local HEROES
IRWIN CRUZ IRWIN CRUZ TALKS TO THREE PEOPLE WHO ARE MAKING A PEOPLE WHO ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE TO ALL OUR LIVES
★Carlos Celdran
Street performer and defender of Manila’s history and Filipino pride
Don’t call Carlos Celdran a tour guide because he isn’t. He may sound like one, he may look like one. And his Sunday morning journeys through Intramuros might seem run-of-the-mill conventional tours. But 35-year-old Celdran is a performer. His tour is a self-written open-air opus and his stage is Manila’s treasured historic heart.
A combination of accident, necessity, an obsession with Manila and a longing to make a difference, resulted in Celdran’s unusual choice of career. He’s a painter by training and studied at Rhode Island School of Design in the US. There he was given free rein with his art and learnt to use different media as canvas for his ideas. Several years later, this is reflected in his tour. “[Use of] theater, picture, music and the spoken word, are an outcome of my training,” he explains.
For two years, he was a head of the Heritage Conservation Society, an organization dedicated to the preservation of historic buildings and houses. He left after it was re-structured, but continued to run the educational tours it had been giving, adding spice along the way to make them more entertaining. He took inspiration from New York City’s Blue Man Group, with whom he interned. “Man, these guys have a great racket,” he thought. “They have this little silly show and tourists flock to see them.” He saw that there was the potential for a similarly quirky attraction in Manila.
Celdran’s “plays” are firmly founded in historical research. He spent countless hours in the libraries of the Conservation Society and the Lopez Museum, and went through the database of the University of Wisconsin. But above all, his piece was fed by a long-standing obsession with the city itself. While other children were into anime and Transformers, Celdran read about Intramuros.
Since 2001, travelers from Mandaluyong to Manhattan have come to see Celdran give his cultural spiel. On regular days of the year, he leads a group amble through Fort Santiago, the San Agustin Church Museum and Casa Manila. Thanks to word of mouth and his blog, his crowd has swollen from five when he started to 50 at present. But Celdran asserts that his tour is more for Filipinos than foreigners. As his slogan says, he tries to “change the way you look at Manila.” This makes it more than just a tour; it is a cause.
“Right now, we are leaving the country in droves because we think there is no future here. But the Philippines has so much hope (and promise). It is a psychological thing that we think we are a basket case. We’ve got to get over that.
“I try to change people’s opinions, one person at a time,” he adds. “It is an individual responsibility. You can blame the government or the institutions, but in the end it is us. There is a sort of inner shame in being a Filipino. I don’t know why it happened,” he adds.
Celdran sees that building civic pride should come from education. “Teaching Filipinos about their culture will make us understand who we are. When we understand who we are, the self-confidence will come in, and with confidence comes productivity,” he says.
And it is up to us to create this identity; if not others will. “Because of this lack of identity, what the world knows about the Filipino identity is left up to market forces. The world understands us through CNN, BBC and the New York Times and usually think of us as violent, dirty and poor,” he says.
But he sees a ray of hope in the desire to change the status quo. “There’s a hunger in the Philippines. For a better identity. For a source of pride.
Filipinos are sick and tired of being torn down.”
He feels this desire most strongly among the young. Why? “Because martial law killed the spirit of an entire generation before us,” he says. “We are the first generation to come of age without that burden. If we say we can do anything, we really can.”
And Celdran is living up to this challenge with his tours, as humble and as funny they may be. Every performance is a jab against of all those years of put-me-downs. In taking pride in our heritage and our home, we take pride in who are.
In nation-building, every citizen is a member of the cast and each has a role to play. No part is too small, even if it comes as a crazy two-hour walk back to Manila’s yesteryear.
★GANG BADOY
Co-founder RockEd Philippines
Gang Badoy is a very busy woman. As one of the original convenors of RockEd Philippines, she leads a group of mostly young volunteers, committed to several urgent issues in our society. The group includes top talent from today’s music, visual and literary scenes. And and as the name suggests, RockEd is best known for its concerts, where the musicians volunteer their voices for an evening fashioned around a cause.
The concerts, however, are just one of RockEd’s many projects. So far, it has done alternative classes in budgeting, basic hygiene and gender sensitivity. It runs a show on Manila’s NU107 on Sunday evenings and discusses topics ranging from human rights to voter education. It has tree planting programs as well as seminars on first-aid (in association with the Red Cross), entrepreneurship, archeology and teacher training. At the time of writing, the group just concluded its Rock the Rehas documentary (rehas means bars in Filipino), which brings to light the plight of the country’s prisoners.
Work doesn’t stop when the last song is sung. Underneath the glam-rock sheen, this group is founded on a bedrock of social consciousness, critical thinking and volunteerism.
The benchmark for RockEd’s work has been the eight Millennium Development Goals set by the UN for all countries at the turn of the century. It is an agreed set of numerical goals for basic issues such as education, health and the environment. But the figures for the Philippines show that it is lagging.
With much work to be done, the group aims to engage youth to roll up their sleeves and act. “I am proud of this generation,” Badoy says. “They have so much initiative. They empower themselves.” These are the people RockEd is trying to reach.
