Women in Bangladesh have benefited little from the modernizing influences that during the past three decades have changed the lives of millions of Muslim women elsewhere. Instead, during this same period the veiling, ankle-length burkha has become increasingly a mark of status among village women in Bangladesh.

This cumbersome, cloth-shielding of women symbolizes their restricted role and denial of opportunities in the society. In the villages, where about 90 percent of Bangladesh’s more than 80 million people live in one of the world’s most densely populated lands, women are segregated from work in the rice fields and markets and confined to tasks within the home compound. As a result of their “invisibility” and the difficulty researchers had in penetrating the seclusion of purdah, the agricultural work women were doing—seed preservation and storage, rice and other food processing, vegetable and fruit growing, poultry raising and livestock care—remained obscure. Consequently national planning for development has focused primarily upon men, even to the point of giving men those aspects of women’s work that is seen as productive of extra income. Family planning is likewise handicapped by the seclusion of rural women and their limited participation in family decision-making.

TAHRUNNESA ABDULLAH, born in 1937 in Jessore, in the portion of India that became Bangladesh, studied social work. At the age of 23 she began organizing a crippled children’s center. Later, after two years as a district health education officer, she became an instructor at the now Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development in Comilla, working with women on adult literacy, nutrition and creation of cooperatives to promote income generating programs based on women’s subsistence level agricultural activities. In 1974 she was appointed Joint Director of the government’s Integrated Rural Development Program where her special concern has been creation of women’s cooperatives and family planning.

By her modesty and sincerity Mrs. ABDULLAH won the confidence of rural women so long semi-isolated. She and associates gathered the facts and gained the understanding essential to designing a sound program, and identified farmers’ wives who were potential leaders and enlisted them in training classes. Necessarily, these were courageous women, ready to endure public, usually male, scorn in their villages in order to take the first small steps toward improving their families’ livelihood.

From such modest beginnings, 180 rural women’s cooperative societies now are functioning in 19 thanas, one in every district, with nearly 5,000 shareholding members. Their small industries are all based on work customarily done by women and geared to utilizing local resources. The objective is to expand their activities so as to produce marketable surpluses.

In leading the rural women of Bangladesh to a new and more effective role in their society, Mrs. ABDULLAH is challenging entrenched traditional customs. Through her dedication, patience and creativity she is mobilizing these Muslim women, themselves, to sever the bonds that must be removed for national village progress, and has herself become a respected voice in national councils.

In electing TAHRUNNESA AHMED ABDULLAH to receive the 1978 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the Board of Trustees recognizes her leading rural Bangladeshi Muslim women from the constraints of purdah toward more equal citizenship and fuller family responsibility.

No language can describe the gratitude that I want to express for honoring me with such a great Award. I want to thank the Board of Trustees and the people of the Philippines on behalf of myself, my family, my people, especially the women and the Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, for this unique honor.

On this important evening in my life, I recall the late President Ramon Magsaysay, who endeared himself to the people of the Philippines and the world by his devoted and sincere service to the cause of his fellowmen. I also remember Mr. Akhter Hameed Khan, under whose able guidance I started working with the most underprivileged of people anywhere—the rural women of Bangladesh; he was a Magsaysay Awardee in 1963. I also remember my colleagues and friends in and outside the government in my country, who always actively supported my program. Last but not least, I remember my sisters in rural Bangladesh who, with their scanty resources, are determined to bridge the gap of centuries in years in bringing a change in their lives.

I believe development cannot have its full impact unless the cause of women is woven into the overall cause of community progress. Development is total or it is ineffective. Women’s participation in development is a goal in its own right. I think by giving me the Award you have really honored the simple, hardworking and underprivileged women, who live and die unnoticed, unheard of in the countless villages of my country and in many other Asian, Latin American and African states. Though almost half the population of any country, they are trampled on, pushed around and looked down upon as a result of centuries of neglect, superstition and segregation.

Most of the rural women in Bangladesh feel bound by village standards of purdah. In effect women are physically confined to their households. They perform much of their work, which tends to be sex-specific, within the shelter of their courtyards. The result is that women have access to the world outside purdah only through intermediaries—young children, fathers, brothers and grown sons.

We, the few privileged people living in the cities, have no concept of their hardship and limitations. Obedience, self-sacrifice and submission are the social strategies women use to provide themselves some guarantee of security and survival.

