part to bring about life-transforming improvements to the communities and individuals they work with. GTC’s Over-all Coordinator added during his inspirational message that GTC’s asset is its community development workers, who visit and help their barangays every week. GTC desires that through the weekly visits of the community development workers, people in the community will be encouraged and mobilized to help others too through the different Goducate projects. Other speakers were members of the community sharing about how GTC had helped them and how they too had the opportunity to help others.

Our guest writer is Leigh, GTC’s Community Health Coordinator

2014-06-112014-06-12

Communities around Goducate Training Center adopt vermiculture

One way by which Goducate plans to help needy Filipinos help themselves is to promote vermiculture among these people. They can then either use the organic fertilizer thus produced by the African night crawler worms for their own crops, or they can sell the fertilizer. When we brought the neighboring villagers to the Goducate Training Center to learn about vermiculture, the uptake was poor. So we decided to go into the community to teach them on site, and the uptake has been encouraging.

The vermiculture program in the areas neighboring the Goducate Training Center in San Miguel, Iloilo, was started in October 2013 One household per “sitio” (an area within a barangay [village], usually far from the barangay center) is given ¼ kg of worms and taught in its own backyard how to culture these worms. When the worms have multiplied, that household gives 1 kg to another household in the sitio. So far, 12 households in 7 sitios around GTC have been producing vermicompost through the Goducate program.

The first person to have a vermibed in his own backyard was Rommy, a farmer in Sitio Sapa, Barangay San Antonio. Previously he spent a considerable sum on commercial fertilizers. So far he has harvested 275 kg in 5 months from January to May 2014 . He uses the compost on his own vegetables, and now spends only a small amount on commercial fertilizer.

One of our more successful vermicompost producers is Rommel from Barangay Sto Angel, who started on the program in January this year. Rommel, a farmer, taught his children how to take care of the worms while he is busy at work. The vermibeds need to be checked frequently to ensure that there is enough moisture and enough substrate (usually dung and rice hay, rice stalks, madre de cacao leaves, ipil-ipil leaves, banana trunks and common grasses, which are rich in nitrogen) for the worms to work on. Within 2 months his ¼ kg of worms had become 5 kg, and he was able to harvest 12 sacks (1 sack = 40 to 50 kg) of compost in 3 months. He uses the compost for his own vegetables and sells some of it. With the profit he was able to buy clothes for his children. He gave a portion of his worms to his nephew.

Rommel and his family with the vermibeds

The guest writer is Melody, a community development worker based at GTC.