In its long, uneven progress to modernity, much of Asia has been held back by a shortage of able technocrats. Many countries lacked schools to train them. Even where technical institutions did exist, the best young graduates often sought jobs and advanced education abroad—and stayed there. Foreign dependency was perpetuated; for too long know-how had to be imported.

Grasping this, in 1959 the Council of Ministers of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization opened the SEATO Graduate School of Engineering in Bangkok. Eighteen students from Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines matriculated in its only subject, hydraulic engineering. The school prospered. Outliving SEATO, it was established in 1967 as an autonomous educational institution: the ASIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, or AIT.

Although based in Thailand, AIT was conceived as a school for the entire region. Asia provided the vast majority of its students and, eventually, half its faculty. Concentrating in the fields of natural resources, agriculture, manufacturing, and infrastructure development, it employed classical engineering and management principles to devise new technologies for Asia—to improve irrigation, for example, dispose of organic waste, build affordable housing, and develop renewable sources of energy.

At AIT’s modern 160-hectare campus built in 1973 outside Bangkok, some 750 students annually pursue master’s and doctoral degrees as well as shorter diploma courses. Research and outreach programs complement teaching. Working with the faculty, students participate in the development of new ideas and their dispersal—through workshops, community-based projects, and liaison programs with universities.

AIT’s student body is chosen scrupulously on the basis of merit and yet, at the same time, forms a cross-section of Asia. In any given year as many as twenty-six different countries may be represented. No one nationality dominates. At AIT everyone is a minority. “Politics” is forbidden. Studying and living side-by-side, AIT’s students learn to accommodate each other’s differences and to respect one another. A loyal network of alumni keeps the connections alive after graduation, creating a grid of friendship and mutual interest that spans the region.

Nearly all AIT graduates stay in Asia, three-quarters of them in their own countries. As middle- and senior-level managers in the public and private sectors and in education, they apply their high-tech skills to raise their countrymen’s standard of living and to improve the quality of their environment. Some have become leaders in advanced technology.

Funded largely by more than twenty governments, as well as by foundations, corporations, and individuals, AIT has an enviable reputation for high standards. Under its current president, Dr. Alastair North, it continues to adapt its specialized training to Asia’s accelerating growth and demands for increasingly sophisticated expertise. True to its mandate, it is generating know-how from within—tapping the region’s vast reservoir of talent to create Asian technocrats.

In electing the ASIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY to receive the 1989 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, the Board of Trustees recognizes its shaping a new generation of engineers and managers committed to Asia in an atmosphere of academic excellence and regional camaraderie. 

I am very proud to stand here this evening to accept this prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award on behalf of the ASIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (AIT).

My pride and pleasure are greater since you honor not one person but the many who have made the INSTITUTE what it is today.

It may be significant that the Magsaysay Award Foundation and the AIT were conceived at the same point in history: one to continue in Asia the ideals of a great leader after his tragic death, the other to halt the flow out of Asia of future leaders in science and technology. While today we remember the vision of the late Ramon Magsaysay, we honor, too, the foresight of Dr. Pote Sarasin who, as secretary general of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), saw as a building block for peace the creation of an international postgraduate engineering school.

Further, just as the achievements of Ramon Magsaysay Award winners have brought substance to the ideals of the Foundation, so have the endeavors and successes of the more than four thousand INSTITUTE alumni provided the basis of today’s signal honor. These AIT graduates live as friends, colleagues—indeed as one family that crosses national boundaries and differences in political ideology and religion. This corps of dedicated persons represents the success of the Institute: it is the source of our honor and our pride.

It is clear, however, that this body of scientists and technologists would not have come into being without the effort of all those who have created, supported, and staffed AIT. I speak of people like our first president, Dr. Milton E. Bender, Jr., who worked to achieve the international breadth, financial independence, and academic autonomy that we enjoy today; people like our current board of trustees, so ably led by Dr. Thanat Khoman, whose wisdom guides our operations; and the governments that provide most of the financing to bring students to the INSTITUTE and the facilities to teach them.

I should like to recognize particularly the governments of Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand, which supported our creation as the SEATO Graduate School of Engineering, and especially the government of Thailand, the host nation, which lends inestimable support to the INSTITUTE and so to the countries that it serves.

