The Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary

The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
(15th of August)

Salve Regina, mater misericordiae: vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve. Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevae. Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle. Eia, ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte. Et Iesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.

O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria. Amen.

V. Ora pro nobis, sancta Dei Genetrix.
R. Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi.

Hail holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious Advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us. And after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary. Amen.

V. Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God.
R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

GLIMPSES: An emerging nobility

By Jose Ma. Montelibano
INQ7.net
Last updated 02:27am (Mla time) 08/11/2006

Some days ago, Eric Pasion, a young man studying law at the University of the Philippines, wrote an impassioned appeal for others like him "not to dream only for ourselves." It was a spontaneous expression of a stirred angst that today finds kinship with thousands, maybe even millions, of Filipinos. It was a cry from the soul of a privileged one for the less privileged.

Moved by his message, I distributed through e-mail what Eric the young man wrote. Instantly, and almost unanimously, I received responses that bore the same fingerprint of a shared resonance. It was not surprising. The same spirit, when expressed by individuals who carry credibility before their audiences, invariably elicits sympathy and support. Recently, the most read and admired speeches have been of Antonio Meloto of GawadKalinga, and rightly so, it seems. Meloto and Gawad Kalinga each received the 2006 award for Community Leadership from the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Foundation.

The appeal to those who have a little more to help those who have little or none, has been spreading like it never had before among Filipinos, including those living abroad. There are many who left the Philippines a few decades ago in search of an elusive dream, or just greener pastures, who now dream the reverse. Their thoughts are drawn toward the people and the country they had left behind, and how they can make the pastures oftheir native land greener.

Many who left in the late 1960s or the '70s did so because of the political climate. Of course, bad politics make bad economics, except for bad politicians. People who are very disturbed by political turmoil seek peace of mind maybe even more than more income. So, in a troubled era, many Filipinos could not stand the heat and left. Most, however, stayed behind because they wanted to. Others simply had no opportunity to go anywhere else.

The desire of helping the people and country that were left behind is a growing sentiment that tugs at the hearts of Filipinos abroad. It is more than a tug if we consider that Gawad Kalinga continues to receive this burst of goodwill and generosity from Filipinos the world over to match its noble work for the poor. What is even more inspiring is the birth of that same goodwill and generosity among young Filipinos, especially students of the premier colleges and universities in the Philippines.

Young Filipinos wanting to help the poor has never been a massive sentiment. Social action groups from Catholic schools have always been involved in immersion programs in selected poor communities. While many claimed to have been touched forever by their experiences, there was no visible improvement in the lives of the poor in the communities that hosted the immersion programs. What may have started with the best of intentions ended up like charity programs with no substantial impact on the poverty situation.

The trend today, however, is a radical one. The conversion of the mandatory Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program to becoming optional gave birth to college students nationwide choosing community service instead. And when introduced to the Gawad Kalinga mechanism for poverty intervention via a full blown community development program, an army of the strategic young are influenced to confront the ugliness of poverty and strive to change it.

Education, then, takes on its higher purpose. The great debates between universities like Ateneo, La Salle and University of the Philippines are giving way from inconsequential form to a new substance that carries the promise of a brighter future. After all, graduates of the premier schools have ruled the nation, and the running total of that education andsubsequent governance is a virtual disaster. And I am not talking about the deteriorating proficiency of Filipinos using English; I refer to the deteriorated values that dominate our way of life led by the badly educated.

The elemental purpose of education is to add knowledge and skills, including the proper use of the English language among others. Yet, the products of an educational system, which shone around Asia as the most proficient in English, oversaw the degradation of a whole culture and value system. Today, poverty has deepened like no other time, reflecting the awesome superiority of exploitation over human concern and social justice. And today, as well, the corruption of a nation has become a gaudy headgear that is noticed by the whole world.

The products of what is deemed as a superior educational environment became the generations that ushered an abundant and Christian nation into one impoverished and highly immoral. Superior education abdicated its higher purpose, trading it for flashy forms and rotten substance. Those who did not engage in the commission of wrong did little to stop it, or simply ran away.

As fewer Filipinos can speak good English, more Filipinos are getting better education. The sympathy and support for the poor is expanding among Filipino students from the leading schools of the motherland. This trend among students reflects the beginning of the end for bad education that allowed flashy form to dominate good substance. At last, glimpses of nobility may soon overpower the rule of inanity, good works may soon overcome empty words, and the courage to confront poverty among our young may soon eliminate it.

