Golden irony

The far-flung barangay of Mount Diwalwal lies on a slope of the mountain after which it was named. Here, the elements of risk and reward are pervasive in the residents’ existence. Located in the town of Monkayo in Compostela Valley, Mount Diwalwal is known as a gold rush area where seekers of good fortune from all over the country flock in the hope of making it big. The death toll from repeated and unpredictable landslides has not stopped the entry of people eager for that lucky strike.

Mount Diwalwal is also known for its unusual manner of recognizing the young people who have done well in their studies. Since 2003, the top 10 achievers (five each from grade school and high school) have been rewarded during graduation with medals of pure gold, 10 grams worth of it in each medal. The annual practice is supposed to encourage the students to keep up with their good work—certainly a well-intentioned tradition but quite misguided in a place plagued by poverty and danger. The widespread poverty has actually resulted in the subversion of the reward practice, as many of the medals were found to have been pawned or sold for much less than their actual value. (The price of gold in that neck of the woods in the first quarter of the year was P2,000 per gram.)

“We conducted an inventory of the awarded medals and found out that the majority of the recipients no longer have the medals in their possession,” barangay secretary Jojo Diosala said last March. “What’s worse, many of the [medals] ended up melted and in the hands of gold buyers for very low prices. The medals have lost their value.”

Barangay officials were quoted as saying that the medals should have been sold to them and not to gold traders, and that they were considering passing an ordinance banning the students’ parents from melting the medals without the officials’ permission. The possibility of cutting down on the number of medals to be given has also been discussed.

But that’s only part of the picture. The practice involving gold medals came into sharp, ironic focus this past week when the new school year began. Despite the harvest of gold in medals and mining, the school year commenced in Mount Diwalwal with the same dismal shortage of books, classrooms, and even usable chairs.

“We really lack additional classrooms,” said Wilson Son, the administrator of Mount Diwalwal High School and its 530-strong student population. “To accommodate the influx of pupils, we’ve been using the covered court as a huge school, catering to several sections.” The shortage in facilities became so much more obvious with the implementation of the Department of Education’s new K to 12 program, which requires additional teachers and classrooms.

Compostela Valley Rep. Maricar Zamora-Apsay said she had already allocated funds for the building of school houses in Mount Diwalwal but that the dangerous condition of the mountainside was making the construction of more classrooms a difficult enterprise. She said a possible site for more school buildings was being studied.

Administrator Son said school opening day went by without too many problems although the high school was still awaiting chairs and other promised equipment from the provincial government as well as donations from outside Compostela Valley.

The fact is that the young people of Mount Diwalwal are in dire need of not only more classrooms but also sufficient books, chairs, and blackboards that they require simply to study. How terribly ironic that the honor students are recognized and rewarded with 14-karat gold medals in cramped and ramshackle surroundings, with most of the medals finding their way to pawnshops and gold traders in a cynical, albeit desperate, commercial exchange.

It’s all about priorities. Just as the national government has devoted the largest part of its annual appropriation to education, so too must the local government of Mount Diwalwal put funds where these would be of the most use. For starters, it should stop the absurd practice of handing out pure gold medals and instead use the money for the requirements of the students. It actually did so once, in 2009, because of economic hardship. There’s no reason it can’t do so again. When it comes to education, every gram helps and every medal counts.