It has been my privilege to get to know them through rural women’s cooperatives which are based on the recognition that rural women are integrated in the household and rural economy of Bangladesh. Because they are sexually segregated in their work and in social functions, separate cooperatives for women are considered necessary at this point to enable them to have direct access to supervised credit, inputs, modern knowledge and leadership training. Women must be enabled to make their own creative contribution. The integration of rural women in the social, economic and political life of the community will enhance women’s personal dignity and lead them toward more equal citizenship and fuller family responsibility.

Through my humble work I have just touched the fringe of the immense problem that lies ahead in ameliorating the condition of rural women in Bangladesh.

I am sure your recognition of this work will encourage the dedicated sincere people who have been and will be working to bring about improvement in the condition of underprivileged women all over the world, to enable them to stand beside their fathers, brothers and sons with dignity, honor and in equal usefulness.

I conclude with my grateful thanks once again to the members of the Board of Trustees and the people of the Philippines.

While the years may dim recall of recent events, we all carry through life recollections of our earliest learning. Rare is the individual not conditioned in mature decision by an indelible childhood incident, remark by an elder or remembered phrase of advice. On the open, absorptive child’s mind is etched so much more than we usually recognize as consequential. At the root of many social ills is the frequent failure to appreciate how determinative are these first lessons of a child’s life.

In its children each civilization sows the seeds that in time make the national ethos. Especially among the newly independent nations there is a great need for children’s literature that frees them of attitudes, prejudices and outdated values detrimental to growth as mature citizens who must shape the future of their culture. Their folk histories and legends are rich in lore of which creative writers can make splendid traditions.

YOON SUK-JOONG was born in 1911, one year after Korea became a Japanese colony, and grew up in the turbulent era of struggle for national identity. Among his enduring early memories was the March 1, 1919 demonstration that provided leadership for the modern independence movement. Preservation and enhancement of Korean culture was their first concern and became YOON’S inspiration. At the age of 12 he helped organize the “Flower Garden Club” as a reading circle. For publication in the club’s magazine he wrote lyrics for familiar tunes so they could sing in the Korean language. “A Flowing Stream,” “A Half-Moon in the Day Sky” and “Eat Hot Pepper and Whirl” are songs still sung by children today.

Among the musically gifted Koreans, composers soon began writing music for other of YOON’S poems. They became a popular vehicle for cementing national aspirations and values. With the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, Korea became independent, though divided. Korean now became the language of education, rather than Japanese, which formerly had been required in all schools. In the ensuing cultural renaissance, YOON’S songs increasingly made children’s lives gayer and cultivated their ability to observe and think.

His works benefiting children are legion: reading, singing and citizenship clubs; orchestras; children’s and mothers’ essay, verse and song contests; a children’s magazine; school songs requested by remote institutions, and books of songs and verse for all elementary grades. He founded and became president of Saesakhoe, the “New Bud Society,” children’s welfare organization. Amidst the terrible trauma of the Korean War, when so much of the “land of the morning calm” was devastated, his poems and songs that young people had learned became a national asset.

Convinced that what children hear and read is at least as important as the clothes they wear and food they eat, YOON has broadened his writings to include stories of people and leaders around the world. From him a new generation of young Koreans is gaining an invaluable awareness of the increasingly interdependent world in which we all must live.

In electing YOON SUK JOONG to receive the 1978 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts, the Board of Trustees recognizes his more than 1,000 poems and songs that over 40 years have fostered joyful, positive values among Korean children.

Availing of my presence at these Presentation Ceremonies of the 1978 Ramon Magsaysay Award, I would like to express my wholehearted appreciation for this most precious and honored award. And on this 71st birth anniversary of the late Philippine President, may I say that he always stood on the side of the poor and the depressed–a guardian of freedom and justice.

I have written for more than 50 years, quietly and in loneliness, songs and poems for children of Korea, hoping to give them dreams, joy and hope.

As you may well know, the Korean people were forced to use Chinese characters for centuries, despite their own written language which originated as early as the 15th century, and to remain dumb, deaf and blind for 36 years under Japanese colonial domination. With the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, Korea became independent, but, unfortunately, the peninsula was divided into south and north.

