Anyone fortunate enough to be acquainted with Bea would immediately sense the passion and certainty that radiate from her every word and gesture whenever she speaks about her children and her cause. Here, in Dive Solana, surrounded by the locally made furniture and décor she used to decorate the entire resort, one can see the beauty that she sees in our local arts and crafts.
She stops in mid-sentence to point out the streak of fiery orange over the sea, "Isn’t that just gorgeous?" she says, just as the lights of Dive Solana turn on over our heads. "I think my traveling made me appreciate our country even more," she says. "I just want to scream," and with this, she raises her hands to the sky, "we have the best country!"
Her prestigious family name aside, Bea is known nowadays as a zealous crusader for the Philippines’ arts and culture. She keeps on apologizing for being a bore about it, but this has been her path and passion since she came back home four years ago from Madrid, after living for most of her life in London and in Spain.
When she arrived in Manila, she met Ino Manalo, now the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. He got her started on her journeys throughout the Philippines where she finally found her calling. "It was seeing my country through the arts and through their creative industries that I said, ‘What is it that we’re looking for outside our country that we don’t have here’?" she says empathically. "I had a calling in that I met so many Filipinos who were not aware of the beauty and what this country had to offer."
Dubbed as "Ms. Philippines" by her sisters because of her drive to promote the arts, Bea wanted to prove that the arts can produce jobs.
"I want to fight for my country," she continues, thumping the table for emphasis. "I know what is here. I believe in my country, and you can’t find anything more beautiful than here. So how can we get this across to others and share this idea?"
Her current project is the province of Bohol, with Ino Manalo and the Ayala Foundation, in cooperation with the Catholic Church, the government and private sector. "Our objective in Bohol is to promote cultural tourism as a means to foster sustainable development especially among the poorest sectors of society in the province," she explains.
Not only that, she is now using her passion for scuba diving for her cause. With her boyfriend, Joel Uichico, friends Marissa Floirendo, Gutsy Tuason and Nonoy Tan, she has been training dive guides to service the needs and requirements of underwater photographers, an unexplored niche market for increasing scuba diving tourism in the country.
Listening to her, I cannot help but remember Joseph Campbell’s more famous sayings about bliss. "If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be."
Bea’s is a life lived in bliss, as evident in her joy in all that she does. Although she may seem to be fighting for a lost cause "because the arts are still underappreciated in our country" one should not give up hope, because Bea is the kind who will go out fighting.