ZAMBOANGA CITY, 20 October 2005 — The Christmas season is still weeks away but members of the Sama Badjao tribe in the southern Philippines have started flocking to the port city of Zamboanga from nearby Sulu archipelago to beg.
Scattered throughout the Sulu archipelago, the Badjaos — popularly known as the “Sea gypsies of the South,” — sailed the rough seas using only paddle boats until they arrived in Zamboanga, a booming city of about half a million people.
The Badjaos are traditionally fishermen and they usually travel by boat from one island to the next in search of a fishing harvest.
The origin of the Badjao is not clear. But researchers believed they came from either Sumatra or the South Sea Islands. Others said their migration to the Sulu archipelago was the result of the expanding Chinese trade as far as the first millennium.
Originally, the Badjao may have been a land-based tribe pushed into the seas by population pressures and by more dominant tribes. Historically, they held no land or other property ashore, except for small burial islands. Through years of oppression, the Badjao have found solace on the seas.
The people now live in one of three types of dwellings: stilt houses on the coast, ordinary land houses clustered along protected shorelines or houseboats.
Houseboats are often double dugout canoes. Typically each boat shelters five or six people — a family and maybe one or two other relatives. Two to six families anchor their boats in a cluster while fishing, sharing food and pooling labor and resources.
In Zamboanga City, some 7,000 Badjao are now living in at least 7 coastal villages. Some of them were given free shelters under the program called Task Force Hope for Badjao, said Samson Abdulmanan, a project implementer from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).
“We are working really hard to address the problems of the Badjao and so far we have given them shelters and skills training seminar, so they may start their own livelihood, aside from traditional fishing, and stop begging for alms on streets.
“This is a continuing program and we hope to educate more the Badjao about the importance of self-sustainability,” Abdulmanan told Arab News on Tuesday.
He said the task force is a joint program between the local government and the DSWD and other national government agencies, such as the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), Department of Agriculture (DA), and the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP.
Abdulmanan said they are also conducting regular trainings on fish net and mat-weaving and new fishing methods to the Badjao.
“The Badjao people are easy to teach and we just need to maintain the skills trainings and other government livelihood programs, so they can also share these knowledge to the others,” he said.
He also appealed for donations from non-government organizations and other countries to help the Badjao.
“We need a lot of things for these people, especially housing and schools and clinics; we need books and medicines for the children and other things that can improve the basic living condition of the Badjao,” Abdulmanan said.
He said the Philippine-Canadian Development Fund helped fund the building of Badjao shelters in Zamboanga. There are more than 100 housing units, enough for about 1,000 Badjao, in the villages of Caragasan and Sangali, he said.
One of these dwellings was visited by President Arroyo in December 2002, he said.
Arroyo also visited a P5.5-million Badjao housing project in nearby Basilan Island in March and awarded wooden boats to fishermen.
Abdulmanan said Japan has promised to donate as much as 3 million pesos in aid for the Badjao through the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).
The Philippines is one of the largest recipients of the technical cooperation provided by Japan through JICA, which has been working eagerly, as an active partner in the pursuit of sustainable development of the country.
