roots of health (roh) - Roots of Health

We have been featured in the August edition of Smile Magazine, the in-flight magazine of Cebu Pacific Air. The article, by Katherine Jack, is about the “Brain Gain”, Filipinos who are returning to their homeland to make a difference.

Ami Evangelista Swanepoel grew up in Manila, and moved to the US when she was 19 to study at Wellesley College. After graduating, she spent two years with Human Rights Watch doing challenging work that further inspired her to pursue her Masters in health and human rights.

Ami was working as a consultant in strategic planning for nonprofi ts, when one morning she received an unexpected email from her mother, Susan. The message tentatively suggested that they found an organization for women and children in Palawan. Ami was excited at the prospect of moving back to the Philippines. “I wasn’t feeling fulfilled in New York and wanted a job that matched my work experience and training,” she says.

Her husband, Marcus, a schoolteacher from South Africa, was also keen to move. “I had been to Palawan before and could imagine us living there,” he recalls. In 2009, they founded Roots of Health (Ugat ng Kalusugan) a non-profit organization focused on improving the health of women and children, and their communities in the city of Puerto Princesa.

Roots of Health aims to give people the information they need to make decisions about family planning, health and improved nutrition. “There is a need for organizations like ours as information about women’s health and pregnancy is lacking in the Philippines,” explains Ami. “It is amazing to see the difference that a small program like ours can make,” she says.

“As a Filipino myself, I find it fulfilling to do this kind of work for other Filipinos.”

For the last few years my mom, Susan Evangelista, has talked about starting an organization for women and children. The specifics would change; sometimes we would be talking orphanages, sometimes a shelter for abused women. But although the specifics weren’t in place, the dream was there.

Meanwhile, my brilliant younger sister, Ami Evangelista Swanepoel, finished a double Master’s degree- Master of International Affairs and Master of Public Health in Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and the Mailman School of Public Health. She found a good job in New York after finishing her degrees but it wasn’t really the hands-on type of job that she had hoped to have.

One day she was speaking with my mom about her desire to work in the field, and my mom suddenly said, “Why don’t you and Marcus (her husband) come and help me start my non-profit organization?” My mom expected Ami to say, “You’re crazy mom. We can’t just leave our jobs and move to Palawan!” But the opposite happened. She and her husband jumped at the idea! And as they say, the rest is history…

My mom and Ami formed both a US and local counterpart for their organization which is called “Roots of Health” and “Ugat ng Kalusugan” in the Philippines. Yesterday I attended the first meeting of the Roots of Health staff with their Advisory Board, of which I am a member. It was the first time we all gathered together but all the work actually began more than a year ago, after that initial email/phone exchange between my mom and my sister. My sister and her husband have since moved to Palawan to work directly with my mom. They have raised funds, developed their vision and mission statements, identified who or what their target is with their organization, started working with women and children in one of the poorest communities in Puerto Princesa, Palawan, tweaked their goals here and there depending on the needs they saw, and finally, on March 9, 2010, gathered their Advisory Board in Puerto Princesa to discuss all that has been done, and see how we can help them as they work toward their goals.

I am officially a member of the local Board of Directors as well as the Advisory Board. I have mostly been a cheerleader for my mom and Ami; and an occasional errand girl. But living in Manila made me feel removed and far away from all they were doing. This meeting was just what I needed to pick me up from the fringes and put me down in the middle of the action! Hearing about how they had chosen the community they work in, the workshops they have with the women in the area, how they are expanding to start teaching children as well, their nutritional support programs and all their adventures and misadventures working in this area transported me from my position as a fan to that of a player. Visiting “Pulang Lupa” (the area at which they work) with another Advisory Board member, Carlos Celdran, after the meeting was the icing on the cake. It was too hot for too many of the residents to be out, but we met some of the key people Roots of Health has been working with. We saw some of the really malnourished children who still gave us friendly smiles, met a mom who is pregnant with her seventh child and who was carrying her 3 year old who looked more like an 8 month old baby, saw the landfill that is practically on top of this community, gazed at the only home – on top of the hill no less – that has water which is sold by the bucket to the other residents, and felt the hot sun beating down on us – an all too familiar feeling to the dedicated staff who go to this community 2 to 3 times a week.

