Planting Seeds

Rebecca Sienes, president of the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Philippines, had a message for Door County when she visited on June 26.

“We just want to let you know that we in the Philippines are existing,” she said.

Rebecca Sienes

Sienes has spent a month visiting the United States, speaking at partner churches, attending the UU General Assembly and spreading the message about her programs in the Philippines. She started programs to empower women through education, economic independence, politics, health and safety, to reach out to women who often go through life uneducated, abused and suppressed.

“The women cannot get a loan from a formal financial institution because the formal financial institutions require a collateral,” Sienes said. “Almost always that collateral is land, the title of the land, and the women do not own land there.”

To get some money into the hands of women, Sienes started a microfinancing program that gives local women’s groups a small loan, about $250, and asks for interest of .05 percent. Women use the money for supplies to start businesses – like fertilizers for gardens, material to weave into rope or livestock to raise and sell.

The loan program is called Binhi – the local term for seed.

“When a seed is planted and a farmer takes good care of it, it can produce hundreds of thousands of seeds,” Sienes said. “So I have likened that program, microfinance, as a seed.”

Knowledge is another seed. Women in the Philippines are protected by a number of laws that criminalize rape, violence and trafficking, but Sienes said many women don’t know the protections exist. Human rights agencies rarely travel into the rural areas where women need the most help, so her programs target people living on the coasts or in the mountains.

“Illegal recruiters go up to the mountains and recruit all those young ladies, then bring them to Manila,” Sienes said.

The recruiters promise parents their daughters will find jobs and send money home, but instead sell the girls into prostitution.

Cities in the Philippines aren’t necessarily safe either, and many lack safe places for female students to live while they’re in school. Dumaguete City is home to four universities, but Sienes said living in the city is dangerous for women, which often keeps them from attending school.

To combat the problem, Sienes is raising money for the Quimada Center Student Dormitory that will provide safe housing to 180 female students.

Sienes knows helping women attend school, understand their rights and start businesses will help them break out of poverty and provide for their children, but not everyone has that understanding.

“One time I was asked by one of the top leaders in our church ‘what’s the purpose of organizing these women? What do you want the women to do?’” Sienes said. “I told him ‘I want the women to walk hand in hand with the men! Right now the women are down here and the men are up here, and that’s not right.’”

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Door County may donate a Sunday offering collection to the Quimada Center Student Dormitory project, which still needs $320,000.