She works a few kilometres away from where her children live but Vanessa Belarmino has not seen them for months now as the coronavirus pandemic restricted her movement outside the house where she works as a helper.

Richmi Baricuatro is a laundrywoman who also sells cooked meals and is looking for a night job so she can pay her monthly rent and meet the growing needs of her young son, now among millions of students learning remotely as the global health crisis shut schools.

The pandemic that roiled the world this year has made it tougher for single parents like them to both work and care for their children, forcing many to make difficult decisions to be able to put food on the table and seek extra income at a time when many hard-hit companies are cutting jobs.

Still, many solo parents are trying to rise above the challenges to raise their children well and help them realise their full potential.

Belarmino’s three young kids are staying with her mother to whom she sends her monthly pay, and her sister helps her nine-year old with her online classes.

“I can’t be with her but I just have to bear it. I miss all of them and I wish I could be with them but I can’t because I need to work for them,” the 33-year-old Pasig resident said during a virtual workshop for single parents over the weekend facilitated by Synergeia Foundation.

Belarmino was on a video call with his son who turned five on Monday and for whom she ordered spaghetti, spring rolls and cake for a small party at home.

“I want my children to complete their education,” she says. “As long as I live, I will work for them.”

The pandemic has also made it more difficult for work-from-home single parents to shuttle between working and mentoring their kids.

Julin Apura has a small store in her home in Valenzuela City which she tends while tutoring her two children, aged five and 12 years old, who are sharing one phone for their online classes. Victoria Fernandez had to send her child, with cerebral palsy, more than 400 kilometres away to Bicol province to stay with her parents due to the health risks.

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Job hunting

Synergeia is a non-profit organisation whose vision is for every Filipino child to complete good basic education, and is in partnership with international institutions like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Synergeia, through its Nanay-Tatay Teacher campaign, has been holding virtual workshops since August to help parents cope with their new task as teachers at home.

About one in three poor Philippine households are headed by somebody who did not complete primary education, trapping them in unskilled low-paying jobs that are not enough to feed their family and in some cases, even to put a roof over their heads.

There are about 17.7 million Filipinos who live in poverty or those whose per capita income is not enough to meet their basic needs, equivalent to 16.7 percent of the population, according to a 2018 study released by the Philippine Statistics Authority in June this year.

Baricuatro, the laundrywoman who tutors her young son in the morning before washing other people’s clothes, says she’s looking for a night job to augment her income while he is asleep.

Czarina Elape from Caloocan City, a 43-year-old mother of two who both have visual disability, is also job hunting since the financial support from the father of her children and from her own mother is not enough, with the kids needing constant medical care.

“I’d like to find work that I can do from home because my children have special needs,’ says Elape, whose five-year old and eight-year old sons are studying via learning modules picked up weekly from school.

Amid a clamor for steady income among the workshop participants, Synergeia Chief Executive Officer Milwida Guevara said the organisation, in partnership with experts, is mulling the creation of a software app that would serve as a one-stop shop for single parents seeking extra jobs and business.

“We’ll also look at how we can establish a cooperative where everybody can help everybody,” said Guevara, who served as finance undersecretary for almost a decade.

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SIPOL

Bravesoles, a group of solo parents in Pasig City, has been trying to develop an app that will be a platform for those seeking freelance work and a market for those selling products online, says Farah Mae Sallave, the leader of the group.

Vegetable vendor Marissa Ondillo, who heads a separate group of single parents in Caloocan, said they had also been working to set up a cooperative to benefit members until their efforts were halted by the pandemic.

Synergeia will be creating a group called Single Parents Online, or SIPOL, that aims to be a support system and platform for these parents as they strive to be better providers for their children.

Caloocan City Congressman Edgar Erice says he is willing to help single parents, realising their double duties of working and teaching their children. During the workshop, his office promised to give Caloocan resident Jeramy Rose Roa a 10-day job to clean communities that will allow her to raise money to buy a sewing machine for a more sustainable earnings stream, bringing Roa to tears.

