Category: Training Center

About 15 kilometers away from the Goducate Training Center (GTC) in San Miguel, Iloilo, is a place called “seven cities”, a monicker for seven villages in the highlands of Alimodian, Iloilo.  The area used to be a hotbed of insurgency, but thanks to farmers like Antonio, who has a passion to help his own people, his village has attained considerable peace and order.

Antonio visited GTC a year ago and was impressed by the vegetable production models he saw.  It sparked his interest in growing high-value vegetables in his own village, where the temperatures often dips to as low as 18 degrees Celsius at night. After visiting his small farm, I advised him to concentrate on organic strawberry production since he has practically no competitors in the whole of Western Visayas.  Strawberries requires warm daytime temperatures and cool nights to induce flowering, and his village has just the right conditions.

Starting with only 5 tissue-cultured plantlets that Goducate provided, Antonio was able to produce sufficient runners for container gardening and for field production.   He uses plant concoctions—made from fermented fruit and fermented plant juices—as fertilizer, fungicide, and insecticide to ensure organic produce, a technology he learned from Goducate.

Antonio is the first to grow strawberries in Iloilo, Philippines.  As token of his appreciation to Goducate for the technical assistance he received, Antonio has offered GTC to be the exclusive outlet for his strawberry harvests.  Once his plant nursery has enough propagated runners, he plans to help other local farmers to engage in strawberry production as a means of livelihood or as a means of supplementary income.

Goducate’s aim is to help the needy help themselves. So it follows that Goducate should help itself—ie, by aiming for self-sufficiency. Thus the Goducate Training Center (GTC) in Iloilo has not only facilities for training purposes but also holiday accommodation and recreational facilities that could be let out to the public. The recreational facilities include a swimming pool, a fishing pond, a zipline, a rock-climbing wall, and a fish spa, as well as many hectares of land for walks and games.

One group that was attracted by the facilities at the GTC was schools. Initially the schools conducted their own program, paying the entrance fee and the fee for whatever facilities they used. However, from June 2013, we started to market educational tours at PhP 150 ($3.35) per head for 30-45 min talks on various aspects of agriculture and farming that Goducate trainees are taught. The topics covered include basic botany, vermiculture, hydroponics, the rice-fish model of rearing fish in rice fields, container gardening, and characteristics of farm animals. The talks are geared for different age groups. They are interactive, with students being invited to use their senses and to participate in accompanying activities. For example, they can taste the Stevia leaf (a sweetener or sugar substitute), spray vermitea (a fertilizer made from worm castings), pot up plants, or feed animals. Included in the educational tour package is a GTC souvenir of either a potted plant or a key chain.

75% of the schools visiting GTC are kindergartens and day-care centers and 25% are elementary or high schools. In the first 2 months of this year 7 elementary or high schools, and 20 groups of kindergartens and day-care centers visited GTC. One of the groups consisted of 24 day-care centers, with a total of 750 pupils. Another very recent tour catered for a mixed group of 150 parents and students ranging in age from 6-40. Of the 27 lots of visitors, 11 took up the educational package and the rest conducted their own program.

The Goducate Training Center (GTC) in Iloilo trains people to be community development workers — ie, people who go out to needy communities, to identify their needs, and to identify leaders within the community who can lead projects that Goducate sets up to meet needs. The community development workers also have to be very hands-on in the projects they help to set up, and in the kinds of help they offer to individuals.

The trainees get their practical training in the villages around GTC. At the moment they are in 10 of the surrounding villages. The help they offer ranges from chopping up firewood for or giving massages to very old people, to screening for hypertension, to helping children catch up with school work through regular remedial classes, to training people in simple livelihood skills, to agricultural projects such as backyard farming or pig rearing.

One of the livelihood projects was training in massage. In one of the villages 4 people have been trained how to give massages. Another livelihood skill being taught is how to make choco-balls and yema (a Filipino caramel candy made with egg yolks and condensed milk) with moringa (a plant with many nutrients) for sale in schools. The recipe for including moringa in yema is still being tweaked to get the right taste and quality.