A Filipino Village for Our Times
The Real good Presidents of D3830, RY 2008-2009
(Printed in the D3830 Handover Special Supplement and the Philippine Daily Inquirer)
June 5, 2008

PP Raffy Aquino, RC Makati Bel-Air
District Legal Counsel, RY 2008-2009

The Filipino village lies at the foundation of Philippine society. History and the anthropological evidence remind us that the village has ever been the wellspring of the Filipino’s strength and his country’s resiliency.

An enduring marvel of social engineering, the village has provided generations of Filipinos a framework for sustaining meaningful social relationships and effective social action. Filipino villagers pooled resources and helped each other, nurtured and raised each other’s children, gathered and produced food together, and tended the forests and the rivers and farmlands with an eye to conserving them not for any one person or family but for the entire community and its future. Even now, where Filipinos are found in almost every part of this planet, they seek solace from other Filipinos, preferably those from the same village in the old country.

The spirit of the Filipino village is alive and well in Rotary International District 3830, among the ranks of this year’s “Real Good” Presidents. It reposes in their hearts, and it comes alive, throbbing and pulsating, as they gather in fellowship and as they take their places in the frontlines of Rotary service.

As “fellow villagers”, they are bonded at the deepest levels, bound to each other with ties that will last lifetimes. Living out the village ethic of mutual help and cooperation, they share resources and exchange ideas, encourage and cheer each other on, and seek each other’s company wherever and whenever Rotarians assemble. Certainly, each President’s achievements shall be like village children, raised by everyone and belonging to all!

Real Good Presidents Chacha Camacho and Tony Ilagan enthuse about their classmates all caring and looking out for each other, with everyone “cooperating, contributing and taking part.” On the other hand, President Lenny Carillo strides with confidence borne of the “advance planning, camaraderie and rapport developed among the PEs as early as last year” while President Edna Gans remarks with wonder that even though her classmates are leaders in their own fields, they have shown “electrifying passion” as a collective, “one in VISION and in ACTION.”

But perhaps the mot powerful articulation of the village impulse now animating the district leadership was this quiet passage in the speech of DG Boyet Limon as he addressed his Real Good Presidents at their PETS last March: “We are in this together. We are a family. No one of us, not a single one of us, gets left behind. We sink or we sail, we fall or we fly, but we will do so together. I will be there for you when you are tired. And when you feel drained of energy or ideas… I will be with you every step of the way. However, as you celebrate the many victories you are sure to win along the way, I shall of course expect to be invited, to eat your food, to drink your wine, to sing your songs, and to dream along with you.”

This ethic of mutual support and common action – forged in Filipino villages across these islands and now happily residing in RI District 3830 – promises to fire the Real Good Presidents’ united thrust toward child health and environmental protection. Indeed, it was precisely in nurturing the young and in tending the environment that the old Filipino villagers showed the way.