Chapyusen is a sitio of Barangay Can-eo, one of the 16 barangays of Bontoc, the capital town of Mountain Province. Being remote, it can only be reached after an hour’s hike from Tucucan and Can-eo.

Chapyusen is one if not the poorest community in the municipality. It remains an isolated village characterized by agricultural under-productivity, food resource scarcity, and inadequacy of livelihood opportunities. Government neglect is very evident through the absence of public infrastructures and services.

All of the 24 households depend on rice farming for livelihood but the produce could barely provide 6 months supply of the staple. The community depends on external supplies to feed its population during food shortage. Left with no stable income to buy food and other pressing household needs, the men turn to the forest for instant cash generation.
Trees are felled and smuggled out of the village for sale to patrons in Bontoc and neighboring communities. Traditional watershed areas virtually turned into grasslands while streams and creeks dried up.

With the depletion of lumber in the forests, the local economy crumbled forcing, the men to look for odd jobs elsewhere. Six families were so desperate that they decided to migrate to other areas, including Baguio City, only to be drawn into another form of oppression as members of the urban poor.

The women, who are usually left behind to tend the farm and care for the children, have taken the initiative to assist their husbands in cash generation. Granted with financial and technical support from the Baguio-based Montañosa Relief and Rehabilitation Services (MRRS), they started the production of woven products for commerce in 2002. But the impact it brings to the household economy is easily overwhelmed by the soaring prices of basic commodities. The prevailing local crisis calls for every member of the family to contribute labor just to ensure that food is served in the table.

The children are not exempted as they take over household chores while their mothers are busy weaving. They also do the tedious manual pounding of rice with the use of a mortar and a pestle. Aside from their workload at home, school children have to walk for an hour daily to attend classes in Can-eo, some 3 kilometers away.

Worse, they have to contend to pine pith wood (saleng) or kerosene lighting in studying their lessons at night – in view of the fact that Chapyusen remains the only unenergized community in the municipality. They also use flashlights to move around the house. A parent shared that on a monthly average, they spent P100 and P90 for kerosene and batteries, respectively.

The microhydro project
The conceptualization of a micro-hydro project (MHP) in the community cropped up during the drafting of the community’s agricultural program by the Chapyusen Mangum-uma Organization (CMO), an affiliate of the Cordillera People’s Alliance (CPA). Based on the program, Chapyusen aims to attain food sufficiency through enforcing local livelihood opportunities related to agricultural productivity and diversification for both consumption and income.

Critical to its implementation is the establishment of a community-based and community-owned power system for the following energy needs: lighting; rice milling; sugar pressing; blacksmithing; and,carpentry or wood works.

In 2001, the CMO forwarded a request to the Montañosa Research and Development Center (MRDC), a NGO working on sustainable agriculture and renewable energy based in Sagada, Mountain Province, to conduct an initial study on the possibility of putting up an MHP. The MRDC is well-known being the pioneering NGO which facilitated the establishment of the Ngibat Micro-hydro Project in Tinglayan, Kalinga in 1994, the first ever in the Cordillera Administrative Region.An initial study by MRDC indicates that the development of an MHP is fairly possible.

Water testing results conducted at the lone water source in the Toy-ob Creek shows that it can generate 6.8 kilowatt-hour (KWH) power during the rainy season. This is more that the 1 KWH which the community actually needs. However, water flow tends to drop to a critical level during the months of February to May and not enough to run a 5 KWH turbine.

Categorically, this means that the community will experience 3 to 4 months blackout during the dry season unless secondary water source would be tapped to maintain water supply. The people expressed their willingness to pursue the project despite this limitation and requested MRDC to come-up with a feasibility study. This was finally completed in 2004 with the integration of a project work plan and a sustainability plan developed with the people’s organization.

