TACLOBAN CITY – A collaborative literacy program by the An Waray party-list and the University of the Philippines’ Office for Continuing Education for the minority group composed of Mamanwa and Manobo in Taacloban is currently being implemented to assist and help them acquire basic knowledge in learning and writing.
The program is dubbed as Project Lapis: Learning for Adult Persons initiative of the Sinirangan Visayas Youth Organization (SVYO and started last September 10, 2011 around 20 members of the indigenous group with ages raging from 26 to 60 years old most of them are parents.
Clement Dula, project coordinator of the literacy program, revealed that since most of their students are adult the teaching process would be indefinite.
“What we really want is for them to learn how to read and write and to count, until they have acquired this knowledge we will not stop the program,” Dula said, adding that most of those who are attending the class are parents.
To ensure that their students will attend the classes, Dula said that they had provided them with school supplies such as papers, notebooks, pencil and pen for them to use in the class.
Every Wednesday from 1:30 until 4:00 the students from their village located in a mountainous part of the city would go down to the Philippine Institute of Herbal and Traditional Medicine located in Barangay Bagacay at the northern part of the city for their weekly class session.
Professor Irma Tan of the UP- Tacloban Campus is the one supervising and conducting the lecture among the literacy program beneficiaries, which she devotes as part of giving back and sharing the knowledge she acquires while members of the SVYO provides her manpower support by assisting her during their weekly session.
The first thing that they teach to their students, according to Dula, is by familiarizing the letters of the alphabet and how numbers are written in words.
“Slowly we are teaching them how to read and then write words,” Dula said.
“It’s all basic because most of them do not really know how to read or write even simple words,” Dula added.
“They are amaze when they learned that numbers when put into words are written that way, although they can recognize them it is written in numbers,” he added.
“Although, there are notion that adult students are hard to be taught, the good thing with them is they really wanted and eager to learn which really inspires us,” he stressed.
Dula added that their lesson is in the local dialect(Waray) including the words they are teaching which is more familiar to the group of Mamanwa and Manobo.
He added that there are also times that they teach how to write Tagalog words.
Once the group already learns the basic writing and reading comprehension, Dula said that it will be the time they will go to the next step of their class which is teaching basic mathematics.
Aside from providing basic learning comprehension to indigenous group, Dula said that the program also aims to encourage members of SVYO to have the essence of volunteerism.
“We want to have the sense of thinking by lending help to other people without expecting anything in return,” Dula stressed.
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