A famous poet once said, “the child is father of the man ” But I do not hesitate to say that the child is teacher of the man. I believe that we adults should try more to learn from children than to teach them. Honesty is what we should learn from children, since the world of adults is filled with hypocrisy and falsity. Goodness is what we should learn from children, since the world of adults is filled with insensitivity and injustice. Natural beauty is what we should learn from children, since the world of adults is filled with artificial beauty and pretense. In short, the child is a moral mentor who shows us a world of honesty, goodness and beauty.

Though it is generally said that there is no frontier in love, differences of language, custom and environment may often cause misunderstanding between man and woman. Though it is generally said that there is no frontier in religion, the variety of beliefs today is so great that their walls may be too thick to remove. Though it is generally said that there is no frontier in art, works of art are difficult to project on the world stage when they are not backed up by national strength.

I am confident, however, that the hearts of children know no frontier. What is the heart of a child? It is the very nature of man. It is the very conscience of man. The hearts of children, therefore, can freely converse even with the animals, trees and stones, and friendship is exchanged among them, over and above the limits of time and space. Let us return to the hearts of children. With such hearts of innocence, honesty, goodness and beauty as children have in themselves, let us all build a heaven on earth where the different human races could dwell as one family.

I would like to say that this award would be a source of inspiration and encouragement to me, which will revitalize my life-long service in the cause of children’s well being.

Before concluding, may I quote from the sayings of the late President Magsaysay as follows: “Though I hold the office of President, I am but a plain soldier of this country at heart.” As for me, may I say: “Though I am a man of letters by profession, I will remain a humble child-caretaker forever.”

Traditionally museums have proven valuable for collecting, preserving and displaying artifacts and other historical evidence of civilization and natural history. Chiefly they have been centers of research and repositories, serving serious scholars and the intellectually curious seeking to understand the origins and evolution of cultures.

Indicative of SHAHRUM BIN YUB’s broader concept of a museum’s popular and creative educational role are the more than 26 million visitors to Muzium Negara in Kuala Lumpur since he assumed leadership in 1967. His philosophy that visiting the museum should be as natural for children and adults “as wearing shoes” has had extraordinary results. A nature conservation exhibit drawing 90,000 viewers in the first five days was only one of some 24 annual special exhibits for which the doors are open until six and sometimes ten in the evening. In addition, a mobile van carries museum exhibitions, including traditional shadow plays and folk dramas, to rural schools and villages throughout peninsular Malaysia.

The first task of a museum is to teach, in the view of SHAHRUM and his associates. Although the Muzium Negara is not large but rather intimate in arrangement, the four galleries—featuring the cultural past, prehistory and the arts and crafts of aboriginal peoples, natural history and key segments of the nation’s economy—afford a comprehensive view of the nation. Colorful, three-dimensional settings enliven awareness and appreciation of the rich diversity of the land and the multiracial society. In the central hall and under open sheds outside are held well-publicized changing demonstrations of weaving traditional textiles, woodcarving, rigging fishing vessels and native games, like top spinning contests between villagers. Stamp, coin, currency and international children’s art exhibits, and a history of boxing with live participation, are interspersed with presentations on contemporary problems such as drug abuse.

The eclectic entrepreneur of this unique cultural enterprise was born in Perak, Malaya (now Malaysia), 44 years ago. After his schooling in Malaya, SHAHRUM studied anthropology at Leeds University and museology at the British Museum. Returning in 1962 to become museum Curator of Ethnography, he did field work among aborigines and rural Malays and, since appointment as Director General in 1967, has encouraged scholarly research on folk customs, rare flowers and birds of the federation and traditional musical instruments. Archeological excavations are now supervised by the museum and national treasures are better protected under an amended antiquities ordinance he helped write.

The Museum holds regular courses for preschool children on painting, animals, birds and early history, while teachers study such skills as taxidermy. A symposium in Kuala Lumpur on neurological science occasioned a display of traditional Malay medical practice at Muzium Negara. The museum staff also readily helps others mount exhibits.

Just as the museum is SHAHRUM’s life, he has made it part of the life of fellow Malaysians. Together with able co-workers trained around the world, he is giving his people an educational institution that carries the heritage of the past into their modernizing society.

In electing SHAHRUM BIN YUB to receive the 1978 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes his making a living museum an enlightening experience for all ages, fostering a national cultural awakening.

