Be A Hero: Be A Filipino!
Eduardo G. Fajardo
Commencement Address
De La Salle University - Manila
June 18, 2005
Dedicated to My Mother, My Hero
Natividad Galang-Fajardo
( 1910 - 2004 )
Not too many people know that this is the third time I have tried to
be a La Sallian. Back in 1964, I was desperate to get into college on
scholarship because I knew that my mother, who was raising all nine of
us by herself, could not afford anything else. My only options were to
get a scholarship or to work by the day and study at night as all my
older brothers and sisters had done before me.
One day, somebody told me De La Salle University had scholarships for
poor students. So, I walked from our home in Tondo, near the railroad
tracks of Tutuban Station, through Abad Santos Avenue, along Bambang
St. through Magdalena, then Avenida Rizal, through Plaza Sta. Cruz,
over the bridge spanning the Pasig River, through City Hall, along Taft
Avenue, through Isaac Peral, through PGH, and finally La Salle Taft.
There, I was told I needed to pay a P 3.00 examination fee. Since I did
not have the money (which explains why I had to walk in the first
place), I walked back to Tondo, reversed myself through Taft, Isaac
Peral, etc., until I got back home. My mother confirmed my fears but
she referred me to my married older sister, Ate Sylvia, who managed to
save the money for me after three weeks. I walked back again to De La
Salle where they told me that they would schedule me for an exam a
month down the road. In the meantime, I heard about another school,
went there, took the exam and, miraculously, won a full four-year
scholarship. After the celebrations, I remembered the P 3.00 so I went
back to La Salle, again on foot, to reclaim it. There, I was told it
was non-refundable. So, I walked the streets again but, somehow, the
trip felt longer than ever before.
Today, I am honored to receive a doctorate, honoris causa, from La
Salle for my work for the last two decades with scholars. Pardon my
pride but I think I deserve this degree: I walked to La Salle and back
3 times and I paid P3.00 for this, 41 years in advance!)
Seriously, I would like to thank De La Salle for granting me a
doctorate degree in the humanities, honoris causa, and for giving me
the privilege of addressing this gathering today.
May I have the honor of being among the first to congratulate the De La
Salle University Class of 2005 for a job well done. You have earned
the right to call yourselves with pride "La Sallians", a name that
evokes the excellence of your academic traditions and holds the promise
of your future as leaders of our country and educators of the poor. May
I now ask all the parents and loved ones of the graduates to please
rise and remain standing. Graduates, let us give your parents and your
loved ones a big hand in gratitude for their love and support
throughout your years of study in La Salle. They are your heroes, the
first ones in your life. Thank you. (Parents and loved ones, you may
now sit down. Thank you.)
May I also acknowledge the presence among you today of a special group
of teachers. Will the 30 joint scholars of the Natividad Galang Fajardo
Foundation and De La Salle University please rise and remain standing?
They are teachers from 17 public schools and the Philippine Normal
University who will receive their Master of Arts degree in Education
with you today, 5 with Distinction and 2 with High Distinction. They
will go back to teaching jobs in public schools with lower salaries and
longer work hours than in most of the private sector jobs but, I assure
you, they are committed to, even passionate about, teaching the
deserving poor. Indeed, these thirty "Bravehearts", are true heroes of
our country. Let us also give them a big hand. Thank you. (Scholars,
you may now sit down. Thank you.)
My biggest hero is my mother, Natividad Galang-Fajardo, "Ima" as we
called her in our native Pampango. Her family was her life. In 1955,
she had a double-crisis. My father had a massive heart attack and was
bed-ridden and jobless with big medical bills to pay for the next 12
years. If that was not enough, she had 9 children, the youngest being
only 1 year old at the time. Things were so bad that her relatives
offered to adopt some of us but she would have none of that. My mother
drew on her faith and focused her energies on keeping her family
together. She cooked "champorado" by the tub and sold it in a "kariton"
beside the Quiapo church daily before the crack of dawn. She fried
"lumpia" and "turon" by the hundreds which we then peddled all over
Sta. Cruz district in the afternoon. She bought piglets in January,
fattened them with our neighbors' table scraps and sold the pigs in May
for our school expenses. As poor as we were, she always had a coin or
two for Mass, a mandatory weekly event for all of us when we had to
wear our best clothes.
What sustained her was a vivid vision of a better life through
education. Thanks to the free public school system, all nine of us
reached high school. Thanks to scholarships, three of us finished
college. She inspired all of us to believe in ourselves and to excel in
anything we were doing which happened to be academics for me. In her 93
years with us, she never complained, never asked for anything for
herself and always encouraged us to take care of others around us.
Growing up poor in Tondo, you develop a sense of stages in your life
and your role in each. In the first stage, people take care of you.