“We are here to be your partner in your roles as both father and mother to your children,” Erice told the workshop participants.

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By : Manny Serapio (manny.serapio@gmail.com)

The message came at 3:00 pm. It contained a terse invitation.  It simply said that each School Governing Council of Masiu is encouraged to join the on-line meeting with the Synergeia Foundation.

Ms. Salimah looked at the message and sighed.  She wanted  to join the meeting but  logistical concerns would make it seem impossible for her to do so. The school, which she has headed for the past three years, was located in one of the remotest parts of her town.  Internet connectivity was a luxury not afforded in her place. Even if she travelled to the town center, she would be hard-pressed to find a signal.

Yet, she was convinced that she and her team needed to be in the scheduled meeting.  In the middle of the Covid – 19 pandemic and with quarantine protocols set in place, Ms. Salimah knew that her role as a school head would be very much different in the coming school year. She needed to think of better ways to educate the school children given that face to face classroom interaction has been prohibited for the rest of the year.  She knew that with everything in the education system not clearly in place, her team of 15 school teachers would not be totally ready when the scheduled opening of classes came.  She needed the help of the larger community. She needed to learn from the others in the municipality. With all these things in mind, Salimah made her decision. She took out her cell phone,  wrote a simple message and sent it to her companions.

At exactly 4:30 am  the following day, Salimah was already in front of the Barangay Hall. She was the first to arrive at the meeting place. She waited nervously for her other companions to arrive. While all of the 5 companions she invited said yes to her invitation, she was still unsure if they really meant it. Her fears were dissipated , when finally they arrived one by one. At a quarter before 5:00 am, they were ready to leave.

Salimah and her team arrived at Iligan City at exactly 8:00 in the morning.  To be able to join the on-line meeting , Salimah made the decision to bring her team to a city three hours way from their community.

The meeting promptly started at 9:00 am. Salimah was surprised upon seeing  that three out of the four school districts of Masiu were properly represented . She learned that like her team, there were also other school governing councils who went out of their town to get a better signal.

Salimah thought that since she and her team was already in a city with a better internet signal, the virtual meeting would proceed smoothly.   However, it did not. Connection was sometimes lost. The voice of the facilitator, at times, became    choppy. Other participants were noisy.  But , everyone stayed patient.  Everyone remained.  Everyone participated.

In the end, Salimah’s perseverance, together with her team, paid off.  She did not only learn something new from her companions, she was also able to share some ideas of her own.

Among the strategies to increase enrollment and continue pursuing quality education in the middle of the pandemic she learned that day were:

1. SGC teams can  work  together to conduct house to house visits and  encourage those parents who have not yet enrolled their children to enroll them already.

2. SGC teams can  provide free school supplies to the school children.

3. Volunteers can  be  tapped to be community learning facilitators.

4. Video lessons can  be produced and  played in various barangay learning centers where students may watch them under the guidance of a learning faciltator

5. Barangay Local Government Units can make  use of the education fund  to provide materials needed for the printing of the modules.

6. Barangay halls can be transformed into learning centers were students may gather to attend tutorial sessions conducted by volunteers.

As the meeting drew to a close, Salimah knew that she maade the right decision to join the on-line meeting.  She would be needing the help of the whole community in making education work in the middle of the pandemic.

And as her team made their three – hour travel back to Masiu, Salimah once again took out her cell phone and started composing a simple message.

“Thank you Synergeia for partnering with the teachers from Mindanao.  It is truly a blessing working with you.”

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With five children, a single mobile phone and a WiFi connection courtesy of her neighbor, Joyless Presado is undaunted by the challenges of distance learning, the new education model that’s added teacher to a parent’s multiple hats.

“Because they can’t go to school due to the pandemic, children should understand that there’s always a solution,” says the 38-year old mother from Valenzuela City, north of the Philippine capital Manila. “This is what I tell my kids so they’re excited even if it’s online learning because they want to learn.

