From Isolation to Recognition: Mapping People, Place, and Possibility in Barangay Ongyod

"Dugay na kami diri, pero daw wala gid may nakakita sa amon." 

(We have been here for a long time, yet it feels like no one truly sees us.) 

by Hilary Shane Caliguiran and Gabriel Purzuelo

These words were spoken with the weight of familiarity, as if being unseen had become part of everyday life.

Barangay Ongyod is not difficult to locate because it is absent from maps, rather it is difficult to see because distance has a way of hiding people. From the municipal center of Miagao to the barangay, the journey takes at least 45 minutes to an hour by jeepney. The road begins to rise. The air becomes colder. The slopes grow steeper and the curves become sharper. What looks like a short distance on a map becomes something else when it is traveled, endured, and lived every day.

Our research, "From Isolation to Recognition: Strengthening Health Governance in Barangay Ongyod, Miagao through Participatory Three-Dimensional Mapping (P3DM)" explores how community participation and spatial knowledge can surface lived realities that are often overlooked in community health planning and governance systems.

Participatory Three-Dimensional Mapping (P3DM) is a hands-on participatory mapping method within the Participatory GIS (PGIS) tradition. It enables communities to construct a scaled relief model of their area based on elevation contours and locally identified geographic features. Through P3DM, community members collectively map their area based on lived experience-identifying not only its physical geography, but also local resources and assets, hazards and risks, and other socio-spatial realities embedded in place.

From this starting point, we asked a question that stayed with us throughout the journey: What does equity look like for communities whose everyday struggles, knowledge, and aspirations remain largely unseen by the systems meant to support them?

The answer would be found long before the P3DM activity even started. Before a community can map its realities with you, it must first trust that those realities will not be overlooked once again.

When people read research papers, they usually encounter the polished parts: objectives, methods, findings, and conclusions. What they rarely see are the months spent knocking on offices, waiting for approvals, returning to the community, explaining intentions, coordinating with partners, and learning how to be present without rushing people to participate. So much of community-based research happens before the "formal" data collection begins.

For us, more than a year passed between our first visit to the barangay and the actual implementation of the study. We first had to navigate the bureaucratic processes of government offices and spent our weekends returning to Barangay Ongyod. No class could have fully prepared us for that part. As BA Community Development-Psychology students, we had studied and understood the concepts of participation and empowerment. We knew the language of community work. But the field asked something more challenging from us: patience.

During our first visits, many community members were understandably hesitant. We were outsiders, ibang-tao. We carried notebooks, questions, and a project that still needed to earn its place in the community. So we kept returning. For many months, we listened to their stories. We learned their names and participated in everyday routines. Through panunuluyan, pakikipagkwentuhan, and pagtatanong-tanong, our relationship with the community slowly shifted from ibang-tao to familiar faces, hindi ibang-tao.

Through this process, we came to understand that trust is never something we can simply assume. It emerges when people feel that they are not being treated merely as sources of information, but are respected as co-creators of knowledge.

In many ways, this became one of the most important lessons of the study. Development, we realized, is not something done for communities. It is something built with them—slowly, carefully, and through relationships that must first be earned.

In Barangay Ongyod, we began to understand how deeply people's lives are shaped by their place. Place is not only land. It is the river a child crosses before reaching school. It is the path residents fear during heavy rain. It is the steep, winding roads where accidents have taken lives. It is the distance a farmer hikes to reach the farm. It is the sole spring that provides water to many households. And it is the distance between a mother and the nearest health service when her child is sick.

On a map, a path is a line. In Barangay Ongyod, a path can mean a 30-minute to one-hour hike while carrying tools through elevated and forested terrain just to reach farmlands. It can mean unbearable heat, slippery soil, toxic plants, and the risk of encountering venomous animals. For older residents and those with health conditions, the same path can determine whether they can continue farming or have to give it up.

Residents often told us, "Na-anad na kami." (We are used to it.) But being used to difficulty does not make the difficulty acceptable.

This was where our understanding of health began to widen. Health was not only about illness or medicine. It was also about the community's social determinants of health, or the "conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age" (WHO, n.d.). This refers to the quality of roads, water, food, livelihood, education, and time, and whether these are accessible or lacking. In the barangay, these conditions shaped the quality of health and well-being of individuals.