Let us not only dream for ourselves...

Allow me to share this email from Eric Pasion, who passionately writes about his own dreams. Eric has been involved with GK in UP and is leading the way for raising thousands of students to become GK workers, volunteers and advocates. Eric is (or was until last school year at least) either president of the student council or the UPSILON fraternity. - Boy M.

Forwarded message
From: Eric Pasion
Date: Aug 5, 2006 5:23 AM

On my watch, it is 4:30am of August 5, 2006.

For thousands of young high school students, it is but 2 hours away from their taking of the UP College Admission Test or UPCAT.

Today would mark a very important day for them as the results of the test they will take will either make or break their dreams of entering the esteemed University of the Philippines.

To countless students from all over the country, this is their chance to make it big.

What is it with the University of the Philippines that so many students not only aspire but would do almost anything just to get in?

Does it make a difference whether or not a person graduates with a degree from UP?

Does it make a difference whether or not a person gets to sit in classroom filled with the brightest young minds of the country?

Does it make a difference whether or not they get to listen to the best professors in this country?

Well, apparently to a lot of young Filipinos, it does.

Perhaps just like me, these young students dream of becoming the best in their profession, or the best in their field.

Perhaps just like me, they want to create a name for themselves so that when they go out of UP, they will have a better life, an easier life.

Perhaps just like me, they have a dream for themselves of becoming somebody.

Having studied in the University of the Philippines for 4 years now, having taken my undergraduate course of Psychology in UP Diliman, and now taking up my bachelors degree at the UP College of Law, I've come to realize that what actually matters is what I do with my UP Education.

In order to be somebody, I would have to make the most out of my UP Education.

A lot of people before me have made the most of their UP Education.

They are now executives in companies, they are now well-established doctors both here and abroad, they have their own law firms, they have become congressmen, governors and prominent political figures.

They have now become a somebody, somewhere, having reached their dreams. Unfortunately though, the people who have put them through school still wait for their dreams to come true.

People go to the University of the Philippines not only because it provides one of the if not the best education available in our country but because it is cheap.

A semester in UP costs around P6,000.

This is a lot less compared to other universities that have a tuition fee of P60,000 per semester or higher.

Why is education in UP 10 times cheaper than other universities?

Well, perhaps it is because 10,000 Filipinos who pay their taxes so that 1 person can study in UP.

The tution in UP is not cheap beacuse it does not only take one or two parents to support one student, but it takes hundreds, if not thousands more.

The only reason we are able to study in UP is because the Filipino people have a dream that the student they put to school will give something back, perhaps not to them directly, but to other Filipinos.

They have a dream that their lives will get better because there are students who can make them better.

They have a dream that their quality of life will improve because of the quality of students that the University produces. This is a collective dream.

As a UP student, I cannot only dream for myself but I have to dream for others as well.

I cannot aspire to be the best, without aspiring for other Filipinos to be the best.

I cannot want to be well-off, without wanting other Filipinos to be well-off.

I am the product of the sacrifice of countless of Filipinos that the things that I want cannot only be for my self alone.

I owe who I have become to the education that I have received from the University of the Philippines, an education that was given to me by the Filipino people.

I hope the people who do pass the UPCAT and those who are already admitted into the University of the Philippines remember to dream big, not only for themselves but for others and that they give back to the people who have allowed them to become better and brighter individuals.

ERIC EMMANUEL C. PASION
President
UP Gawad Kalinga

"In this age of darkness,there are two ways of spreading the light. You may either be a candle, or the mirror that reflects its light." - Ninoy Aquino, while in prison

The 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership - CITATION for Antonio Meloto

The 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership

CITATION for Antonio Meloto
Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies
31 August 2006, Manila, Philippines

Asia’s vast cities-of-the-poor are visible proof of a hard fact. Despite decades of economic development programs and foreign aid and the earnest efforts of foundations and NGOs, not to mention the sweet promises of politicians, great millions of people in Asia still live in poverty. In the Philippines, nearly half of the country’s 84 million people are credibly said to live below the poverty line. Forty percent of its urban families occupy what the Asian Development Bank calls "makeshift dwellings in informal settlements." Slums, in other words. Antonio Meloto believes these disheartening facts reveal his country’s failure "to work for the collective good." As executive director of Gawad Kalinga Community Development Foundation, he is changing this.

