Cebu, or Sugbo, is situated in the middle of the Visayas, one of the three major components of the Philippine islands. Cebuy City is where my SEALNet team and I were for the past two weeks or so. My days in Cebu mark the first time ever that I serve as a ground mentor to a project team. A mildly monumental step, I could say.
What type of mentor will I be? Such is the kind of questions I asked myself before I stepped onto that Philippine Airlines flight from Shanghai to Manila. A thousand answers floated around in my head, until I hit the ground, got picked up by Xun (one of the two project leaders) and met the team members at our hotel. Almost immediately, I let my natural self take over and started conversing with everyone. These are their names: PLs Ross & Xun, team members Bee, Clarisse, Diane, Katie, Kerry, Janine, Joey, Marielle, Rena, and Tiffany. Interestingly, all team members are girls while both PLs and I are guys. Just to preclude any conspiracy theory, we did not only select girls; in fact, we took in a few guys, who ended up dropping out. I guess there is a certain degree of selection effect, as girls tend to flock around service projects.
In this project, we worked with two high schools, an international non-profit, a medical school, and other miscellaneous partners. It is unlike any other project I participated in because each team member/mentor has two sets of mentees, since we do the same leadership workshops twice with both UP Cebu high school and the Science high school. Details about the day-to-days can be found at our blog site: http://projectphilippines.sealnetonline.org/blog/, so I won't dig into the project per se; rather, in the two weeks I spent in Cebu, there was a plethora of emotions I felt that need to be detailed. Concurrently, I admit that a mere two-week time period does not do justice to the extraordinary amount of culture and history these 7,107 islands provide.
Religion has a predominant grasp on people's lives. Magellan, Legazpi, and numerous Spanish missionaries brought Catholicism, which today still has more than 80% of the population following it. Churches, the cross, and other Christian symbols are ubiquitous in the Philippines. Little does the a foreigner know that 500 years ago, the islands mostly consisted of Islamic kingdoms and animistic tribes. Spirituality and God play a big role in determining what ranges from individual choices to government policies. I was fortunate enough to attend two masses during the stay. One was when I went with fellow teammates Joey and Clarisse to Cebu's Redemptorist Church, where over 1500 people from all over the community congregated and listened to a pastor preach. He told one story which I remember clearly even weeks after the mass: a poor family saw him on the street walking, and the first words that came out of their mouths was "Please come eat with us, sir." Even though the family's rations were at a bare minimum, they still opened their arms and wanted to share their food and sense of fulfillment with a passer-by.
Temperature hovered at around 35C during the mass, but the giant doors on the sides were fully opened to allow circulation. It was an indescribable feeling sitting in the midst of 1500 people while holding the hands of others and praying with them, notwithstanding my non-believer status. An afternoon well spent.
The second mass I attended was the day I left Cebu at the Basilica Minore del Santo Niño. The Santo Niño, given to the local Rajah by Magellan in 1521 and rediscovered in 1565, is the patron saint of Cebu and even of the entire country. It is common to see taxis with miniature statues of the holy child right by the steering wheel. I stood in queue to see the holy child and waited for well over 30 minutes. Nevertheless, it was so worth the waiting because the amount of spirituality dwarfs any feeling of anxiety or heat, especially after seeing men and women come back in tears from seeing and touching the patron saint. It soon became futile for me to attempt to surmise what the tens of thousands of church goers were thinking. After all, devotion takes a lifetime to grasp.
