Rising above ourselves

The challenges to make our community progress into people-centered communities require us to commit ourselves far beyond our common imagination. It requires us to rise above ourselves and secure for our posterity the stability, soundness and prosperity for our children and their children too. Down the road towards progress and development require us to commit ourselves to loftier ideals and noble practices that empower people to also move the cogs of progressive commitment and the advancement of communities more apparent.


Many communities are not as progressive as other communities however, much more; they have potential to succeed at every front. It only lacks the courageous spirit to chart their future together into a brighter opportunity for those living in those communities. Some communities are even blighted by poverty and some indifference and xenophobia. Some even are hampered due to discrimination by virtue of race, gender, sexual orientation, culture and education. Some even are being discriminated upon because they are old or too young to assume responsibilities. In this context, the prevalent practice is to leave important decisions to the old guards and allow the young cubs to learn the winding road of bureaucratic and institutional protocol, leaving them with lesser responsibilities. When we do this, we not only discriminate but inadvertently teaching them not to have their own decision and mind but depend on someone else’s. This is not how we raise the future.


Empowering others is such a sacrificial and unselfish commitment to the community. In this context, almost all of those who are into positive change and community involvement receive cold responses and many programs and projects are doomed to fail or has failed because people do not understand what “empowerment” means in their collective role. Many in our communities talk about empowering people, change, empowerment, hope, future, and more technical terms but when asked to digest it for the common man or simply define it in rural or context-specific definitions, no one can easily find what these words mean. It may be daunting as I have said but it can be done. Change and empowerment can happen unless we do not want them to happen so frequently in our communities. These, however, are not grandiose comparatively speaking. Many community changes are happening everyday and these, when appropriately documented and highlighted can also be so encompassing that it empowers people. Take for instance in basic education, when a teacher teaches a child to write for the first time, alphabets, numbers and their names, and they get it correctly, change happen. Everytime a woman brings her newborn child to the health centers for a dose of immunization, change in cultural habits happen. Everytime a farmer shifted to new agricultural technologies or adopt bio-organic methodologies in doing agriculture, change happen. These are vignettes of change that can be a powerful tool to liberate communities from poverty, we just do not noticed it because it is so fragmented, small-scale and seemingly, unnoticed because we do not know these people, in this kind of change, it is faceless yet borderless since it happens everywhere.


By doing this, we have to firmly believe that we can make change happen in manifested fashion. We have to rise above ourselves to make a difference in the lives of those around us. We build on strong communities because we believe in others and how they can also believe on those around them. In this, we have to remain committed and steadfast in our commitment to make change happen for good. When we do, we give ourselves the much needed injection to recuperate from an illness that saps our energy from within. This nation has always been called “sickman” among many countries in Asia and the world and we owe it to ourselves to aid in its transformation. It is not because we wanted to transform societies to be more globalized but because we wanted a better future for ourselves, our neighbours and friends. We have had many great leaders who made this country proud and we have great new ones with determination, pedigree, educationally-adept of the world and are indeed, globalized in their perspective of how things are in our communities, and we have to practice what we say in earnest. We have to put our trust on our nation first, to our communities and ourselves vice versa. It has to be in an orderly fashioning of our commitments that will generate the much needed stamina for this nation to once again, rise above all others and reclaim its place in the world. After all, we only have nothing but one Republic we call the Philippines.