2020 Year End Report
Firstly, thank you for supporting us and Happy New Year!
2020 has been a difficult year for the Aeta Tribe Foundation. It has been a year coupled with despair and disruption. Our annual donations have dropped 60% due to the global pandemic and extended lockdowns. Much of our activities serving the Aeta communities throughout Central Luzon, Philippines, have been limited by avoiding large gatherings. Our activities in the Aeta villages were performed in the most reasonable and most affordable way which included providing cloth facemasks to prevent the spread of Covid-19 within the indigenous communities. The cost for each cloth facemask was .25 cents, and we handed out the facemasks for all adults throughout the provinces of Pampanga, Tarlac, and Zambales. We distributed a little over 10,000 cloth facemasks to the Aeta people by the end of the year.
At the height of the infections in the Philippines, the Aeta people returned to their ancestral lands and stayed away from cities and towns. They live in a close-knit community and help one another. The pandemic has strengthened the relationships among families and between villages. They cultivate the land and grow enough food to feed the entire community. The elders have begun sharing their medicinal knowledge and have begun collecting herbal plants for medicine. Once we learned they were using banana flowers or blossoms from banana trees as facemasks, it made sense for us to supply them with facemasks so that they were able to keep the potential fruit from the banana trees as food.
Some Filipinos have accused and blamed the Aeta for spreading the coronavirus because of their culture of eating lizards and fruit bats in the forest. Consequently, the Aeta have been dismissed, and in some areas, they were ignored and did not receive any type of medical or food relief. Several communities in the province of Tarlac had reached out to our foundation, and luckily, we were able to find donors from the South San Francisco Golden Gate Lions Club to provide food relief throughout the province of Tarlac, a province that is rarely visited.
In January 2020, we started building a water system in Mawakat Village located in Floridablanca, Pampanga Province. Once Covid-19 first appeared in the Philippines in early March, we were unable to complete the water project due to the stay-at-home mandate, quarantine, and lockdowns. Our board of directors was denied access to enter the Philippines from the United States, and travel scheduled for later in the year was also cancelled. The only way we could communicate with our Aeta representatives and honorary members was through Facebook via their cell phones.
Unfortunately, the Aeta villages didn't have access to computers, Wi-Fi, or Internet which further delayed and/or made impossible communication with the Aeta communities. The Aeta were forced to stay in their villages and the local government restricted them from going to cities and towns, which made things even harder for the Aeta people to purchase the minutes they needed to use their cell phones. Luckily, we have one Aeta representative live within the city proper and she was able to communicate with us using her cell phone. As a member of the Aeta Tribe Foundation, a non-profit organization, she was also allowed to visit Aeta communities to drop-off bags of facemasks to the tribal leaders for different villages and communities. Because of the health, safety, and social distancing, our representative avoided face to face interactions with the tribal leaders with the goal of protecting the Aeta communities. As a result, we have very few pictures to shares with our donors.
As of January 1, 2021, there have been 478,761 Covid-19 cases and 9,263 deaths in the Philippines. The covid restrictions have crippled the economy and many Filipinos, including the indigenous communities, have lost their jobs and livelihoods. According to ABS-CBN news, on September 27, 2020, there were 7.6 million Filipino households who went hungry in the past three months.
The economic environment and the health hazards pushed the more vulnerable of the Aeta communities and they had gone deeper into poverty, when they already struggle with having access to clean water, making food production to meet the ever-growing demand for food even more difficult. In addition, the long lockdowns meant the Aeta children had to stop going to school. The Department of Education (DOE) made rulings about the use of online classes for primary schools, another challenge for Aeta children continuing their education. They have no computers or Internet access in their villages. As it was, their education was already sub-standard since the teachers were freshly out of college and new to teaching.
This year, we hope to continue providing facemasks to prevent the spread of coronavirus and slippers for the children to reduce parasitic infections. Lastly, we hope to bring education to the primary schools by supplying them with more papers, notebooks, and pencils since the Aeta are restricted to visit cities and towns during the pandemic.
We want to give thanks for your donations last year and hopefully again for this year to the Aeta Tribe Foundation. We are in dire need of your continued financial support.