Much like what the travel brochures say, "it is more Fun in the Philippines." Before I set foot on the islands, I was told by many that Filipinos have near-natural forte in music. Some evidence has convinced me so: Charice, along with thousands of other Filipino entertainers at clubs, on cruise ships, and around the world. But one really has to be BE here to feel the aforementioned musical talent. Quite literally, 70% of the radio stations play those sappy 80s and 90s love songs around the clock, and many taxi drivers sing along to the tunes. In supermarkets, it is not uncommon to hear melodies echoing from the voice chords of multiple shop workers. And the kids, oh gosh, don't get me started on talking about the kids. They are the most amazing. Our high school mentees created a song about healthy living based on the melody of Call Me Maybe and tried to teach it to elementary school kids. Nearly every single one of them, see picture below, know how to sing it after a couple of tries and were so excited that they jumped onto the desks. And lest you don't hear them, they are actually very good. Meanwhile, singing lends itself to dancing, and we saw plenty of it during 1000-person Zumba sessions at the Ayala mall. Also when we were there, it was the annual Intramurals, when different groups in a school play each other in various sports and competition. Each group also had to come up with a group dance, in which every single member participates in choreographing or dancing.
So why are Filipinos so talented? There are multiple theories, but to simply put it after a cursory reading, they are a fun people. And this is in spite of the fact that 1/3 of the population live under the poverty line of $1.7/day. Amazingly, people find time to sing in church choir, dance during feasts, and simply not let the worst conditions get the best of them. Singing and dancing, coupled with the power of religion, enables the common folk to persevere through difficult times.
Hope
Amid all the poverty and problems, there are plenty of reasons why Filipino citizens should keep their heads up. For one, there is real development in many places and GDP's growing at 6.5%, keeping in mind that this is not due to some outburst of natural resources. Secondly, in a shameless attempt to self-advertise, there are organizations and projects like SEALNet going into the country and fostering positive change. Thirdly and most importantly, hope lies in the nature of the people, and in their faith. I will let pictures do the storytelling.
Mentoring
To answer a question posed earlier, I actually noticed changes to my leadership style after these two weeks of mentoring. Having taken up the roles of chapter founder, project leader, and more recently, chairman of the board, I am used to being at the forefront of everything. In fact, sometimes I feel a strong need to seize the spotlight in order to promote the organization.
Mentoring can't be more different. Mentoring is about being in the background and observing people's behaviors, attitudes, and interactions. It's about noticing changes and constantly thinking about ways to make improvements. And that was exactly what I did. In the middle of all the goofiness I naturally exuded, I observed, noticed, and cared. Even though things were not within my control, it was a great feeling chatting with the project leaders at night and with team members during the day. The entire process makes me more patient, a skill I have desperately tried to hone over the years.
I will soon step onto the flight back to China and then the U.S. These 7,107 islands have given me a lot to think about and regurgitate at latter dates, but for now I will remember one thing: It is more fun in the Philippines.
p.s. What's NOT healthy? Here is an example:
What type of mentor will I be? Such is the kind of questions I asked myself before I stepped onto that Philippine Airlines flight from Shanghai to Manila. A thousand answers floated around in my head, until I hit the ground, got picked up by Xun (one of the two project leaders) and met the team members at our hotel. Almost immediately, I let my natural self take over and started conversing with everyone. These are their names: PLs Ross & Xun, team members Bee, Clarisse, Diane, Katie, Kerry, Janine, Joey, Marielle, Rena, and Tiffany. Interestingly, all team members are girls while both PLs and I are guys. Just to preclude any conspiracy theory, we did not only select girls; in fact, we took in a few guys, who ended up dropping out. I guess there is a certain degree of selection effect, as girls tend to flock around service projects.
In this project, we worked with two high schools, an international non-profit, a medical school, and other miscellaneous partners. It is unlike any other project I participated in because each team member/mentor has two sets of mentees, since we do the same leadership workshops twice with both UP Cebu high school and the Science high school. Details about the day-to-days can be found at our blog site: http://projectphilippines.sealnetonline.org/blog/, so I won't dig into the project per se; rather, in the two weeks I spent in Cebu, there was a plethora of emotions I felt that need to be detailed. Concurrently, I admit that a mere two-week time period does not do justice to the extraordinary amount of culture and history these 7,107 islands provide.