I am deeply honored and grateful for this Award. I am honored because it has been made in the name of so great and popular a leader of your country, Ramon Magsaysay. I also am honored to be among the illustrious personalities who have received this prestigious Award in the past and to be with those of my distinguished contemporaries who are to receive the Award today.

I like to think that the Award is not only a personal honor to me, but more importantly to the institution for which I am responsible—the National Museum of Malaysia—and to my loyal staff who have no less dedicated themselves to its service. I thank God the Almighty and the Government of Malaysia for the privilege given to me to serve my country in my humble way in the service of the National Museum in Kuala Lumpur.

What is most gratifying in receiving this Award is the recognition which the Board of Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation has given to the importance of museums in the life of the community. We find the concept of a museum as an instrument of education present in human society as early as 300 B.C. Then, in Alexandria, Egypt, was created a museum as an institution of learning.

The term museum conveys the image of an institution that has on display, in three dimensional form, the artifacts of man from the earliest of times to the present day, giving the visitor a sense of realism and participation. These artifacts are testimony of the strivings of men’s minds with the problems of life and destiny through the ages. They furnish evidence of how man has attained an ever increasing degree of mastery over the inclemency of nature.

We learn from these artifacts, that man, while struggling for survival, has also taken time to reflect on his lot. We learn of his search for the significance of the world and his life within it—a quest which he has never ceased to pursue. We learn of his illuminating discovery that all creation must have had a beginning, that there was a creator—his realization that there must be God.

We find that man has always endeavored to make his implements artistic as well as utilitarian. The three major visual arts—architecture, sculpture and painting—and the minor arts—decorative and functional crafts, such as the making of furniture, crockery, apparel, rugs, carpets, and vases—have very much been infused with the cultural and aesthetic values and the religious and philosophic concepts of man. They illumine man’s yearnings of yet higher attainments.

In times such as ours we, who cherish a liberal and tolerant society with freedom of worship and the democratic process as the basis of rule, can draw strength from our rich cultural heritage to awaken and enlighten our fellowmen. In this, our task is lightened as man’s desire to understand rather than just obey is innate.

A museum should be able to make a distinctive contribution to enriching man’s understanding of himself and his environment. A museum should be able to give men the opportunity to better appreciate his aesthetic inclinations and his spiritual aspirations and thus guide him to a richer living.

This then is the message a museum conveys to all mankind and the Foundation’s recognition of this important role has been demonstrated by the Award made to me—a recognition which will be appreciated by the museum world, particularly in this region.

Near stagnation in so many villages of Southeast and South Asia has allowed population growth to exceed development. Resulting spread of malnutrition combined with underemployment or unemployment compounds frustration, especially among the young. Despite well-meant national and international planning and the billions of dollars committed to development both internally and from external aid, most rural poor throughout the region feel increasingly left behind.

None of the political-economic formulas so far attempted in post independence Asia has proven truly satisfactory, either materially or humanly. Far more crucial than shortage of funds for construction of economic infrastructures is the dearth of ideas that can mobilize the vast underused manpower and harness this to popular aspirations. Too often internationally designed development schemes relate only marginally to local human and physical reality. Because funding generally dictates conception of the project, the best of technical efforts may be circumscribed thereby. The crisis in relations between developed nations of the northerly latitudes and aspiring peoples further south actually is less one of money than lack of agreement upon sound strategies for building healthy societies.

It is in this arena that SOEDJATMOKO, as a creative social historian of contemporary trends, is making his greatest contribution. Encouraging both Asians and outsiders to look more carefully at the village folkways they would modernize, he is fostering awareness of the human dimension essential to all development.

Born 56 years ago in Sawahlunto, Sumatra, SOEDJATMOKO first set out to train himself as a doctor. Because of political activities he was expelled from medical school in Jakarta during World War II by Japanese occupation authorities. At the start of the Indonesian fight for independence, he joined the foreign press department of the revolutionary government’s Ministry of Information and later the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. One of three young people chosen to represent their unrecognized government at the United Nations and in the United States, he participated in debates at the United Nations Security Council at Lake Success until international recognition of Indonesian independence was won in 1949. He then represented the new nation in the United Nations and elsewhere abroad and took time at his own expense to study differing political systems in Eastern and Western Europe, Russia and America.