“You can’t be too negative because education should continue,” said Presado, who admits her name is a misnomer. “I’m joyful by heart.”

In Pandan in the province of Antique in central Philippines, Richard Suñega, a father of three, picks up his neighbour’s kids during the day and teaches them along with his own. “We should focus on the youth today because they need to continue learning and I support that,” he said.  

As the coronavirus pandemic shuttered schools and relocated learning to homes, parents have now taken on the role of educators, guiding their children through learning modules given by schools and online classes.

Synergeia Foundation, a non-profit organisation targeting to lift the quality of basic education, partnered with local governments and the Department of Education, and from August began virtual workshops with parents in various cities and towns across the Philippines to help them cope with their new task as teachers.

Nanay-Tatay Teacher

Synergeia’s Nanay-Tatay Teacher campaign, with workshops done via Zoom video conferencing and broadcast on Facebook, where Presado and Suñega shared some of their experiences, aims to arm parents with the right mindset in schooling their children.

“The first role of a teacher is to provide inspiration,” says Synergeia Chief Executive Officer and President Milwida Guevara, who leads the workshops with Synergeia Vice Chairman Dr. Antonio Torralba.

“If your child is inspired, he understands the importance of education and you’ll only need to do little to discipline him,” says Guevara.

Guevara, who was Finance Undersecretary for nearly a decade through 2000, said it is important to focus on three essential learning competencies – reading, mathematics and character education – at this time when the conventional school system is not available and the burden of teaching students lies with their own parents, many of them already stretched thin by their jobs.

“This is not a normal situation so do not focus on the subject matter, focus on the child,” she says.

That is a learning that 40-year-old Ana Vi Conadera tries to put to heart as she guides her Grade 7 son through 11 school modules covering different subjects.

Conadera, from Talisay City in central Negros Occidental province, picked up the modules herself when public schools launched classes on Oct. 5. They need to be returned the following week when she’ll get fresh modules.

Internet speed in the Philippines is among the slowest in the world, ranking 106th in terms of fixed broadband and 120th for mobile based on Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index in August.

Premium on values

With Internet availability slow, costly or scarce in many areas, most public schools are supplying learning materials or modules to students, putting parents in charge of teaching them to their kids.

“It’s difficult so I’ve asked my sister to help out,” said Conadera, on how she deals with helping her son, Andrew, with his lessons.

She’s a solo parent to Andrew and eight-year old Reana who starts getting her own modules a week later, and can only help out when she finishes work in the local barangay office mid-afternoon after a busy morning cooking meals she sells through her sister’s store.

“I try not to exert too much pressure on him since classes have just begun. But I remind him to read through his lessons again and again so he’ll pick it up,” says Conadera who’s thankful her younger child is excelling academically. “She tells me to spend more time with her brother since she’s doing fine on her own.”

Synergeia’s Torralba says “one of the best gifts we can give our country is nurturing the minds and hearts of our children.”

To that end, Pasig City resident Rochelle Berdan says she puts premium on value formation over academics.

“I don’t need my child to be extremely intelligent. What I need is a child who is loving and has respect for others,” says Berdan who has two kids in grade school.

Seeing her children grow up with the right values “gives me a greater sense of fulfilment as a mother,” said Berdan.

The pandemic-enforced learning system has also spurred volunteerism among some parents. Ferly Bones says she helps teach 15 mostly grade schoolers in her neighbourhood in Batad in central Iloilo province, allowing her to discover the potential of each child that may otherwise be overlooked in a regular school setup.

“There are children who can’t read but are good in drawing, so they have a skill that can be developed. I realised even the simplest kids have talent that can be nurtured,” Bones said during last week’s Synergeia-led workshop for parents of the Batad and Dumangas municipalities in Iloilo.

Alongside that epiphany, Bones says she realised “that even if I’m a simple mother, I can also be a teacher.”

-Manny Serapio (manny.serapio@gmail.com)