Religion has a predominant grasp on people's lives. Magellan, Legazpi, and numerous Spanish missionaries brought Catholicism, which today still has more than 80% of the population following it. Churches, the cross, and other Christian symbols are ubiquitous in the Philippines. Little does the a foreigner know that 500 years ago, the islands mostly consisted of Islamic kingdoms and animistic tribes. Spirituality and God play a big role in determining what ranges from individual choices to government policies. I was fortunate enough to attend two masses during the stay. One was when I went with fellow teammates Joey and Clarisse to Cebu's Redemptorist Church, where over 1500 people from all over the community congregated and listened to a pastor preach. He told one story which I remember clearly even weeks after the mass: a poor family saw him on the street walking, and the first words that came out of their mouths was "Please come eat with us, sir." Even though the family's rations were at a bare minimum, they still opened their arms and wanted to share their food and sense of fulfillment with a passer-by.
Temperature hovered at around 35C during the mass, but the giant doors on the sides were fully opened to allow circulation. It was an indescribable feeling sitting in the midst of 1500 people while holding the hands of others and praying with them, notwithstanding my non-believer status. An afternoon well spent.
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| Mass at the Redemptorist Church |
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| Mom taking her daughter to kiss touch the glass before Santo Niño. |
The second mass I attended was the day I left Cebu at the Basilica Minore del Santo Niño. The Santo Niño, given to the local Rajah by Magellan in 1521 and rediscovered in 1565, is the patron saint of Cebu and even of the entire country. It is common to see taxis with miniature statues of the holy child right by the steering wheel. I stood in queue to see the holy child and waited for well over 30 minutes. Nevertheless, it was so worth the waiting because the amount of spirituality dwarfs any feeling of anxiety or heat, especially after seeing men and women come back in tears from seeing and touching the patron saint. It soon became futile for me to attempt to surmise what the tens of thousands of church goers were thinking. After all, devotion takes a lifetime to grasp.
Much like what the travel brochures say, "it is more Fun in the Philippines." Before I set foot on the islands, I was told by many that Filipinos have near-natural forte in music. Some evidence has convinced me so: Charice, along with thousands of other Filipino entertainers at clubs, on cruise ships, and around the world. But one really has to be BE here to feel the aforementioned musical talent. Quite literally, 70% of the radio stations play those sappy 80s and 90s love songs around the clock, and many taxi drivers sing along to the tunes. In supermarkets, it is not uncommon to hear melodies echoing from the voice chords of multiple shop workers. And the kids, oh gosh, don't get me started on talking about the kids. They are the most amazing. Our high school mentees created a song about healthy living based on the melody of Call Me Maybe and tried to teach it to elementary school kids. Nearly every single one of them, see picture below, know how to sing it after a couple of tries and were so excited that they jumped onto the desks. And lest you don't hear them, they are actually very good. Meanwhile, singing lends itself to dancing, and we saw plenty of it during 1000-person Zumba sessions at the Ayala mall. Also when we were there, it was the annual Intramurals, when different groups in a school play each other in various sports and competition. Each group also had to come up with a group dance, in which every single member participates in choreographing or dancing.
So why are Filipinos so talented? There are multiple theories, but to simply put it after a cursory reading, they are a fun people. And this is in spite of the fact that 1/3 of the population live under the poverty line of $1.7/day. Amazingly, people find time to sing in church choir, dance during feasts, and simply not let the worst conditions get the best of them. Singing and dancing, coupled with the power of religion, enables the common folk to persevere through difficult times.
Need
Our SEALNet project focuses on major health needs including diabetes and hypertension. Two of our main partners are the Cebu Institute of Medicine (CIM) and Gawad Kalinga (GK), a poverty alleviation non-profit that builds homes and communities around Southeast Asia. Diabetes poses great threat to the livelihoods of poor people, as complications such as increased risk of cardiovascular arrest, loss of vision, and limb ulcers regularly destroy livelihoods. Imagine that the male head of family (who happens to be the most common sufferer of diabetes) has to get his foot amputated or becomes blind, then the family would have to go into deep debt just to get a simple surgery.
