February 2015 – Formation of Aeta Tribe Foundation
My name is Fernando Briosos and I am the founder of the Aeta Tribe Foundation. As a young boy growing up in the rural town village of Guagua, Pampanga, Philippines during the 60s and 70s, I lived in poverty. There was always a shortage of food and a normal part of my life was wondering when I would have my next meal. Of course, there were so many of us in the Philippines striving to make the most of what we had while living in poverty. Others may have had more difficulty than I did; many were in an even worse situation. After our house burned down, my parents left me to live with my grandmother while they moved to San Francisco. I was nine years old and penniless. Everything I owned had been donated. Each day I focused on survival by collecting old magazines and other recycled materials to sell for change so that I would have enough for a piece of bread or rice with soy sauce. Survival was my priority over education. Unbeknownst to me, my best friend, Johnny, a German Shepherd was killed and became food for my family.
At the age of 14, I left my homeland to join my family in the United States. Like many immigrants, I did not speak English. I was sent to school in sixth grade because I had only had four years of primary school from kindergarten to third grade. However, I failed and had to repeat sixth grade. It was humiliating, so I went to work part-time as a janitor after school and used the money to hire tutors on the weekends to teach me English, reading, and math. Every three months after that, I advanced to the next level. In three years, I passed all of my high school examinations and received my high school diploma at the age of eighteen. From there, I rented my own apartment and worked full-time during the day while going to college in the evenings. I paid 100% of my college education myself and received a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Management eight years later that changed the course of my life.
The first time I saw the indigenous Aeta people was in February of 2015 when I went back to visit my homeland. My relatives still live in poverty but their situation is not as tragic as that of the Aeta tribe. The Aeta people not only suffer from food shortages, but also from a lack of water in the mountains. I couldn’t believe how poor they were. Water should be a right for every person, especially children. Many children under the age of nine begin their day by stopping cars in the middle of the highway early in the morning and begging for money. Some of these children live under bridges for shade. This kind of behavior pushes the death toll even higher due to car accidents and dehydration. Perhaps my recent encounter with the people of the Aeta tribe served as a reminder of my own youth and how difficult it was for me to have food once a day. I was even more greatly affected when I recalled Aeta children fighting over a cup of water.
After Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, more and more of the Aeta people began coming down the mountain to visit metropolitan cities and towns for water. During the night they come to people’s houses with small containers and try to collect water from faucets below the houses. Their situation gets worse during the dry season when there is no water available and the soil is very dry, making it even more difficult to plant vegetables. The Aeta call the season from November to June the hunger season.
During my first visit to the village, we brought three truckloads of water and food. The truck holding water was overrun by children pushing each other, trying to get a single cup of water to drink. They were thirsty and in less than an hour, we ran out of water. I didn’t expect to see so many of these children in one village called Nabuklod in Floridablanca. The chieftain and the elders of the village gathered all the food we brought – rice, sardines, coffee, and milk – and told us the food was only enough for 125 families, however the village had 600 families and approximately 3,000 people. They suggested that they would discuss who among the 125 families would receive the food. I felt uncomfortable that I could not provide enough food for all 600 families. The elders decide which families got to eat while the others watched; their decision was respected. I didn’t see remorse, fighting, or any conflicts among the families in the village.
While the tribal leaders discussed their decisions, I saw children divide one banana equally among five people. One boy didn’t want to eat his piece; he wanted to give it to his baby sister who he said needed it more than he did.
Prior to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the Aeta lived a nomadic life in the dense forests of the mountains with their own tribal laws, culture, and traditions. They moved to the mountains during the Spanish colonization. We refer to them as “Negritos” because of their dark skin and their curly or kinky hair. They find the term “negrito” to be derogatory and they prefer to be called “kulot,” which means curly. They refer to Filipino citizens as “unat,” which means straight hair. They live a simple, peaceful life in various provinces around Mount Pinatubo. They speak different dialects namely: Mag-Antsi in Tarlac, Mag-Indi in Pampanga, Ambala in Bataan, and Sambal in Zambales. The Aeta all share the same tribal laws, culture, traditions, and beliefs. Men used to wear G-string clothes and the women were topless. Today, they wear modern clothes from private donations.
The Aeta live a primitive life with primitive ideas and habits. Imagine living in a village for your entire life and having no contact with anyone outside of your village. You can’t go to school because there aren’t any schools in the village; nor are there computers or Internet access. You have no knowledge of the modern world. The only knowledge you gain are the opinions of your uneducated parents and older members of the village. You live your life by the teachings of the people with whom you surround yourself. You are drawn together by common interests and for the good of your village. You follow and repeat the life of your ancestors, from one generation to the next. Joining a modern society results in devastating cultural upheaval and creates more conflict, struggle, and pain. Hence, your poverty continues.