Born to humble circumstances in Bacolod, Central Philippines, Antonio Meloto attended Ateneo de Manila University on a scholarship and embarked upon a successful career in business. In 1985, an encounter with the Filipino Catholic organization Couples for Christ caused him to reassess his life and priorities. Meloto subsequently joined the organization fulltime and, in 1995, launched a work-with-the-poor ministry in Bagong Silang, a huge squatter relocation site in Metropolitan Manila. He called his ministry Gawad Kalinga, "to give care."

In Bagong Silang, Meloto immersed himself in the lives of slum dwellers. He learned that "a slum environment develops slum behavior." But he also found goodness, even in the hardened gang members he met there. Slum dwellers needed love and spiritual nourishment, it was clear. But they also needed dignity and decent living conditions. It was not enough to pray for them, he decided. "We should do something!"

Meloto decided to build houses. Drawing support and volunteers from Couples for Christ, he began transforming the neediest area of Bagong Silang into a viable neighborhood with safe, sturdy, and attractive homes—the first Gawad Kalinga village. In doing so, he formulated guidelines for later Gawad Kalinga projects. New homes would be allotted only to the poorest families. They could not be sold. And although the beneficiaries would not have to pay for their new homes, they would have to help Gawad Kalinga’s volunteers build them and to abide by neighborhood covenants.

As Bagong Silang Village blossomed, Meloto identified new sites for Gawad Kalinga villages and spread word of the project through Couples for Christ. He solicited donations and volunteers passionately, offering "see-for-yourself" exposures to convince skeptics. Through the ANCOP (Answering the Cry of the Poor) Foundation he brought expatriate Filipinos into Gawad Kalinga’s growing web of partners and supporters. Meanwhile, he introduced health, education, and livelihood components to Gawad Kalinga villages to equip the occupants with skills and resources to rise in life.

As word of Gawad Kalinga’s hopeful project circulated at home and abroad, it tapped into a reservoir of longing. Many Filipinos despaired over their country’s stubborn poverty and yearned to do something about it. They flocked to the movement, convinced by Meloto that their money and efforts could really make a difference. Donations soared and Gawad Kalinga villages began to proliferate throughout the Philippines.

Meloto guided the organization to embrace all comers. "We provide the framework," he says. "We also provide the principles; we also provide the spirit. But anyone can come in." This philosophy led Gawad Kalinga into cooperative projects with corporations, civic organizations, families, schools, and government agencies as well as over three hundred governors and mayors. When typhoons destroyed thousands of homes on Luzon in 2005, for example, Gawad Kalinga joined a dozen government agencies and private organizations to build forty thousand new ones. In Mindanao, Gawad Kalinga-led "Peace Builds," fostered by local mayors and built by Christian, Muslim, and indigenous-Filipino volunteers, resulted in hundreds of new homes for displaced Muslim Filipinos.

It is often said that Tony Meloto is the face of Gawad Kalinga. But the movement he spawned is now much bigger than himself. In truth, Gawad Kalinga has thousands of faces. These are faces of every Filipino ethnicity, faith, and social class—of donors at home and abroad who are providing the money and land for new villages; of volunteers across the Philippines who are joining their families, and friends, and schoolmates, and officemates, and fellow church members to build houses and to provide Gawad Kalinga villages with training and services; of executives, lawyers, doctors, architects, and other professionals. These are also the faces of over one hundred thousand grateful beneficiaries.

Today more than eight hundred fifty Gawad Kalinga villages span the Philippines. Alongside those sponsored by Filipinos abroad, such as Norway Village, Swiss Village, and North Carolina Village, there are more than one hundred others sponsored by major corporations. And this is just the beginning. Gawad Kalinga is committed to building seven thousand new communities by the year 2010.

Gawad Kalinga neighborhoods typically contain fifty-to-one-hundred brightly painted homes and are conspicuously tidy and clean. There are flowers and plants and pleasant walkways, plus a school, a livelihood center, and a multipurpose hall. Participating families are mentored by a Couples for Christ caretaker team that organizes volunteers to assist in education, health, and livelihood projects. In many, clinics provide routine medical care. Through a self-governing neighborhood association in each village, residents are becoming stewards of their own stable and vibrant communities.

The objective is transformation. Meloto recently described a mature Gawad Kalinga village as "a beautiful middle-class community. Crime has virtually disappeared. Former street children are now in school. The idle have been motivated to find employment and are now leading productive lives." As for those who contribute to Gawad Kalinga and its mission, they are transformed, too, by their acts of goodwill and the warm camaraderie of bayanihan, "working together."