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| The team at GK community of 86 houses in Maguikay district of Mandaue, Cebu City. Men build their own houses. Their families were relocated to the current site from the slum community due to the opening of a new factory. |
At CIM, we met a group of equally passionate individuals that were studying to become doctors. Since high school students graduate at the age of 16 or 17 in the Philippines, these med students are young compared to their U.S. counterparts. Their campus is small and situated in the middle of the bustling city. Despite the old age of the buildings, everything seemed quite well organized and clean. We attended a couple of lectures about diabetes type II and hypertension here and learned how to take blood pressure, a skill I have yet to master after more than a dozen attempts. Afterwards, we even went to see (and touch!) the cadavers in the dissection room. One thing that shocked me was that despite the large population around, CIM only has 500 enrolled students. Surely, it must be difficult to get into med school, but how can 500-person med school provide enough medical talent for the Visayas region, which has well over 10 million in population? This shortage is even more severe in Luzon, where the bulk of the population lives. Some students confirmed my worry: doctors are constantly short in supply in the country.
The problem is not restricted to the medicine field alone; in a country with 90 million people, the shortage in talent is ubiquitous in engineering, science, business, law, etc. Facing the pressure of life, students often don't have the motivation or ability to pursue post-secondary and post-college education that will enable them to become specialists. Increasingly, I began to feel what the successful Filipino entrepreneur Dado Banatao said to me in a previous conversation: foundational education is the way to alleviate poverty. That is why his organization PhilDev is focusing on building a system that will make it easier for students to go down the path of scientific learning, become specialists, and eventually start businesses themselves.
But the problem isn't resolved even if the society was able to generate a whole lot of specialized talent. In a conversation with Earl, the founder of a thriving incubator in the Philippines, I realized that the problem also lies in the fact that existent talent is not being utilized. An example he gave is that companies like Cisco and Dell only have sales centers in the country and those places are employing highly skilled engineers as salesmen and saleswomen -- what painful stifling of human resources.
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| Cebu Institute of Medicine, which enrolls about 500 students. |
Amid all the poverty and problems, there are plenty of reasons why Filipino citizens should keep their heads up. For one, there is real development in many places and GDP's growing at 6.5%, keeping in mind that this is not due to some outburst of natural resources. Secondly, in a shameless attempt to self-advertise, there are organizations and projects like SEALNet going into the country and fostering positive change. Thirdly and most importantly, hope lies in the nature of the people, and in their faith. I will let pictures do the storytelling.
 |
| Girl picking out lice and fixing her grandma's hair. Brings a smile to everyone's face :) |
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| Jessiah is my new friend who acts all shy in front of me while secretly smiling at me behind my back. |
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| Big guy's quite a boss. He just loves to take everything others own. |
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| Scouts at Sci-Hi with their dashing neckerchiefs. Right before a flag ceremony permeated with patriotism. |
Mentoring
To answer a question posed earlier, I actually noticed changes to my leadership style after these two weeks of mentoring. Having taken up the roles of chapter founder, project leader, and more recently, chairman of the board, I am used to being at the forefront of everything. In fact, sometimes I feel a strong need to seize the spotlight in order to promote the organization.
Mentoring can't be more different. Mentoring is about being in the background and observing people's behaviors, attitudes, and interactions. It's about noticing changes and constantly thinking about ways to make improvements. And that was exactly what I did. In the middle of all the goofiness I naturally exuded, I observed, noticed, and cared. Even though things were not within my control, it was a great feeling chatting with the project leaders at night and with team members during the day. The entire process makes me more patient, a skill I have desperately tried to hone over the years.
I will soon step onto the flight back to China and then the U.S. These 7,107 islands have given me a lot to think about and regurgitate at latter dates, but for now I will remember one thing: It is more fun in the Philippines.
p.s. What's NOT healthy? Here is an example:
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| My last meal before leaving Cebu at Jollibee. Yep, I finished both plates :/ |
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