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Saturday, December 03, 2005
'Why we want to graduate here'
THIS is the unofficial XU story.
The readers might ask why -- when we could write about how Bamboo or the Ateneo de Manila Blue Eagles came to play music and shoot hoops at the XU gym this week -- we would choose to write such a simple story about philanthropy and a story that has been told so many times in the past.
Well, partly because it's true and we are part of it and we are being paid to do it, but also because we have spent four years in this university and have been eyewitnesses to a remarkable confrontation between XU and the world outside the school.
We spent hours arguing over whether to use cheap emotionalism and corny cliché' to get our message and the emotion across -- or not.
This is the story from our twenty-year-old perspectives -- minus the biased deductions and the romance-novel garbage.
So much has been said about the goodness of Xavier. We know it. You know it. The students know it.
The guy selling ginanggang beside Copylandia-Xavier knows it. "Be men and women for others" -- they make sure that mission statement is engraved into our brains so deeply that we even start chanting it in our sleep.
At some point in our Journalism class one of our classmates pointed out, "Have we been men and women for others?"
This sparked a steamy debate over whether XU students have dared the seas of anonymity and been good people in secret -- without the lure of recognition and threat of bad grades -- and concretized the mission on their own time. And so, began a mad scramble for XU philanthropic organizations that would save our souls and absolve us from guilt.
1. International Linkages
A tribal community in Bukidnon named Kagahuman is tucked away on top of a mountain without electricity or telephones or a legitimate bathroom.
It's an eight-hour climb from Malitbog, Bukidnon with a weather that swings from extremes of blazing sunshine or pounding rain. Paved roads are expected on the same year that pigs begin to fly.
The Join Together Society (JTS) -- an international organization based in Korea that aims to eradicate hunger and illiteracy and does relief, rehabilitation, and development work on the side -- brought Kagahuman and Xavier University together through Development Communication department chairperson and JTS volunteer Estrella Borja.
The students -- particularly Development Communication students -- have gone up and down Kagahuman a number of times to help transport health and education materials, and to organize intercultural dialogues between the students and the residents of Kagahuman.
The partnership has yielded a two-room school building with toilets, potable water system, and two-room cottage for the teachers, and an ongoing support for production pursuits. Kagahuman has also given the students a revolutionized perspective about poverty and culture, about hiking up and down rugged terrain in designer clothes, and about eating crawling creatures of the six-legged kind (raw).
The students recently participated in the ongoing construction of a four-room school building in Upper Tigaason, Talakag, Bukidnon.
(XU Dev Com students Paula Borja, Job Wahiman, Vanessa Gorra, Rod de Asis, Paiko Zapanta, Mia Belen, Rechelle Tolinero, Wella Hong, Peter Capaque, Marbe Ralozo and Penny Cunanan wrote this two-part article)
(December 3, 2005 issue)
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