Yet these same conditions were also experienced through a different lens—that of the children in the community. The children became part of our story in ways we did not expect.

Because many community members were occupied with farming and household responsibilities, some allowed their children to observe or join parts of the activities. The children would arrive early, stay through the long hours of creating the 3D map, and return the next day as if the work was also part of their routine. Over time, they stopped being the timid observers and became constant companions throughout the process.

Through them, we saw Barangay Ongyod not only as a community facing layered challenges, but also as a place of warmth and personality. Their presence reminded us that the barangay could not be reduced to categories such as "geographically isolated and disadvantaged area" or "research site." It was home—where children live fully in the midst of hardship, and where they imagine futures beyond the mountain paths they walk every day.

Their presence reminded us that community work is not only about gathering data, but it is also about allowing ourselves to be changed by the people who let us into their everyday lives. It was within this shared process of learning that P3DM took place.

The construction of the P3DM itself took two months of going back and forth to the barangay every weekend. Community members helped trace, cut, paint, label, and interpret the map. They identified the barangay's concrete roads, unpaved trails, streams, water tanks, farms, boundaries, tourist sites, dense woodlands and grasslands, bamboo groves, rafflesia hotspots, fire- and landslide-prone areas, and the spring, among other landmarks. They also marked houses and common facilities, identifying households of senior citizens, children, and other vulnerable community members.

The 3D map became a physical manifestation of how people adapt to and live with the land they were born into. P3DM made their lived realities visible. The process turned local knowledge into something people could see, touch, and collectively discuss. This became most meaningful during a reflection session, where we gathered community members and used the 3D map as a shared reference point for identifying the community's concerns.

During the reflection session, we were able to surface and group the community's lived realities into four interconnected concerns: (1) human security concerns, which include the steep and winding roads, elevated terrain, and hazard-prone paths that people navigate daily just to reach essential services; (2) economic concerns, which include the uncertainty of farming shaped by climate change and the challenges faced by their local livelihood association, as well as the fragility of tourism-based livelihoods due to limited support from higher government offices; (3) social concerns, which include the everyday systems and services that influence the health and general well-being of community members, including water, education, food, housing, infrastructure, health-seeking practices, and social cohesion; and (4) governance concerns, particularly in health governance, include the community's limited emergency response capacity, insufficient health personnel, medicines, and equipment, gaps in health service delivery, and poor health information systems.

This was where the 3D map became a space for the community to recognize their realities not as separate problems, but as interconnected conditions of everyday life. Roads shape emergency response and access to essential services, which in turn affect children's access to quality education. Water shapes hygiene and farming, which in turn affects income and, ultimately, healthcare decisions. There are many more examples, but in Barangay Ongyod, place brings all of these conditions into one lived reality.

This is why mapping matters. Not because the map solves the problem by itself—it does not. A map cannot finish a road, build a health station, or create irrigation for farms. But it can hold what communities have long known yet have struggled to make visible. It can surface conditions that institutions often overlook and transform lived experience into evidence that can be seen and shared.

We entered Barangay Ongyod with a research project. We left with a clearer understanding of what recognition requires. Before a community can be recognized by institutions and policymakers, its realities must first be understood through the experiences of the people who inhabit it. Recognition begins with the willingness to take both people and place seriously.

We return to the line that began this journey: 

"Dugay na kami diri, pero daw wala gid may nakakita sa amon."

In Barangay Ongyod, we learned that places are not defined merely by geographic features, but they are mainly defined by the people who move through them every day. Those who walk long and uncertain paths, send their children to school across difficult terrain, and continue to live, adapt, and hope in conditions that are often unrecognized.

"From isolation to recognition" is a responsibility that demands action. Recognition begins when people are no longer just seen from afar, but are heard, understood, and empowered to shape the places they call home.

This piece was written by Hilary Shane E. Caliguiran and Gabriel T. Purzuelo, part of the 2026 Batch 01 cohort of the WTA Labs Research Grants Program (RGP). WTA Labs supports research on space, place, cities, and communities through grants of up to PHP 25,000.00. Their featured research project is titled "From Isolation to Recognition: Strengthening Health Governance in Barangay Ongyod, Miagao through Participatory Three-Dimensional Mapping (P3DM)".