The Aeta people in the village were all related in a kinship system. They lived in grass huts and when a member of their family got seriously ill or died, they moved to a new place and built a new hut. They used various herbs for remedies and performed ritual dances and ceremonies to cure the sick by reaching out to the spiritual world. They relied heavily on the water collected from the streams and on the rich soil where they planted trees and crops such as rice, bananas, papayas, coconuts, winged beans, green peas, squash, pole beans, eggplants, and other root crops such as yams, sweet potatoes, and cassavas. Prior to the volcano eruption of 1991, they had plenty of food to eat throughout the year. During the planting or harvesting season, they would perform ceremonies and thank their God, Bapa Namalyari/Apu Namalyari for good blessings and outcomes. If the Aeta people had a large, successful harvest, they would leave out a banana leaf filled with fruits and vegetables in the mountains.
The Aeta are mostly vegetarian and used livestock as a dowry system. The men gave animals as gifts to their bride’s family when they married. If the couple produced girls, the men would continue to provide the bride’s family with livestock. Once they produced a boy, the father would give his son the livestock until he got married. The men are able to marry multiple wives as long as they have animals to give the brides’ families. Women can have multiple husbands as long as their new husband is willing to re-pay all the gifts that the previous husband had paid to his bride’s family.
The Aeta lived primitive lives. They followed the tribal law of “an eye for an eye.” I once heard a story about three young boys who were playing together. One boy pushed the other boys into the river for fun. Tragically, there was a water buffalo in the water that killed the two boys. As a result, the boy who pushed the others was executed along with his father by beheading.
If an Aeta kills a non-Aeta Filipino and is locked up in jail, the elder or the head of the village will ensure that the Aeta faces execution in their village. If a Filipino citizen killed an Aeta, then most likely, the Filipino citizen would compensate the family of the Aeta by paying a reasonable monetary penalty instead of going through the Philippines’ trial court system. There are not a lot of conflicts between the Aeta people, but if there is, the village elder will make things right.
During and after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, the Aeta were the most greatly affected. Many of them died during the eruption and the rest were forced down the mountain. Many contracted diseases such as measles once they came into contact with the modern world. Many children died. The new birth rate resulted in a large population of children under the age of 25.
The Aeta people are protected and are given the right to follow their own laws and traditions under the Indigenous People Republic Act (IPRA) of 1997. The IPRA was created to recognize, protect, and promote the rights of the indigenous cultural communities. The Philippines government has given the Aeta ownership of their lands and provided them with schools and other government assistance necessary to enforce and guarantee their rights, taking into consideration their customs, traditions, values, and beliefs.
There are approximately 50,000 Aeta or 10,000 families who were displaced during the eruption and resettled within the 128,000 hectares of ancestral land at the foot of Mount Pinatubo. However, the government did not provide long-term accommodations or the infrastructure necessary for their survival including water systems, sanitation facilities, electricity, permanent housing, hospitals, roads, or bridges. Today, the Aeta in this area face extreme poverty; roughly 60% of the Aeta children are stunted and classified as malnourished.
In one village we visited, we learned that there were 600 families with a total of about 458 children in school as follows: 38 in day care, 62 in kindergarten, 107 in grade 1, 73 in grade 2, 103 in grade 3, 43 in grade 4, 17 in grade 5, and 15 in grade 6. During my visit, I didn’t notice any bad odors in the village but I did see flies clustering around children’s cuts, skin rashes, and runny noses.
If given the opportunity, the children are quite intelligent. I put together a drawing competition where I handed out plain white paper, crayons, and pencils and I asked them to determine appropriate gifts and prizes for the winners. Out of the 458 children between kindergarten and grade six, I selected 30 winners and provided each winner with a backpack.
The competition was to draw what it was like to live in their village. The drawings were shockingly good but I wanted to hear from the children what they thought of their drawings. Each of the winners described their drawings. I received drawings of a father making charcoal to sell, a mother doing laundry, a whole family planting rice, hunting birds using a bow and arrow, fishing with a spear, a family eating together with a fish on the table, a mother cooking, a child playing with a kite, farming using water buffalo, watering plants and vegetables, watching the goats, feeding the chickens, going to school, resting after a long day of work, picking different types of fruits, harvesting by putting rice in baskets, carrying wood for the fire, chopping trees, and climbing a coconut tree to get coconuts. They were all amazing.