You have met two such heroes so far, your parents and your mentors, who
taught you loving kindness and compassion, critical thinking and a
sense of mission. In the second, you learn to empower yourself by
learning a trade. Here, you take care of yourself as you become your
own hero. You look for either a scholarship to college or, failing
that, you get a job quickly and study at night. In the third stage, you
take care of others. You look after your younger siblings' education,
you take care of your own family, you support your parents in their old
age and you care of anybody else who comes along the best way you can.
The stages overlap, the years fly by so fast and life repeats itself as
you become a "hero" to others.
Today, you have become full-fledged members of society, in the second
stage of your life. From this day forward, you will take care of
yourselves and learn a decent trade. You will learn to excel in
whatever it is that drives you with a passion for that is the only way
you will achieve any thing important in this world. Consider
yourselves lucky, very lucky, that you are La Sallians. Your parents
have the means to get you to the best school where you can get the best
education along with the best minds and talents in the country. But,
even now, you must be aware that, soon enough, you will have to take
care of others around you. Because you have been gifted with so much,
you will be responsible for a lot more.
Let me now show you who you are responsible for.
I am told that, in 2004, there were 7.7 million Filipinos working
abroad, roughly 9.3% of our total population. If you add the
undocumented ones, the percentage figure can easily rise to 10% of our
total population. One out of every ten Filipinos is working outside the
country! If each such Overseas Filipino Worker ("OFW") has even only
two dependents, that means nearly one out of every three Filipinos
today depends on OFW remittances for their livelihood. For you to get a
better appreciation of this diaspora, 2,378 Filipinos left every single
day of 2003 to work abroad.
This exodus is the single biggest mass movement of workers in our
century. It has and will continue to have major economic, social,
political, and moral ramifications on the future character of our
country and our people.
For some time now, OFWs have been carrying us on their shoulders. To
begin with, our economy is totally dependent on OFW jobs to keep
unemployment down and to maintain economic growth at a steady pace. The
earnings of OFWs are probably the only thing keeping our economy afloat
at this time. $8.55 Billion of annual remittances go a long way towards
supporting families back home and shoring up the government's dollar
reserves to help service maturities from our $56 billion of foreign
loans. The major growth sectors in our country today are principal
beneficiaries of substantial expenditures by OFW dependents in housing,
clothing, food and education. Clearly, OFWs are modern-day heroes of
our country.
Like all else, there is a price to pay for all these. The Filipino
family system is at risk. Almost one-third of our population is growing
up without at least one parent: the absence of a mother or a father
against the backdrop of available cash has strained our traditional
family structure and values: we see broken marriages, second families,
prostitution, out-of-school youth, drug addiction, among others, on
the rise in the OFW sector.
It is no bed of roses either for the OFWs abroad: the women are the
most vulnerable to human trafficking while the men take on some of the
most dangerous jobs. If they escape these, many OFWs are forced to
accept entry-level jobs because the quality of public school education
back home has so deteriorated that they lack the professional skills to
compete at higher job levels. Thus, every time a bomb goes off in
Israel or a truck driver is kidnapped in Iraq or a maid is beaten up in
Singapore, we hold our collective breath as a nation, fearing that yet
another Filipino has been abused or, worse, that another Filipino is
going home in a casket.
And still Filipinos continue to brave dangers and endure loneliness
away from their families for a simple reason: we have collectively
failed them. We have failed to create enough decent jobs to save them
from a life of grinding poverty back home. We have failed to create a
fair and just society, respectful of the rights of every man, woman and
child and protective of our environment.
Every generation has a defining challenge. My generation was asked to
reclaim democracy from a cruel dictatorship and to restore justice. We
did get democracy back but we have utterly failed so far to make it
responsive to the needs of the people. The challenge for your
generation today is to create enough decent jobs for a fast-growing
population and to promote a better quality of life for all in a fair
and just society. The personal challenge for you, of course, is to stay
home, forego the "American Dream" of material comforts and cast your
lot with our people. Your response to these challenges will define you
and your generation; it will be the story of your life.
You need to prepare to move up to the third stage of your life wherein
you begin to take care of others. This time, "others" will include not
just your immediate family, not even just your La Salle family. You
need to be a special kind of hero: you need to be a patriot, someone
who loves an entire country, someone who takes it upon himself to be
responsible for an entire people.
At the first level, patriotism is simply the awareness of and
compassion for all of our countrymen; it is to be one with all
Filipinos. It is a celebration of a common history and values with all
people within the same shared space. It is an identification with an
entire people, an affirmation of being part of a transcendental spirit
animating all Filipinos so that we feel each other's pain and we
rejoice in each other's triumphs.
