Ben Abadiano
In a great twist of fate/blessing, and just when I needed someone to talk to, I bumped into Ben Abadiano at the Podium a week ago. Ben is a Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Emergent Leadership and a former Jesuit. We had a great conversation. I’m just amazed at what this guy has done for the poor and the Indigenous People of this country. Before entering the Jesuits, he had a foundation for the Mangyans of Mindoro. After he left the Jesuits, Ambassador Howard Dee got him to work for Assisi Foundation. Ben is now its President.
He mentioned having traveled to Japan, India, around the States, and even to the Pentagon! Next year, he’s going on a Roadshow around Europe with three other Magsaysay Awardees from the philippines: former President Corazon Aquino, former Director of the Phil. Center for Investigative Journalism (and now Fellow of Cornell University) Sheila Coronel, and Supreme Court Justice Hilario Davide. Not a bad company at all!
I went back to work after that dinner conversation inspired and with newfound energy–not necessarily for my own work, but for the future and for the hope that one day, I will find my own place in the sun.
In the meantime, I keep walking.
Here’s something about Ben from the Ramon Magsaysay Awards Website…
The 2004 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership
CITATION for Benjamin Abadiano
Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies
31 August 2004, Manila, PhilippinesGiven the clamor of national politics in the Philippines and the dominant presence of Manila in the nation’s consciousness, it is easy to lose sight of the country’s great size and diversity. But in the highlands across the Philippine archipelago live several dozen groups of indigenous peoples whose ways of life stand in contrast to those of the lowland and urban majority. Although theirs is not wholly a world apart, it is a world still on the margins of the country’s major political, economic, and cultural systems. As a young man, Benjamin Abadiano discovered this world and became part of it.
Born in 1963, Abadiano was raised by his grandparents and educated at Xavier University in Mindanao. A mentor there introduced him to the country’s indigenous peoples. During a brief exposure among the Manobo in Bukidnon, he found himself drawn to the spartan simplicity of upland life. In 1988, at age twenty-five, he wandered into Paitan, Mindoro Oriental, where the Servants of the Holy Spirit missionary sisters worked among the Mangyan. Abadiano volunteered to help and stayed on for nine years.
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