Unfortunately, many of the children stop going to school in grade 4; instead they go in search of food in the mountains or beg for money in the city during the day. Only 10% of the elementary graduates make the effort to walk the three hours to complete high school so they can become teachers for the children in the village.
Education is not a priority for them as they do not value it as a means to improve their lives. Very few graduated from college, but even those who did couldn’t find jobs because they were considered to be different. They faced culture shock coming from a primitive life; a reality they didn’t understand or expect as they found themselves in competition with other Filipino citizens. Their elders told me that their children were discriminated against because they were short and dark with curly hair. Even the older Aeta said they were treated like second-class citizens in hospitals where they had to wait a long time to be seen by doctors. They felt they weren’t given the same treatment as other Filipino citizens. Already, discrimination has become a roadblock for the Aeta moving forward.
These tribes worked as farmers and hunter-gatherers and obtain their food from the dense forest that has all but disappeared. They now use commercial fertilizers for better yield of their crops so they can sell them to other Filipino citizens. The Aeta avoid eating these crops grown with fertilizers because they make them very sick. They have difficulty adopting the new habit of washing their hands and food before they eat the root crops. Consequently, they eat the unwashed crops and get very ill.
The greatest threat to humanity is ignoring certain societies because of unfortunate circumstances. The Aeta people have lived a secluded life which is now being complicated and threatened by modern civilization where they face prejudice and discrimination. Racial and ethnic inequality is evident as education remains out of the reach for thousands of the Aeta children; a formidable obstacle to achieving sustainable development goals. Many Aeta remain uneducated because the primary schools are located two to three hours away, are not accessible by roads, and do not have electricity. Today there are still no plans for the government to build new infrastructure for the Aeta communities. As a result, children are unmotivated and grow up uneducated. They spend the majority of their time in search of food and, most importantly, water.
For two months after my interaction with the Aeta people, I couldn’t stop replaying and recalling the images of how they lived and how isolated they were from the rest of the country.
So, I quit my job and began the Aeta Tribe Foundation with the dream of bringing clean, sustainable water systems to the first inhabitants of the Philippines – the Aeta tribe. I hope to provide them with two basic ingredients to get them assimilated to the present times as quickly as possible; plenty of drinking water and more food to eat.
Based on what I learned from the elders, the Aeta would prefer to go back to the way it was for them in the past before the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. However, they know now that they have to work and live among the other Filipino citizens. With our foundation, we hope that someday some of their children may travel far from their home and build a better future for themselves by escaping their extreme poverty. The drawing competition led me to believe that they would do well if given the opportunity.
At the age of 14, I left my homeland to join my family in the United States. Like many immigrants, I did not speak English. I was sent to school in sixth grade because I had only had four years of primary school from kindergarten to third grade. However, I failed and had to repeat sixth grade. It was humiliating, so I went to work part-time as a janitor after school and used the money to hire tutors on the weekends to teach me English, reading, and math. Every three months after that, I advanced to the next level. In three years, I passed all of my high school examinations and received my high school diploma at the age of eighteen. From there, I rented my own apartment and worked full-time during the day while going to college in the evenings. I paid 100% of my college education myself and received a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Management eight years later that changed the course of my life.
The first time I saw the indigenous Aeta people was in February of 2015 when I went back to visit my homeland. My relatives still live in poverty but their situation is not as tragic as that of the Aeta tribe. The Aeta people not only suffer from food shortages, but also from a lack of water in the mountains. I couldn’t believe how poor they were. Water should be a right for every person, especially children. Many children under the age of nine begin their day by stopping cars in the middle of the highway early in the morning and begging for money. Some of these children live under bridges for shade. This kind of behavior pushes the death toll even higher due to car accidents and dehydration. Perhaps my recent encounter with the people of the Aeta tribe served as a reminder of my own youth and how difficult it was for me to have food once a day. I was even more greatly affected when I recalled Aeta children fighting over a cup of water.
After Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, more and more of the Aeta people began coming down the mountain to visit metropolitan cities and towns for water. During the night they come to people’s houses with small containers and try to collect water from faucets below the houses. Their situation gets worse during the dry season when there is no water available and the soil is very dry, making it even more difficult to plant vegetables. The Aeta call the season from November to June the hunger season.