Sincerely,
Fernando Briosos
President
Follow us on Facebook: Aeta Tribe Foundation | Facebook
2020 has been a difficult year for the Aeta Tribe Foundation. It has been a year coupled with despair and disruption. Our annual donations have dropped 60% due to the global pandemic and extended lockdowns. Much of our activities serving the Aeta communities throughout Central Luzon, Philippines, have been limited by avoiding large gatherings. Our activities in the Aeta villages were performed in the most reasonable and most affordable way which included providing cloth facemasks to prevent the spread of Covid-19 within the indigenous communities. The cost for each cloth facemask was .25 cents, and we handed out the facemasks for all adults throughout the provinces of Pampanga, Tarlac, and Zambales. We distributed a little over 10,000 cloth facemasks to the Aeta people by the end of the year.
At the height of the infections in the Philippines, the Aeta people returned to their ancestral lands and stayed away from cities and towns. They live in a close-knit community and help one another. The pandemic has strengthened the relationships among families and between villages. They cultivate the land and grow enough food to feed the entire community. The elders have begun sharing their medicinal knowledge and have begun collecting herbal plants for medicine. Once we learned they were using banana flowers or blossoms from banana trees as facemasks, it made sense for us to supply them with facemasks so that they were able to keep the potential fruit from the banana trees as food.
Some Filipinos have accused and blamed the Aeta for spreading the coronavirus because of their culture of eating lizards and fruit bats in the forest. Consequently, the Aeta have been dismissed, and in some areas, they were ignored and did not receive any type of medical or food relief. Several communities in the province of Tarlac had reached out to our foundation, and luckily, we were able to find donors from the South San Francisco Golden Gate Lions Club to provide food relief throughout the province of Tarlac, a province that is rarely visited.
In January 2020, we started building a water system in Mawakat Village located in Floridablanca, Pampanga Province. Once Covid-19 first appeared in the Philippines in early March, we were unable to complete the water project due to the stay-at-home mandate, quarantine, and lockdowns. Our board of directors was denied access to enter the Philippines from the United States, and travel scheduled for later in the year was also cancelled. The only way we could communicate with our Aeta representatives and honorary members was through Facebook via their cell phones.
Unfortunately, the Aeta villages didn't have access to computers, Wi-Fi, or Internet which further delayed and/or made impossible communication with the Aeta communities. The Aeta were forced to stay in their villages and the local government restricted them from going to cities and towns, which made things even harder for the Aeta people to purchase the minutes they needed to use their cell phones. Luckily, we have one Aeta representative live within the city proper and she was able to communicate with us using her cell phone. As a member of the Aeta Tribe Foundation, a non-profit organization, she was also allowed to visit Aeta communities to drop-off bags of facemasks to the tribal leaders for different villages and communities. Because of the health, safety, and social distancing, our representative avoided face to face interactions with the tribal leaders with the goal of protecting the Aeta communities. As a result, we have very few pictures to shares with our donors.
As of January 1, 2021, there have been 478,761 Covid-19 cases and 9,263 deaths in the Philippines. The covid restrictions have crippled the economy and many Filipinos, including the indigenous communities, have lost their jobs and livelihoods. According to ABS-CBN news, on September 27, 2020, there were 7.6 million Filipino households who went hungry in the past three months.
The economic environment and the health hazards pushed the more vulnerable of the Aeta communities and they had gone deeper into poverty, when they already struggle with having access to clean water, making food production to meet the ever-growing demand for food even more difficult. In addition, the long lockdowns meant the Aeta children had to stop going to school. The Department of Education (DOE) made rulings about the use of online classes for primary schools, another challenge for Aeta children continuing their education. They have no computers or Internet access in their villages. As it was, their education was already sub-standard since the teachers were freshly out of college and new to teaching.
This year, we hope to continue providing facemasks to prevent the spread of coronavirus and slippers for the children to reduce parasitic infections. Lastly, we hope to bring education to the primary schools by supplying them with more papers, notebooks, and pencils since the Aeta are restricted to visit cities and towns during the pandemic.
We want to give thanks for your donations last year and hopefully again for this year to the Aeta Tribe Foundation. We are in dire need of your continued financial support.
Sincerely,
Fernando Briosos
President
Follow us on Facebook: Aeta Tribe Foundation | Facebook