I have been a stay at home mom for so many years now that I sometimes feel like I’ve forgotten how to work outside of the home. But part of what makes this so exciting for me is that it is still “home” in a sense. Because it isn’t only my mom and my sister who are involved in this, my dad and my brother-in-law are also very much involved with the day-to-day work of the organization. The Advisory Board, US Board and local staff members are not all family, but some are people we have known for a while; and even with newer acquaintances, there is the bond of working together for a common cause. I’m looking forward to being able to do more with Roots of Health and hope that as I do, I can inspire others to support Roots of Health as well.

As with every month since we started working in the Philippines, December was another very busy month for Ugat ng Kalusugan!

I started off the month with 3 days of back to back to back meetings in Manila with other organizations focused on maternal and child health and reproductive health. The people I met with were incredibly helpful and I am so thankful for their generosity in sharing their time and best approaches and practices with me. I really learned a lot and left the meetings eager to return to Palawan and use some of the wise advice I’d been given. Reflecting on the meetings made me feel so thankful for how supportive the nonprofit and NGO community has been here in the Philippines. Everyone we have met with has been so happy to help us and Roots of Health / Ugat ng Kalusugan is benefiting and will continue to benefit greatly from all of these relationships.

Back in Palawan, Susan, Marcus and Lyn Lyn were busy preparing for our end of year Christmas party in Pulang Lupa and when I returned I helped organize our activities as well. Christmas is a very big deal in the Philippines, and we had decided in late November that though we wouldn’t be able to begin our educational outreach activities before January 2010, that we could at least have one session to formally launch our activities in the community before we closed for the Christmas holidays. We decided to have a short program for the women and children in Pulang Lupa. We planned to gather all the women in one area and introduce ourselves and our work more formally and give them an update on what we would begin doing in January. We decided to have a few games related to our work, serve a simple merienda (snack) and give each woman a small gift of food/groceries for her household. We decided to have a brief program for the kids as well and planned to have games and stories with the little ones in a nearby area, serve them a merienda, and give each child a toy that we had purchased. We tried to guesstimate how many people would attend and decided that probably around 50 women and 130 children would attend. We planned for that many number of gifts and rounded up a bit for food. We knew that the party was probably going to be a bit chaotic but we also believed that it would be fun and we hoped to have a good number of women in attendance.

The Christmas Party

On December 11, party day, we showed up in Pulang Lupa 40 minutes before our start time, fully expecting that we would need time to start rounding up some of the women and children. We had planned to start our activities when we had about 40 kids and about 20 moms in attendance. We were surprised upon arriving to see that a small group of children had already gathered. Within 15 minutes, there were about 50 kids waiting and a few minutes before our scheduled start time, there were more than 100 participants patiently waiting. Some of the moms and kids did come a bit late, but we had nearly all our participants ready and waiting at our scheduled start time. There were so many people! We estimate that there were about 150 kids and about 60 women all together. In addition, there were about 10 men from the community – fathers and husbands – who came to join in our programming as well. The extra numbers made things a little bit more hectic, but we were so pleased that we had such a high turnout, and we were happy that everyone, including the men, had decided to come out. We were thankful for the extra food we had brought because it allowed us to also give the men a small merienda. Not all of the women got a bag of groceries, but all households did get a bag of food (some households had more than one woman in attendance.) And we had candy that we gifted the extra kids with. So in terms of supplies, it all went fine.

Susan and Lyn Lyn and I handled the program for the women, and it all went better than we could have hoped for. All the women in our group were cheerful and excited to participate and were interested to learn more about our planned programming for January. Before we began we asked the women to write their names on nametags, and we called on each individual by name. We think they really appreciated this, and it was helpful to us to place more faces with names as we hope to know every member of the community on a first name basis before too long. The games and activities we’d planned all had something to do with reproductive health and we were pleasantly surprised to see the women really engage and really get into the games and discussions. We don’t think that they have very many chances to talk about their lives and their thoughts and ideas, and it was fantastic to see how much they enjoyed participating in our activities. The men were mostly on the periphery, just listening, but I think they are also happy to know more about our plans, and they enjoyed listening to the women and watching them engage. My dad, Oscar, also came to the party and he stood with the menfolk and chatted with them quite a bit. We don’t yet have programming for the men in the community but we are very glad that they came and now know more about what we are doing as we think this will make it easier for the women to come to our sessions without eliciting any suspicion from their husbands about what we might be teaching them.