During my first visit to the village, we brought three truckloads of water and food. The truck holding water was overrun by children pushing each other, trying to get a single cup of water to drink. They were thirsty and in less than an hour, we ran out of water. I didn’t expect to see so many of these children in one village called Nabuklod in Floridablanca. The chieftain and the elders of the village gathered all the food we brought – rice, sardines, coffee, and milk – and told us the food was only enough for 125 families, however the village had 600 families and approximately 3,000 people. They suggested that they would discuss who among the 125 families would receive the food. I felt uncomfortable that I could not provide enough food for all 600 families. The elders decide which families got to eat while the others watched; their decision was respected. I didn’t see remorse, fighting, or any conflicts among the families in the village.
While the tribal leaders discussed their decisions, I saw children divide one banana equally among five people. One boy didn’t want to eat his piece; he wanted to give it to his baby sister who he said needed it more than he did.
Prior to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the Aeta lived a nomadic life in the dense forests of the mountains with their own tribal laws, culture, and traditions. They moved to the mountains during the Spanish colonization. We refer to them as “Negritos” because of their dark skin and their curly or kinky hair. They find the term “negrito” to be derogatory and they prefer to be called “kulot,” which means curly. They refer to Filipino citizens as “unat,” which means straight hair. They live a simple, peaceful life in various provinces around Mount Pinatubo. They speak different dialects namely: Mag-Antsi in Tarlac, Mag-Indi in Pampanga, Ambala in Bataan, and Sambal in Zambales. The Aeta all share the same tribal laws, culture, traditions, and beliefs. Men used to wear G-string clothes and the women were topless. Today, they wear modern clothes from private donations.
The Aeta live a primitive life with primitive ideas and habits. Imagine living in a village for your entire life and having no contact with anyone outside of your village. You can’t go to school because there aren’t any schools in the village; nor are there computers or Internet access. You have no knowledge of the modern world. The only knowledge you gain are the opinions of your uneducated parents and older members of the village. You live your life by the teachings of the people with whom you surround yourself. You are drawn together by common interests and for the good of your village. You follow and repeat the life of your ancestors, from one generation to the next. Joining a modern society results in devastating cultural upheaval and creates more conflict, struggle, and pain. Hence, your poverty continues.
The Aeta people in the village were all related in a kinship system. They lived in grass huts and when a member of their family got seriously ill or died, they moved to a new place and built a new hut. They used various herbs for remedies and performed ritual dances and ceremonies to cure the sick by reaching out to the spiritual world. They relied heavily on the water collected from the streams and on the rich soil where they planted trees and crops such as rice, bananas, papayas, coconuts, winged beans, green peas, squash, pole beans, eggplants, and other root crops such as yams, sweet potatoes, and cassavas. Prior to the volcano eruption of 1991, they had plenty of food to eat throughout the year. During the planting or harvesting season, they would perform ceremonies and thank their God, Bapa Namalyari/Apu Namalyari for good blessings and outcomes. If the Aeta people had a large, successful harvest, they would leave out a banana leaf filled with fruits and vegetables in the mountains.
The Aeta are mostly vegetarian and used livestock as a dowry system. The men gave animals as gifts to their bride’s family when they married. If the couple produced girls, the men would continue to provide the bride’s family with livestock. Once they produced a boy, the father would give his son the livestock until he got married. The men are able to marry multiple wives as long as they have animals to give the brides’ families. Women can have multiple husbands as long as their new husband is willing to re-pay all the gifts that the previous husband had paid to his bride’s family.
The Aeta lived primitive lives. They followed the tribal law of “an eye for an eye.” I once heard a story about three young boys who were playing together. One boy pushed the other boys into the river for fun. Tragically, there was a water buffalo in the water that killed the two boys. As a result, the boy who pushed the others was executed along with his father by beheading.
If an Aeta kills a non-Aeta Filipino and is locked up in jail, the elder or the head of the village will ensure that the Aeta faces execution in their village. If a Filipino citizen killed an Aeta, then most likely, the Filipino citizen would compensate the family of the Aeta by paying a reasonable monetary penalty instead of going through the Philippines’ trial court system. There are not a lot of conflicts between the Aeta people, but if there is, the village elder will make things right.
During and after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, the Aeta were the most greatly affected. Many of them died during the eruption and the rest were forced down the mountain. Many contracted diseases such as measles once they came into contact with the modern world. Many children died. The new birth rate resulted in a large population of children under the age of 25.
The Aeta people are protected and are given the right to follow their own laws and traditions under the Indigenous People Republic Act (IPRA) of 1997. The IPRA was created to recognize, protect, and promote the rights of the indigenous cultural communities. The Philippines government has given the Aeta ownership of their lands and provided them with schools and other government assistance necessary to enforce and guarantee their rights, taking into consideration their customs, traditions, values, and beliefs.