In June 2004, the project formally commenced with the clearing of the irrigation canal and construction of the power house. As agreed upon, CMO takes the lead role in community organizing and mobilization. The ubfo, an indigenous system of cooperative labor-exchange, was institutionalized and strengthened which proved to be the key to sustained mobilization. All members contribute to the hauling of materials and provide manual labor in all phases of construction works and installations. On the whole, the residents of Chapyusen provided 625 person-days of free labor throughout the duration of project implementation.

In March 2005, finishing touches of the control panel were conducted and the MHP was finally tested yielding positive results. This was greeted with intense jubilation but lasted for only 10 minutes - the same length of time that the facility ran due to lack of water supply. As originally expected, it was in the midst of the dry season and the flow of water at the Toy-ob creek was at its lowest and not enough to run he facility.
Fully satisfied that the facility had indeed worked, the people had come up with a plan to request Can-eo to let them tap water from creeks within its jurisdiction. With the help of concerned groups who facilitated the meetings, the latter conceded saying that the MHP is a remarkable feat worthy of support from the whole I-Can-eo tribe.

Finally, in July 18, 2005, the MHP was inaugurated and switched on providing 24-hour non-stop energy to the community. The event was witnessed by local government officials and invited guests from different parts of the province.
Initially, the electricity output is controlled at 960 watts which is more than enough to light individual houses through the use of two 20-watts fluorescent lamps. As a maintenance fee, the CMO General Assembly gladly approved the motion for each household to pay Php20 monthly.

The amount is pittance compared to the Php190 per month that they spent on kerosene and batteries. The MRDC engineers advised the people to maintain the present capacity while learning the basic management and operations of an MHP. They said that electric supply could be increased to 4 KWH but it would only be done when the PO could already operate the facility on its own.

When this moment comes, other hydro-powered facilities like rice mill, sugar presser, blacksmith and carpentry/woodwork shops could be installed. The engineers also highlighted the need to conduct watershed protection activities aimed at protecting the catchments areas to ensure ample supply of water to the MHP.“ The forest must not be viewed as a source of instant cash through unregulated logging but as a source of life which needs protection from degradation,” they said.

Today, the people of Chapyusen are enjoying the fruits of their cooperative undertaking. The children can now do their chores faster at night and study their lessons in convenience. The women are the most delighted, saying that they could now weave over time to complete their quota.

This would give them additional time to tend the farm during the day. The people all agreed that the MHP was the most trying and challenging project in their lives, and at the same time, the most gratifying. Nevertheless, the main challenge still lay ahead in terms of sustaining the project.

Contemporary challenges
The MHP has built up the people’s capacity to develop their own local resources while ensuring affordable access of poor households to electricity. It also becomes an opportunity for the people to improve their organization by participating in all phases of project implementation. The institutionalization of ubfo in community mobilization had meted a positive outcome by restoring traditional cooperative practices and free utilization/exchanges of individual skills towards a common objective.

Sadly, such community-based initiatives in the development of power sources and making electricity as a basic service to the people is nowhere to be found in the government agenda.

Instead, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo opted for energy deregulation by passing the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA) which would only facilitate the entry of foreign companies to exploit and plunder the country’s resources in the guise of providing rural electrification and poverty alleviation.

The EPIRA Law is a plain and systematic sale of the country’s patrimony and national economy to transnational corporations (TNC) controlled by the imperialists. This is already felt locally as manifested by the planned construction of a hydro-electric dam in Talubin by a foreign company. If pursued, it will dislocate the indigenous peoples in the communities of Bayyo, Talubin and Can-eo who were the traditional stewards of the natural bounties found within their ancestral domains.

While some government officials in the province boast of future income from the project in terms of taxes, little do they know that it’s just a paltry amount compared to the cost of environmental and social destruction it brings. More so, EPIRA guarantees super profits to the TNC by empowering them to pass on power costs to consumers. Clearly, it is profits at the expense of service.

The MHP project in Chapyusen has proven that the technology to develop and promote independent low-cost alternative power sources is attainable through people’s responsiveness and unified action. Apparently, we have the capability to develop our resources sans the TNCs and make electricity a basic service to the people. Abozaid Kasan