As they held soil in their hands, young Indigenous women and community leaders also held space for reflection during the second week of the Beginners’ Program on Inculturation, Synodality, Integral Ecology, and Indigenous Pastoral Ministry, in Bendum, Malaybalay to learn, lead, and grow together.
The week began with building a nursery of plants and also possibilities. Participants prepared garden beds, collected compost, and learned about native tree species. They realized that planting is also healing even if tiring. They learned that caring for land means caring for the community.
In the sessions with Marlyn, a Pulangiyēn woman farmer, participants saw how traditional farming and modern agroecology come together with seed banks, organic fertilizers, and intercropping. What some had only read about came alive in the forest garden that now feeds two local schools. Marlyn reminded us, “We don’t work just for food. We nurture the land so it can nurture us. We are not workers. We are learners.”
Jason introduced the community’s water system which is designed not just to serve, but to sustain. It’s a model where responsibility is collective and management is rooted on indigenous values. Women, along with other community members, lead these efforts, from monitoring systems to managing citronella processing for livelihood.
Facing disaster with wisdom and hope
In the upland communities of Mindanao, disasters do not always look like the floods that sweep cities. Sometimes, the disaster is quieter – a creeping hunger when crops fail, a dry tap when the spring runs low, a young farmer choosing to migrate because the land no longer feeds them.
In Bendum, youth are learning to face these disasters not with fear but with wisdom and hope. In sessions on disaster preparedness, youth like En and Dave spoke of fears during typhoons and how traditional knowledge and root crops offer resilience. They reflected on how environmental degradation and economic hardship are linked, and how women are often the first to respond.
Participants sat under trees and around simple wooden tables to learn that disaster risk reduction is not just about emergency kits or evacuation plans. It’s also about understanding the cycles of nature, rebuilding food systems, and restoring cultural knowledge that has kept communities resilient for generations.
Many of the youth spoke of how their elders could once read the skies, the birds, and the winds to know when to plant. But today, climate change has made the seasons unpredictable. Typhoons hit harder. Rain does not come when it should. And the loss of native crops means food is harder to find during lean months.
Yet the solution is not only technological. As En shared, “we started planting root crops again not just for tradition but for survival. Sweet potatoes, gabi, and cassava don’t rot easily. They don’t drown in floods. They wait underground until we need them.” In Bendum, this is not just farming. This is wisdom in practice.
Integral ecology as leadership from the margins
Where the forest teaches, the soil listens, and the unheard begin to lead.
Integral ecology is more than an environmental framework. It is a way of seeing the world where everything is connected: the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, the loss of biodiversity and the erosion of culture, the health of a forest and the dignity of its people.
In Bendum, this truth is lived in the everyday choices of a community that tends to the land as it tends to each other. And those who lead this work? They are Indigenous elders, women farmers, youth who know how to listen to the rain, speak to the soil, and hold community together.
This is leadership from the margins and it is what integral ecology looks like in practice.
In many development spaces, indigenous and rural communities are treated as afterthoughts – consulted late, tokenized in processes, or burdened with labels like “vulnerable populations.”
But in Bendum, it is precisely these “margins” that hold the deepest wisdom.
Pedro Walpole, a Jesuit who has lived with the community for more than 40 years and coordinator of River Above Asia Oceania Ecclesial Network (RAOEN), reminded participants that the Datu (tribal leader) is not wealthy in money but in relationships. That in a forest, abundance is measured not by possessions but by the connection to water, to ritual, to people, to the sacred.
When youth from across the country visit Bendum, they do not just learn about compost or watershed management. They learn how cultural identity, spiritual grounding, and ecological practice weave into one seamless ethic. They learn that synodality – the walking together Pope Francis calls for – has long been practiced in places far from the spotlight.
Throughout the week, participants were asked: “What will you leave behind for the next generation? Their answers were clear – a forest of stories, a culture of care, and the courage to lead rooted in faith and community. They came to Bendum as youth and students and leave as guardians of the gaup – of land, culture, and the future.
When Indigenous peoples are trusted to learn in community, they begin to lead with clarity and conviction. And when they lead, not just in titles but in action, they do not just transform communities, they help heal the world.