One day, two or three years ago, a friend in physical rehab work here in Palawan asked me to come along to visit a patient, a ten year old boy with cerebral palsy. Somehow while we were in the house, my friend discovered a baby, hidden away in a back room under a big screen tent meant to keep flies off the food on the table.  The baby was a little girl, so wizened and malnourished that she looked like a mummy.  The older brother of the patient we had come to see was the father of this child, and the mother was a student of Palawan State University.  She had given birth inside her boarding house. “Oh no”, I thought – “another boarding house delivery.”   Okay – better than a boarding house abortion. Part of me wanted to snatch this little girl and take her home and try to nurse her back to health – but several friends reminded me that kidnapping was illegal!

I have been teaching in Palawan State University since 2000. I teach in the Teachers College and this of course is supposed to have a great ripple effect – whatever my students might absorb from me, whether knowledge or skills or attitudes, they will later pass on to their own students.  (Yikes!  This really gives the teacher the responsibility to get it right!  May future generations forgive my transgressions!). This also means that I have dealt with so many unintended pregnancies, so many scared, unprepared single mothers.  And on so many occasions I have witnessed this be the end of education, the end of hope for a better future. The babies are born into poverty and there is no money to feed them adequately or to take care of them when they are ill.  The mothers are forced to take dead end jobs, clerking in little shops or selling fish in the market.

So I talk a lot about reproductive health to my students, talk about staying healthy, and being empowered and in control.  And I encourage students to talk back, challenge and contradict, and keep trying hard to understand what is going on in their lives and their minds.

At the same time I have always been a sucker for hungry kids – I just find it so satisfying to know that good food has gone into wasted little bodies.  Once, more than 25 years ago I had a sabbatical from Ateneo, the university in Quezon City where I was working at the time. I signed on with a Maryknoll-based NGO in Kaingin Two, a small community of “informal settlers” down behind the waterworks in Balara, an area behind the University of the Philippines, Diliman.  I did informal nutrition work – but mostly I brought sick kids to the hospital and helped them avail of medical aid or went to their wakes.  I had nightmares for days whenever a child died.  Ami, my youngest child, was about three at the time, and I would bring her outgrown clothes and give them to five or six year olds in Kaingin.  And I would watch Ami’s progress and that of these kids – some kids couldn’t walk at two, weren’t talking at 3.  Food makes so much difference!

Twenty-five years later, Ami finished a Masters in Public Health at Columbia University.  She was by then living in New York with her husband Marcus, who was teaching in a middle school.  Ami was working for a consultancy firm, which consulted for nonprofits, but I knew that she wanted much closer contact with basic, on the ground, NGO work.  Marcus liked his teaching job but was also very opened to other career possibilities.

So I made a totally audacious proposal – that the three of us set up an NGO in Palawan, where I live, and work on reproductive health education and ensuring safe and healthy, planned, pregnancies, and good nutrition for babies and small children.  Then I waited – half expecting Ami to email and ask if I was on some new hallucinogen she didn’t know about!

That evening – early morning in New York – she called, all excited.  They wanted to come!  I was amazed and of course delighted.

And this was step one in our start-up.  Ami put her powerhouse friends in New York to work, setting up the board of Roots of Health there and fulfilling all the legal requirements there. I began hanging around with the nurses and midwives of PSU, making connections and learning what I could here.  Marcus started learning more about constructing web sites.  And he did more reading in environmental issues, a long time interest of his, and sustainable, organic farming.

And we’ve come a long way since then! 🙂