Just watch our currency plumb new depths with each day of fresh scandal and coup rumors, and you will be depressed. Yesterday the peso slid to 55.60 before closing at 55.45 to the dollar. On the other hand, the Thai baht – at par with our peso only six years ago – was trading at a healthy 41.30 to the greenback. How did we mess up so badly, so rapidly?
I know a number of people who actually packed up after the May 1 riots and relocated with their spouses and children, mostly to Canada, others to the United States and New Zealand.
Fortunately, there are people who refuse to be bogged down by pessimism and disappointment. There’s former President Cory Aquino, for example, with her "People Power People" project. If we do less yakking and whining and refuse to give in to despair, the nation will be a better place.
And often, like 27-year-old Japanese physician Tetsu Nakamura, their work transcends politics, religion or race. Nakamura, a native of Fukuoka, Japan, went to Afghanistan in 1984. He has since devoted his life to fighting leprosy and other contagious diseases that ravage people in refugee camps and isolated villages.
The repressive Taliban regime did not discourage Nakamura and the US attack following 9-11 did not prompt him to return to his native land. Instead he raised $3 million from the international community to provide wheat and cooking oil for the refugees who streamed out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan, where he had set up a 150-bed hospital in the city of Peshawar.
These days he is busy teaching people how to find water and grow crops amid an ongoing drought. Nakamura will receive the Magsaysay award for peace and international understanding.
Many years after the war, Toyama organized Japanese volunteer missions to teach Chinese how to grow crops in barren land. Now 97 years old, Toyama and his Project Green Hope have transformed over 10,000 acres of Inner Mongolia into an oasis. The project, he said, is his "green atonement" for Japan’s past sins and "testimony of our desire to live in peace and harmony."
Toyama’s formula for long life is just as inspiring: "Life doesn’t need to rest. To me, I just work from morning to night. It’s time to rest after death."
Bucking cultural mores and economic practices, Sinha has spent the past two decades putting indentured children back to school. She set up a foundation in 1981, which gained support from 1,600 teachers and 8,000 youth volunteers. Their target: to withdraw from work 80,000 children in 500 villages and put them in school. Since then thousands of child workers have returned to school, with many of the adolescent girls consequently avoiding arranged marriages.
Sinha, 53, is the Magsaysay awardee for community leadership.
Another woman, the awardee for public service, also battled cultural constraints. Gynecologist Gao Yaojie emerged from retirement after diagnosing her first AIDS patient in 1996. Gao then set out to warn her country about the deadly disease. If you remember how Beijing tried to keep the SARS outbreak secret, you will understand what a tough battle Gao faced. She was initially reviled, laughed at and considered eccentric. Eventually, government officials took notice and tried to stop her from spreading her warning across China.
Gao persisted. Now 76, she has the pleasure of seeing how attitudes toward the AIDS threat have changed in her country.
By the time Indonesia let go of East Timor, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese had died at the hands of the repressive regime. When the East Timorese voted for independence, militias went on a rampage of murder and destruction. Among those destroyed were Lopes’ house and the headquarters of his foundation.
A Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation was set up last year, to help the East Timorese come to terms with their past and improve their future. Lopes was the unanimous choice to head the commission. Just 36, he is the Magsaysay awardee for emergent leadership.