Ateneans and La Sallites should not weep when they lose to each other
in basketball games. They should weep, instead, for Christians and
Moslems who are casualties in and refugees from the continuing conflict
in Mindanao. We should raise funds not just for the annual Ateneo-La
Salle athletic tournaments but for scholarships for the children of
our neighbors right here in Leveriza who today are separated from the
rich of La Salle not by the short distance of a few street meters but
by the wall of poverty.
For a just society, we should teach our children at an early age that
the poor and the ethnic minorities were not created by a lesser god but
by the same God we worship. We should tell them that God is in our
employees -- our drivers, our gardeners and our maids -- who,
therefore, deserve the same respect and support as we give our own
family for the blessings they give us in our daily lives.
At the second level, patriotism is creating vehicles of hope for one's
countrymen. It ennobles the national psyche. A poor man with a job is a
happy leader and willing provider for a family. A bright student with a
scholarship is a person with a future and a stake in our society.
La Sallians, do not to leave for work abroad. I can understand why
poorly-educated Filipinos have to look for jobs abroad but not you. You
are in the best position to start a business here or to start a
professional career of your own with your La Salle education, your
family finances and your personal connections. Do not just take a job,
create a job! There are many business opportunities here for the
bright, the hard-working, the creative and the patient: just ask the
Koreans and the mainland Chinese businessmen who have been settling
here in droves in search of a better life. Create jobs so that our
OFWs have an option to stay home, be with their families and strengthen
our institutions and values as a nation.
La Sallians, donate scholarships to the deserving poor and set to
motion infinite circles of goodwill. The scholarship Mr. Jose B.
Fernandez, Jr. gave me to the Ateneo de Manila University in 1964 has
since grown, through the Natividad Galang-Fajardo Foundation, to 329
scholarships, 56 funded professorial chairs (of which 31 are in La
Salle), several scholarship funds and one graduate school of
mathematics education, among many others. Imagine the next circle.
Right in your own home, provide scholarships to the children of your
household staff. They, too, are your responsibility.
Better yet, donate a professorial chair. Adopt a public school teacher,
buy her books, help her source a computer; make it your personal
apostolate to encourage and to support her as she serves God and
country in the trenches of public education. A typical teacher touches
the lives of at least 5,000 students in a 25-year career. Her
inspiration to our young, however, is forever: At 57, I still carry
with me today values and lessons about life I learned from my teachers
at F. Balagtas Elementary School and at Arellano (Public) High School
half-a-century ago.
At the third and highest level, patriotism is sacrificing one's own
time, one's career, and, if necessary, even one's own life for love of
country. La Sallians, trace a non-traditional path: pursue a
service-oriented career.
Teach in state universities yourself, especially in the provinces where
there is a scarcity of good Ph.D.'s. Work for the government and be a
model of an honest, efficient and motivated civil servant for the sake
of the masses who desperately need social services. Join NGOs to
protect the environment, uphold human rights, teach population control
to the poor, or safeguard the environment. In short, donate yourself to
your country. Be a hero to the rest of us.
La Salle parents, please do not tell your graduate to become yet
another Wharton MBA selling Citibank private banking products to
already rich people in Asia. Allow him, instead, to make a meaningful
career here. If he is good in Mathematics and if he loves teaching, why
not grant him Ph.D. scholarship so that he can teach the poor? Forget
the pay; by the mere fact that you have a La Sallian son, God has given
you enough blessings already. Donate your son to the poor, as the
Father gave us His Only Son. If you wish, hedge his bet:: give your own
son a huge professorial chair so that he can better concentrate on his
apostolic work. Encourage him daily. Affirm his decision.
For me, all three levels patriotism come so naturally. They are
ingrained in the three stages of life in Tondo as we start with
"heroes" who help us and become "heroes" to others later on.
Patriotism begins with my mother's love for her children and expands
into her children sharing her love with all Filipinos through our
Foundation. "Inang" in Tagalog and "Ima" in Pampango represent to me
all that is caring, loving, noble, and worth sacrificing oneself for.
The Philippines, our country, is my "Inang Bayan", my mother's land,
my motherland. It is the home of my heroes, my mother and my teachers.
Now, it is the home of my own family --my wife and my two sons.
Everything that I am, I developed here; everything that I have, I
earned here. Why should I be selfish? "Bakit ako magmamaramot ? "And
so I expand my mother's love for me and my love for my mother to my
love for my own country. Thus, I am responsible for all my countrymen.
I am a Filipino. I am responsible for all Filipinos.
And so are you, too, my dear graduates. You are not La Sallians, you
are more than that. You are Filipinos. Therefore, love your country as
you love your own mother and as your mother loves you.
And so, my dear graduates, go forth into the world. Write a good life
story. Be a hero. Be a Filipino.
My mother be with you. La Salle be with you. Our country be with you.
God be with you.
Maraming salamat po sa inyong lahat. Pagpalain tayong lahat ng Diyos.
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