The Sama-Bajau Beached in Zamboanga Have No Barangay to Sign Their Aid Form
Coral died off Tawi-Tawi. The boats came north. DSWD says there is no address to release the relief against.
Sama-Bajau families who left the reefs around Tawi-Tawi this year are camped on the seawall in Zamboanga City, and the DSWD field office has a problem with the paperwork. The relief form needs a barangay of residence. Sea nomads do not have one.
The coral they fished for generations has been dying in patches since the last bleaching event, and the small pelagics that used to follow the reef edge thinned out with it. Families who lived on lepa boats moved their houses north looking for water that still produced. They beached in Rio Hondo, in Mariki, along the coastal strip past the port.
The form has a box they cannot fill
Cash aid releases run through the barangay. You need a certificate of residency, or at minimum a barangay captain willing to vouch that you sleep in his jurisdiction. The captains in Zamboanga's coastal barangays were not consulted before the boats arrived, and most are not interested in adding undocumented Sama-Bajau to a population count that already strains their internal revenue allotment.
So the families get turned away at the desk. No barangay clearance, no AICS. No AICS, no rice. The kids panhandle on Veterans Avenue and the LGU calls it a vagrancy issue.
Stateless on paper, Filipino in fact
The Sama-Bajau have lived in the Sulu-Sulawesi sea for centuries, longer than the borders that now divide Philippine, Malaysian, and Indonesian waters. Plenty of them were never registered at birth. The PSA late registration process costs money and requires witnesses who can swear to a birth date, and a birth on a boat off Sitangkai does not generate the kind of paperwork a civil registrar accepts without a fee.
The result is a population that is Filipino by every reasonable measure and stateless by every administrative one. Climate displacement does not change that. It just moves the problem onto a different shoreline.
BARMM has a mandate. Zamboanga is not BARMM.
Tawi-Tawi sits inside the Bangsamoro region, which has its own social services ministry and its own outreach programs for Sama-Bajau communities. Zamboanga City voted out of BARMM in the 2019 plebiscite. The families who crossed that invisible line lost access to whatever BARMM was set up to provide them, and Zamboanga's city government has no obligation to absorb the gap.
Advocacy groups have been asking DSWD central office to issue a department order recognizing displaced indigenous peoples without fixed address. The standard answer is that the guidelines are being studied. The guidelines have been studied since the last bleaching event, and the one before that.
What the seawall actually looks like
Tarps strung between bancas. Cooking fires on the rocks at low tide. Babies sleeping on rice sacks. A woman holding a folder of photocopied IDs that no agency will accept because the address line says Sitangkai and the agency is in Region IX.
The reef is not coming back this decade. The boats are not going back to it. And the cash card stays in the DSWD drawer because the form needs a barangay captain's signature, and no captain in Zamboanga is going to sign for people the city would rather see paddle somewhere else.
