Howard Dee leads 2018 Ramon Magsaysay awardees

MANILA, Philippines — The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation announced yesterday its six awardees who have made significant contributions to their communities and helped change the lives of the less fortunate. 

Senen Bacani, chairman of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, said this year’s awardees were chosen based on their inspiring vision, creativity and leadership in addressing the problems in their own societies. 

“They are the Asia’s heroes of hope,” Bacani said. 

One of the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Awardees is former Philippine ambassador to The Holy See and Malta Howard Dee, who was recognized for his heroic service to the Filipino people. 

Dee served as a secretary-adviser on Indigenous Peoples’ Affairs during the administration of former president and now Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. 

He also served as the chairman of the government’s peace panel negotiations with communist rebels and was a member of the Social Reform Council during the time of former president Fidel Ramos. 

Dee also joined in the government’s peace panel for the Bangsamoro Basic Law in 2015. 

He will be conferred the award on Aug. 31 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila along with other winners, including Cambodian Youk Chhang who was recognized for preserving genocide documents in Cambodia “to serve the aim of judicial redress, national reconciliation and collective healing.” 

East Timor’s Maria de Lourdes Martins Cruz was recognized for uplifting the less fortunate people in the community and her courageous pursuit of social justice and peace. 

Also, the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation recognizes Vietnamese Vo Thi Hoang Yen, who contracted polio, “for her dauntless spirit and prodigious energy in rising above her condition.”  

Yen is the founder and director of the Disability Research and Capacity Development in Vietnam. 

Indian national Bharat Vatwani, a founder of Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation, is recognized for “his tremendous courage and healing compassion in embracing India’s mentally afflicted destitute.”

Vatwani started caring for mentally challenged individuals in India when he and his wife first rescued a man drinking water from a street canal. 

Also from India, Sonam Wangchuk was named 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee because of “his uniquely systematic, collaborative and community-driven reform of learning systems in remote northern India.” 

Wangchuk founded the Student’s Education and Cultural Movement of Ladakh and started teaching Ladakhi students, who failed in the entrance exams to government-run schools. 

In a Skype interview with reporters, Cambodia’s Chhang and Vietnam’s Hoang Yen said they are very humbled by and grateful for the recognition given to them. 

The Ramon Magsaysay Award, one of Asia’s highest honors, was established in 1957 in memory of the late Philippine president Ramon Magsaysay.