There are approximately 50,000 Aeta or 10,000 families who were displaced during the eruption and resettled within the 128,000 hectares of ancestral land at the foot of Mount Pinatubo. However, the government did not provide long-term accommodations or the infrastructure necessary for their survival including water systems, sanitation facilities, electricity, permanent housing, hospitals, roads, or bridges. Today, the Aeta in this area face extreme poverty; roughly 60% of the Aeta children are stunted and classified as malnourished.
In one village we visited, we learned that there were 600 families with a total of about 458 children in school as follows: 38 in day care, 62 in kindergarten, 107 in grade 1, 73 in grade 2, 103 in grade 3, 43 in grade 4, 17 in grade 5, and 15 in grade 6. During my visit, I didn’t notice any bad odors in the village but I did see flies clustering around children’s cuts, skin rashes, and runny noses.
If given the opportunity, the children are quite intelligent. I put together a drawing competition where I handed out plain white paper, crayons, and pencils and I asked them to determine appropriate gifts and prizes for the winners. Out of the 458 children between kindergarten and grade six, I selected 30 winners and provided each winner with a backpack.
The competition was to draw what it was like to live in their village. The drawings were shockingly good but I wanted to hear from the children what they thought of their drawings. Each of the winners described their drawings. I received drawings of a father making charcoal to sell, a mother doing laundry, a whole family planting rice, hunting birds using a bow and arrow, fishing with a spear, a family eating together with a fish on the table, a mother cooking, a child playing with a kite, farming using water buffalo, watering plants and vegetables, watching the goats, feeding the chickens, going to school, resting after a long day of work, picking different types of fruits, harvesting by putting rice in baskets, carrying wood for the fire, chopping trees, and climbing a coconut tree to get coconuts. They were all amazing.
Unfortunately, many of the children stop going to school in grade 4; instead they go in search of food in the mountains or beg for money in the city during the day. Only 10% of the elementary graduates make the effort to walk the three hours to complete high school so they can become teachers for the children in the village.
Education is not a priority for them as they do not value it as a means to improve their lives. Very few graduated from college, but even those who did couldn’t find jobs because they were considered to be different. They faced culture shock coming from a primitive life; a reality they didn’t understand or expect as they found themselves in competition with other Filipino citizens. Their elders told me that their children were discriminated against because they were short and dark with curly hair. Even the older Aeta said they were treated like second-class citizens in hospitals where they had to wait a long time to be seen by doctors. They felt they weren’t given the same treatment as other Filipino citizens. Already, discrimination has become a roadblock for the Aeta moving forward.
These tribes worked as farmers and hunter-gatherers and obtain their food from the dense forest that has all but disappeared. They now use commercial fertilizers for better yield of their crops so they can sell them to other Filipino citizens. The Aeta avoid eating these crops grown with fertilizers because they make them very sick. They have difficulty adopting the new habit of washing their hands and food before they eat the root crops. Consequently, they eat the unwashed crops and get very ill.
The greatest threat to humanity is ignoring certain societies because of unfortunate circumstances. The Aeta people have lived a secluded life which is now being complicated and threatened by modern civilization where they face prejudice and discrimination. Racial and ethnic inequality is evident as education remains out of the reach for thousands of the Aeta children; a formidable obstacle to achieving sustainable development goals. Many Aeta remain uneducated because the primary schools are located two to three hours away, are not accessible by roads, and do not have electricity. Today there are still no plans for the government to build new infrastructure for the Aeta communities. As a result, children are unmotivated and grow up uneducated. They spend the majority of their time in search of food and, most importantly, water.
For two months after my interaction with the Aeta people, I couldn’t stop replaying and recalling the images of how they lived and how isolated they were from the rest of the country.
So, I quit my job and began the Aeta Tribe Foundation with the dream of bringing clean, sustainable water systems to the first inhabitants of the Philippines – the Aeta tribe. I hope to provide them with two basic ingredients to get them assimilated to the present times as quickly as possible; plenty of drinking water and more food to eat.
Based on what I learned from the elders, the Aeta would prefer to go back to the way it was for them in the past before the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. However, they know now that they have to work and live among the other Filipino citizens. With our foundation, we hope that someday some of their children may travel far from their home and build a better future for themselves by escaping their extreme poverty. The drawing competition led me to believe that they would do well if given the opportunity.