We knew going into the Christmas party that the kids would be a bigger and wilder group so we recruited some extra help for Marcus and were so thankful for the help that Jane, Evetha, Gonie, Jennie, Jong and Jen lent us. Marcus and his team entertained the kids with games and songs and Evetha, who is an amazing story teller, told the children a few stories. It was a huge group but they managed to keep everyone engaged and entertained. Distributing the toys was the only portion of the afternoon that did not go as smoothly as other parts because of the extreme enthusiasm and excitement from the kids, but even that didn’t go too badly. In the end all the kids went home happy and were all very appreciative of their new friends and new toys.

After we cleaned up we piled into our cars and went home exhausted, but really thrilled with how well the afternoon went, and really excited about starting our programs there in January.

Other Activities

On December 14th Susan and I held a Board Meeting with our New York and Vermont based Board of Directors. Unfortunately Susan and I could not attend in person, but technology allowed us to participate in the meeting via phone. Our Board of Directors is comprised of intelligent and enthusiastic women and we had some great discussions about the work we’ve already done and our work ahead. One Board member, Suneeta, has already visited us in Palawan and we hope that in 2010 the rest of the members of the Board will be able to come to Palawan to see our work firsthand as well.

During the last week of work in 2009, we focused on organizing our materials and workshops so that we can hit the ground running in January 2010. Within the first few weeks of January we plan to test some of our workshops and activities with students at Palawan State University, start the programming for women in Pulang Lupa, and begin the nutritional support program for undernourished children in the community. We are so excited to begin our programming and for all that lies ahead in 2010.

All of us at Roots of Health / Ugat ng Kalusugan would like to thank you for your support and enthusiasm for our work since we started in August, and we look forward to your continued support and interest in 2010. We wish you all a wonderful holiday season, and send our best wishes for a peaceful and prosperous New Year.

November has been a busy and important month for Roots of Health. Since my last blog update, we completed our needs assessment. In analyzing the data as well as our general observations from being in the communities, we have decided to begin our programs and service delivery in a community in Santa Lourdes called “Pulang Lupa” (meaning “red earth”) which is a part of Purok Matahimik. It is the community that I mentioned before that is also referred to simply as “Dumpsite”. Based on the income and size of the local families as well as health and nutrition patterns, education levels and knowledge on reproductive health, Pulang Lupa is clearly the most underserved community and we believe they will benefit greatly from our programs.

Upon selecting Pulang Lupa as our first program site, we mapped all the households within the location and spent 4 days conducting in-depth surveys within every household in the community.

View the photos of the Pulang Lupa.

Number of households – 59

Number of people living within the 59 households – 315 (average of 5.3 individuals per household)

Percentage of households with access to their own toilet facility – 61%

Percentage of households with access to their own electricity – 44%

Percentage of households with connection to their own supply of water – 5% (95% of the people in the community do not have their own connection to a water supply and have to walk down a steep hill to collect water from a well for bathing and cleaning and they buy water directly from a water company for drinking and cooking).

100% of the respondents live in homes made of nipa or thatch, and 95% of the houses have only one room for all of the inhabitants to share.

42% of the respondents do not have a job.

The average salary in the community is around P3,330 ($66). However, this figure is skewed because of outliers– two households have a monthly income of around P10,000 ($200) and many more have a monthly income between P500 ($10) and P1000 ($20).

Less than 30% of the respondents practice some form of family planning.

62% of respondents said that the ideal number of children is either 2 or 3.

Only 54% of respondents have been pregnant 3 times or less.

Of the remaining women, 8 (13.5%) have been pregnant 4 times. 3 women (5%) have been pregnant 5 times. 6 women (10%) have been pregnant 6 times. 3 respondents (5%) have been pregnant 7 times. 2 women (3%) have been pregnant 8 times. 3 respondents (5%) have been pregnant 9 times. 2 women (3%) of respondents have been pregnant 10 times and 1 woman has been pregnant 12 times.

Nearly all births are at home with a traditional healer as a birth attendant.

10 women have had no formal schooling in their lives. 17 women went to anywhere from 1st to 5th grade in elementary school. 14 women went up to the 6th grade and completed elementary school. 9 women had some high school education but only 5 women actually graduated from high school. 1 woman went up to her second year in college, and 3 women completed vocational or secretarial school.

All of the women have experienced difficulty in feeding their families, and very few can afford to buy meat or fish. Most women reported eating rice with either eggplant, kangkong (a type of spinach), plantains or casava when we asked them to tell us everything they had eaten the day before we interviewed them.

Roots of Health

Roots of Health Featured in “Smile” Magazine

Roots of Health and Me

Ugat ng Kalusugan in December

Pulang Lupa