Home again in the 1950s SOEDJATMOKO became the editor of the weekly Siasat, associate editor of the daily Pedoman and was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly. With like-minded intellectuals he challenged President Sukarno’s “guided democracy” as it became increasingly a vehicle for thought control and moved toward a closed society. When Indonesia in 1966 rejoined the United Nations he lent influential guidance, later serving as ambassador to the United States before he returned to become Special Adviser on Social and Cultural Affairs to the Chairman of the National Development Planning Agency.

The lot of the independent thinker amidst the political tumult of developing Asia is precarious. It is a measure of SOEDJATMOKO’s positive commitment that concern for himself has not inhibited forthright expression. Nor has he allowed his membership in numerous leading international forums and organizations to divorce his concern from the realities of Indonesian village life. While primarily a man of ideas rather than administrative action, his writings have added consequentially to the body of international thinking on what can be done to meet one of the greatest challenges of our time; how to make life more decent and satisfying for the poorest 40 percent in southeastern and southern Asia. In the process he is stimulating others to sharpen their perception and make government and private efforts more relevant.

In electing SOEDJATMOKO to receive the 1978 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, the Board of Trustees recognizes his persuasive presentation of the case for developing Asia’s basic needs in the councils of world decision making.

It is both with a sense of pride and humility that I stand before you as the 1978 recipient of the Magsaysay Award for International Understanding. To be associated in this fashion with the memory of a great human being who was really a man of the people, concerned with the lot of the poor—the common tao—is a rare honor indeed, for which I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

But I also feel humbled, because of my awareness that whatever small contribution I may have made is dwarfed by the magnitude of the problem of persistent poverty and human suffering in Asia, and by the realization of how much still remains to be done.

The problem of poverty in our countries is not new. We in Asia all know it because our eyes, our ears and our hearts tell us. Many of us have experienced it, but were lucky to break out of the vicious circles which keep most of the poor on our continent permanently entrapped. More generally, the nationalist movements of our countries actually sprang, early in this century, from our awareness that there was no hope of overcoming poverty in a colonial setting, and that only in freedom and independent nationhood would it become possible to release the energies of our own peoples to that end. Our experience since independence has made clear how much more intractable poverty is than we initially thought, and how inextricably it is interwoven with problems stemming from the fragility of our new nations, the rigidities of our social structures and the limited cohesiveness of our transitional societies.

We now also know how woefully inadequate our knowledge and understanding is of these problems, even though, in principle at least, science and technology properly applied could provide us with the means to eradicate poverty from this globe.

For more than 20 years we have striven for a solution by applying Western development models. In some cases, mostly limited to the small countries in Asia, these have worked. They have done less well in the larger, much more populous countries, and we have not been able to prevent the number of the absolutely poor from rising. This realization is now forcing us towards development and industrialization strategies that are different from those of the West. We will have to learn how to turn the massive number of rural and urban unemployed and underemployed into our major resource. We can only do so if we put the human being rather than projects in the center of our efforts. He should be the base, the purpose as well as the means of development, if we are not to fail. It has become equally clear that the active participation of the poor in each of our countries’ development is an essential condition for its achievement. Also, we know such participation must be voluntary and self organized, on the basis of restored self-confidence and hope among the poor and the weak. We are all still groping as to how to do this. But it is already obvious that only through our wrestling with these problems of poverty and demography, through our search for an autonomous development trajectory that is inspired by our human compassion and by our commitment to freedom and social justice, can we hope to grow into the more humane, prosperous, just and moral societies we all so fervently want. It is through this experience that our nations and our cultures will renew themselves. It is through this struggle that our national and cultural identities will be transformed, redefined and strengthened from within, in ways which may be meaningful to, and compatible with, others in the world. For no longer can any nation work out its salvation in isolation.

Rich or poor, strong or weak, we are all bound to share the burden of each other’s successes.

The Magsaysay Award, as an expression of the Foundation’s own commitment to these values, will undoubtedly provide continuous encouragement to those in Asia devoted to these ends, as I have been. Once again, I want to thank you.

Thailand is not alone in experiencing a proliferation of slums especially around Bangkok with its approximately five million inhabitants out of the total Thai population of about 45 million. Population pressure, low farm income and unemployment in the countryside have combined with hunger for better opportunities to speed migration into the cities. The influx burdens public and social services such as water, sewage, health, education and housing, and imposes immense pressures upon available tax revenues and administrative capabilities.