Now fifty-six, the lanky, self-effacing Meloto says, "I believe in the immense potential of the Filipino." Thinking of people like himself who formerly ignored the poverty around them, he says, "Before, we were part of the problem."

"Now," he adds, smiling, "we are part of the solution."

In electing Antonio Meloto to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his inspiring Filipinos to believe with pride that theirs can be a nation without slums.

Building a business for employees - BusinessWorld – 24 July 2006

Newsbarbers’ Dennis A. Gadil (ENTERPRISER)

BY IRIS CECILIA C. GONZALES, Senior Reporter

Tradition has it that we go to our friendly neighborhood barbershop, not only for a haircut but also to hear about the latest talk of the town, the community gossip or whatever news there is.

Dennis A. Gadil, a newspaper man, said this is a tradition he wanted to keep alive because he credits his narrative skills to his neighborhood barbershop in Paranaque, where he grew up.

Mr. Gadil has been working as a journalist for Malaya since 1993, covering mainly the legislative beats.

Because of this, Mr. Gadil, along with his fellow newsmen, thought of putting up Newsbarbers.

Mr. Gadil made sure, however, that his barbershop is no ordinary shop. More importantly, Newsbarbers is both a business and a venue to empower employees by teaching them not just about business but about investing.

Thus, its owners make it a point that its barbers will have the opportunity to become part owners through the money that they put in the company.

Mr. Gadil and former People’s Journal reporter Zaldy de Loyola opened the first branch at Ever Gotesco mall along Commonwealth Avenue in August 2002.

Now, barely four years since the launch of Newsbarbers, the group has three operating branches in Circle C mall in Congressional, SM Fairview and the one in Ever Gotesco. The group will open two more this year – one in SM Bacoor and another in SM Pasig.

The opportunity came when eight seasoned barbers defected from an existing shop because of poor labor practices. Mr. Gadil and his colleagues thought of helping the workers by providing a venue where they could practice their skills under a labor-friendly environment. Now, the group is proud of how Newsbarbers has turned out.

“It’s basically the same service but the major difference is how we run the business and how we treat the employees,” Mr. Gadil told BusinessWorld.

His employees have, in fact, become investment partners, an opportunity they never thought would happen. Buddy Gonzales, the shop’s head barber, is now part owner because his employers encouraged him to put up his money into the business. He has also been appointed area manager.

“We also have a trust fund for employees that they can tap for loans in case of emergency or whatever need arises,” Mr. Gadil said.

Former radio journalist Terence Grana said the group would continue to maintain good service to their clients and help empower employees. The utility men or the janitors – there are at least two in every shop – are also trained to become barbers so they can earn more.

The group is also planning to expand the business over the next two years by opening it for franchise. “Franchising is the direction. We are looking at five franchises in two years,” Mr. Gadil said.

This bunch of newsmen-enterprisers, however, are not resting on their laurels. They have vowed to uphold the service and continue to teach and train their employees how to satisfy the customer.

And living up to its name, Newsbarbers also makes sure that clients can catch the latest neighborhood chit-chat, as well as the latest political and economic developments.

The television sets in each shop are tuned in to the news at the scheduled timeslots so that clients can listen to what’s happening.

Running the business, though, is not without challenges. Mr. Gadil complained about the tedious registration process in putting up the business, as well as the various tax requirements.

Mr. Gadil said it is not easy to run a business, but he advises would-be enterprisers to study the market first and familiarize themselves with what they are getting into.

“One has to master the formula of the particular business that he wants to get into,” he pointed out. In the case of Newsbarbers, the group chose to put up their businesses in malls because malling has become a one-stop shop experience for families.

This is in contrast to stand-alone barbers shops in commercial districts like Tomas Morato. Based on Newsbarbers’ experience, he said, it is more practical to have the shop inside malls because families would want to be able to do everything they want when they go out. The mother can do the groceries or shop with the children, while the husband can go to the barbershop while waiting.

But not all malls are ideal, he said. When asked why Newsbarbers did not expand in the newly opened Mall of Asia in Pasay City, Mr. Gadil said it is not the kind of mall where families would go to do the groceries or have a haircut. “It’s a very leisure-type mall,” he said. He also advises entrepreneurs to invite other investors if they want to put up a capital-intensive business such as a barbershop. If one can’t do it alone, it would be good to seek the help of other people. Investment in a barbershop can go as high as P900,000 to P1 million.