MANILA, Philippines (PNA Feature) — Even as their country reels from the onslaught of a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and a consequent killer tsunami and massive fear of nuclear radiation, Japanese diplomats in Manila go about their mandated duties with stoic calm, dispensing earlier-promised grants that would help the Philippines’ less fortunate.

On Friday, March 18, Ambassador to Manila Makoto Katsura signed a grant contract for US$ 95,331 (about P4.1 million) for a vocational training center in Negros Occidental in the Visayas that is seen to benefit around 500 women and children from Sipalay City, and the municipalities of Candoni and Toboso.

He signed at the Japanese embassy in Manila with Teodorico Peña, executive director of the Bacolod City-based “Pag-Inupdanay Inc.,” a non-governmental organization (NGO) that helps support the center.

On March 16, Wednesday, the embassy’s Minister for Economic Affairs, Akio Isomata, attended the turnover of equipment for the Physical Therapy Unit of the Dr. Jose N. Rodriguez Memorial Hospital in Tala, Caloocan City, Metro Manila.

Health Secretary Enrique Ona and Dr. Edgardo Javillonar of the Dr. Jose N. Rodriguez Hospital witnessed the turnover of the US$ 76,474 (about P3.5 million pesos) equipment.

At the event, Isomata thanked the Philippines for being one of the first countries to console Japan over the catastrophe that hit his homeland, with the dead and missing now nearing 17,000 persons.

On March 14, as primal fears of nuclear radiation gripped his countrymen, Katsura was in the turnover event of a US$ 79,724 (about P3.7 million), X-ray machine in the Radiology Department of the San Lazaro Hospital in Manila, not referring at all to the devastation in his speech.

And on March 11, the very day of the 9.0-magnitude earthquake, the ambassador was at his embassy delivering on a US$ 81,911 (about P3.5 million)) pledge for the construction of a muscovado processing facility in the municipality of Bangued, Abra with an NGO known as KAPPIA Network Inc.

Three days before the catastrophe, on March 9, the Japanese envoy turned over to the municipality of La Trinidad in Benguet province an organic composting facility valued at US$ 89,993 (about P4.1 million).

Despite this regular flow of assistance in what it calls grassroots grants projects (GGP), it’s really not the habit of the Japanese to sing their praises or flaunt their riches or generosity.

The embassy said it looks at their multimillion-peso annual grants for Philippine grassroots projects as a filial duty not only to a friend in need and with so much potential and is a strategic partner in Asia.

Japan is the top donor of official development assistance (ODA) to the Philippines. From 1989 up to March this year, 440 grassroots projects have been funded by GGP. A project is valued from P1 million to P4 million, implemented by NGOs, local government units and other non-profit organizations.

The stories of how hope reached these townsfolk are originally tales of despair. For one, as in the Negros Occidental vocational center, the women have become helpless since their non-governmental supporters have run out of resources.

Negros Island has an overall image of being rich because of its “haciendas,” but many farming families earn a measly P1,500 to P3,000 monthly, not enough to survive on if there are five school-age children. Thus women and even minor children must also work to augment the income. But without a skill, the will to work and live does not add up.

But the officials and members of the NGO, Pag-Inupdanay Inc., resilient as the local population, turned on their imagination and voila! — they applied for GGP grants of Japan that practically cost them nothing but the will to better their lives with the livelihood opportunities embedded in the grants.

As for Abra, which is one of the 10 poorest provinces in the Philippines, the income of a family in its sugarcane farming sector could be pegged to only P2,500.

Luck came to them in the form of the provincial government’s One Town One Product (OTOP) program, which promotes the production of muscovado sugar, a healthy sugar from the canes which has a potentially large market in the Philippines.

Through the KAPPIA Network of local sugarcane farmers, boosted by the Japanese grant for a processing facility and such machinery as a cane crusher and a cane juice filtering system, their production of just 8.81 metric tons in 2009 through crude methods as a carabao-driven juice extractor, is seen to jump such that they could now compete with their more modern machine-using Visayan compatriots in the national market that demands at least 100 metric tons.

For Ambassador Katsura and his predecessors, what could be more uplifting to the spirit than that a community, another human being, rises to his feet amid a world of despair and becoming self-possessed again.