In the three years since its conception, RockEd has proven effective in its mission. It’s grown from a circle of five friends living in Metro Manila to a force of 50,000 spread from Luzon to Mindanao. Part of the allure comes from the group’s non-partisan, creed-free character, which means that it is able to bypass the politics that often shipwreck other well-intentioned projects. Badoy herself was led into RockEd as an answer to her desire to do public service.
As the daughter of a retired Sandiganbayan justice, she was groomed to become a lawyer, but admits to not being interested in politics. Instead, she was interested in the arts, and in RockEd, she found her calling.
“The youth today is searching for a reality it can trust. They are hungry for answers. And they have to be interesting.” RockEd turned to music to address this challenge. The result was entertainment-come-participation.
“Music is something that we are great at, and you have to use something people are really proud of,” says Badoy. Musicians are effective in delivering the message and in reaching a scrutinizing audience.
Skeptics have asked if attending concerts such RockEd or LiveAid can actually make a difference. After all, people might think they have done their part as soon as they leave the stadium. “But that is not the point,” Badoy insists. Though she acknowledges that the intensity of participation among the volunteers varies, RockEd’s primary goal is reaching the youth, getting them interested, and telling them of the possibilities. RockEd encourages participants to develop projects in their own communities, if possible at zero cost. So it mentors and facilitates, sending people to help and serving as a forum for ideas. Badoy cites one group of Badjao students who wrote to her about a rally and clean-up of their school they staged. It may be a small contribution, but this is just one manifestation of civic activism.
Watch out for 2007 Rock the Riles concerts in the first half of December at select LRT and MRT stations in Manila.
Visit www.rockedphilippines.org.
★ILLAC DIAZ
Social entrepreneur and founder of MyShelter Foundation
You may have seen him on TV or on the pages of your favorite glossies or fashion catalogue. But commercial model Illac Diaz has also proved himself to be a poster boy for social entrepreneurship. This eloquent, MIT graduate has shown that, famous or not, everyone has to do their part in making a change.
There is a long list of causes for our country’s problems. But the 34-year-old Diaz chose to tackle shelter in the form of transient housing for seafarers, earthbag schools and low-cost residences made from indigenous materials. For him, this basic need must be addressed first because, he says, “there must be a place to gather.”
He sees the problems of poverty as long-term, and there needs to be a permanent structure to roof and to anchor the efforts to change. Above all, a good living environment motivates communities to learn better, work better and feel better about themselves.
One of his foundation’s most iconic projects is the construction of conical sandbag houses located in Escalante, Negros Occidental and the school houses in Surigao del Norte. Architectural needs in rural areas are complex and expensive because of the sheer number of people still living in the countryside and the high cost of building. According to Diaz, shipping the materials can stretch the budget by as much as 250 per cent. So MyShelter Foundation makes use of indigenous supplies and adobe and soil technologies for low-cost housing. Using cheaper local materials takes the contractors out of the equation and involves the local community, who receive payment. Because money does not leave the community, “cash flow is enriched and creates a trickle-down effect.” Money is then used to finance entrepreneurial activity and generates more wealth. The same concept was employed for the adobe schools built in Surigao in northern Mindanao.
Another successful project is Pier One, a seafarer’s center located in Real and Solana streets in Intramuros. Established in 2001, the 240-room, 600-bed housing complex was built to put roofs over transients looking for jobs in Manila. Coming to the capital with their dreams in their pockets, most are forced to live in cheap, unhealthy living quarters as they wait for their break. Pier One has tried to go beyond low-cost housing and address the issue of livelihood as well. Employers looking for people to hire come to the center and post ‘Help Wanted’ ads on the bulletin boards. There is also an internet area to surf for jobs. In effect, the center functions as a clearing house for those who seek and offer jobs alike, a physical venue where needs are met. Diaz asserts that to date, some 100,000 people have benefited from this “clustering principle;” he is considering the idea of creating centers for construction workers and salespeople as well.
The success of Pier One has also provided direction for an upcoming project, Centro Migrante. Diaz plans to move away from shared living quarters to create private micro-rooms where transient tenants can have a more private space. The center’s design goes further by using pre-fab construction materials and eco-friendly solutions. He plans to roll out one thousand bedspaces by next year.
Diaz says he learnt two great lessons from the Pier One experience. Firstly, he discovered that it proved social enterprise creates more potential than charity-based projects. They might have a high cash-burn rate, but they can terminate as soon as the money dries up. Social entrepreneurship overcomes the problem of funding, so not having money can no longer be an excuse not to act. Furthermore, it helps people like him sharpen their focus to sustainability, enabling them to come up with better project designs.
His second lesson was that corporate social responsibility programs (CSR) have done a lot to improve the lives of the marginalized, becoming important contributors in small sustainable development projects, though evolution is necessary.
As Diaz finishes his postgraduate program at Harvard University, his projects are garnering him more recognition, perhaps even more than he had as a model.
“I understood that [with the shelter work], recognition has a shelf life. People would give you one shot once you they let you in the door and I intended to make it count. I got myself educated and used this knowledge to make projects that mattered. Everyone has a civic duty to make the Philippines a better place in which to live. Some answer it; others don’t. But that doesn’t change our fundamental obligation.”
Earthbag Shelter is in Escalante City, north of Bacolod. The Earth Schools are in Barangay Day-Asan in Surigao City via Butuan. And the dormitories are in Intramuros (Real street) and Ermita in the Manila area.
CentroMigrante is still in the planning.
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