PRATEEP UNGSONGTHAM was born 26 years ago in Klong Toey, the largest of some 300 slums around Bangkok which together house over 800,000 persons, of whom about half are children. Smells of the underlying swamp are pervasive and there are no septic tanks or sewers and little garbage collection. During the monsoon water rises to the ground floor of makeshift dwellings. Both the Bangkok Municipal Administration and the Port Authority, as landowner, are reluctant to provide normal services that might confirm squatters’ rights to remain in an area scheduled for port expansion.

Yet Klong Toey is a humanly vital community despite the fact that roughly one-half of the some 42,000 residents live in one-room shacks with 25 square meters of floor space for six persons.

PRATEEP’S father, a Chinese immigrant who after two decades of struggle as a fisherman had in the 1940s sought a better living in the capital city, supported his family of three children and four step-children by basket weaving. Like many women and children in Klong Toey eking pittances from small side businesses, the mother bought shrimp paste at her home village which she sold in Bangkok markets; PRATEEP at the age of six began to buy candies in the market and sell them in the slum. Her mother had registered their house and secured for PRATEEP the birth certificate most slum children did not have but which was required for entrance to government school. When she still was not admitted for lack of space her mother paid for her to attend an inexpensive private school for four years. At age 11 PRATEEP went to work for the daily equivalent of from 35 to 70 U.S. cents packaging firecrackers, chipping paint and rust and cleaning the bilge of cargo vessels, and polishing handles in an aluminum factory. Within four years she saved enough to return to night school and eventually earned the teaching diploma she determined upon in order to help neighbor children denied government schooling.

PRATEEP had found her vocation in 1968 when she watched over two children of working parents and soon had 28 charges she kept occupied with songs and games for five U`S. cents each per day. Within two months she had the limit of 60 children who could be packed into the largest room of her family’s jerry-built house and could maintain discipline only by instituting regular instruction in reading, writing and counting. Later teenage slum assistants helped teach nutrition and preventive health to her students whose families often gleaned part of their food from waste of nearby slaughter houses.

As her efforts won public recognition, private contributions, and support from the Bangkok Municipal Administration, PRATEEP began, with help in-kind from neighbors, to construct the now seven building Pattana Village Community School. For the 694 children enrolled in grades one through six, a kindergarten and rudimentary vocational school, there are 25 teachers and a small clinic staffed on weekends by volunteer doctors and nurses from city hospitals, all showing the people of Klong Toey where there is a will there is a way.

In electing PRATEEP UNGSONGTHAM to receive the 1978 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes her bringing learning, better health and hope to impoverished children otherwise denied services in the portside slum of Klong Toey.

Tonight I feel I cannot be myself. First, I want to speak to you in English, a language I am only beginning to learn. So please forgive me if I make mistakes and cannot speak properly. Second, this is the first time I have dressed in this way. This costume, like the Magsaysay Award, was given to me. A benefactor of my school wanted me to be able to accept this Award in Thai national dress. Third, I am only one of a team that has built the Klong Toey school the Award recognizes. The achievement is not mine alone but is a collective effort. So I am representing my fellow workers who are not here. Lastly, this ceremony is very far from Klong Toey, the slum of Bangkok where I grew up and still live and teach.

Yet, I welcome this occasion to say that the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s recognition of our school calls attention to a problem faced by all developing countries. A Thai newspaper last Sunday carried a cartoon showing that it took a man near the top of a coconut tree on an island of the Philippines with a telescope to see Klong Toey while our own people nearby had overlooked the slums of Bangkok. I wonder how many of you in this audience have visited the slums in your own cities. They are so frequently ignored.

Through our lives we ask when something happens, what does it mean? What am I going to do? I asked when I learned of this Award, what have I done to deserve it? What am I going to do to live up to it? My answer is this. For us slum people the past is hard and the present dismal. We always look to the future for something better. So, to help make a better future for at least some of my neighbors, I will donate all of my cash prize to establish a foundation to support the Klong Toey school. Added to this will be the contributions from others which were encouraged by the announcement of the Magsaysay Award to me. This new foundation will help make my dreams come true. We will enlarge the preschool and provide a nursery for smaller children so that their brothers and sisters of preschool age can attend classes to prepare them for regular elementary school. For the vocational school we have just started for post-compulsory education level young people, we will be able to add essential equipment and facilities.

To the Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation I want to express my deep thanks. You have my promise that I will do my best to live up to the honor you have given me.