I must mention the generosity of the United States of America, without whose aid AIT could never have started, and whose contributions over thirty years still total more than those of any other donor nation. I want, too, to recognize the tremendous input today of nations that thirty years ago were not major contributors of international aid: the Federal Republic of Germany, Canada, Australia, and Japan. Today almost all the industrialized nations of the world support the INSTITUTE and its tasks in Asia.

But the ambitions of students, the vision of benefactors, and the objectives of the INSTITUTE cannot be realized without the dedication and excellence of the staff. These, my colleagues, I represent this evening. I am proud that this corporate teamwork is symbolized by the presence here on this wonderful occasion of the president of the alumni association and graduate of the very first class, Professor Srisakdi Charmonman, and of my two vice-presidents, Professor Ricardo P. Pama and Professor Helmut Eggers. As citizens of Thailand, the Philippines, and the Federal Republic of Germany, respectively, they illustrate the East-West partnership of which our founders, and I am sure the late Ramon Magsayeay, dreamed.

Ladies and gentlemen, as I accept this award on behalf of AIT, I and my colleagues pledge that we shall continue to do everything in our power to uphold and to further the vision and the service to Asia that characterize the awardees with whom we are honored to be listed. 

In Asia today the mass media exercises a powerful influence, informing the public and shaping its attitudes. And increasingly so. Yet, when monopolized by government or vested interests, media’s power is easily used for propaganda purposes. In open societies it is often squandered in trivial entertainments. Father JAMES BERTRAM REUTER JR, S.J., swims against the tide.

As a young American religious scholastic assigned to the Philippines, Father REUTER directed his first stage play in 1941 and wrote scripts for the “Commonwealth Hour,” a popular Catholic radio program. Imprisoned during the war, he wrote songs and skits to rally fellow internees. Following ordination in the United States in 1946, and a course in broadcasting, he returned to the Philippines. At the Jesuit academies Ateneo de Naga and, from 1952, Ateneo de Manila, he immersed himself in a whirlwind life of teaching, coaching, and supervising everything from the school newspaper to the glee club.

He made his mark in dramatics. Year after year his Ateneo Players’ augmented from Manila’s Catholic schools for girls staged memorable plays and gala musicals. He was an exacting director who subjected young thespians to his passion for achieving perfection by hard work. They yielded and learned. Some launched successful careers in professional broadcasting and theater. But for most, Father REUTER’s amateur theatricals were really a school for life. To many he became a lifelong mentor and friend.

In time Father REUTER became the church’s all-around media man, a priest whose parish encompassed stage and studio, airwaves and press. He introduced Catholic programming to Philippine television and helped set up Radio Veritas. He wrote, adapted, directed, and produced radio, television, and stage plays. These bore lessons of Christian faith, social responsibility, and personal morality to Philippine audiences and exemplified his crusade for high standards, substance, and ethics in media.

Under Martial Law, Father REUTER struggled to keep Catholic radio stations alive and raised his voice in a small weekly magazine. But like his earlier newspaper column and television programs, this, too, was muzzled. Arrested and tried by the government, he was released under an uncertain amnesty. In the presidential polls of 1986, REUTER’s fellow Catholic broadcasters challenged election fraud by helping orchestrate a nationwide independent vote count. During the ensuing “People Power Revolution,” he moved behind the scenes to keep a radio voice on the air. Prominent among those from media who put their lives on the line to inform and mobilize the public were his former students and players.

Father REUTER once described the early Jesuits as “great-souled men with powerful minds and strong wills.” Hard-driving yet compassionate, REUTER is described this way himself, not least by his erstwhile student actors and stage hands whose lives he touched permanently by insisting from them their very best.

In electing FR. JAMES BERTRAM REUTER JR., S.J., to receive the 1989 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the Board of Trustees recognizes his employing his gifts as writer, theatrical director, and broadcaster, but most of all as teacher, to make the performing arts and mass media a vital force for good in the Philippines.

I think this award is coming to me because in my lifetime the Catholic Church has changed. For centuries the Church worked in three ways: through the parish, the school, and charitable institutions. It spoke to the people from the pulpit, the teacher’s desk, in hospitals, in orphan asylums, in homes for unwed mothers, and in the feeding kitchen. But in my lifetime the Church has discovered that if we continue working through these channels alone, we will reach only 15 percent of the people. If we work through the media, radio, television, press, and film, our outreach potential is 100 percent.

For example, there is no person in Asia who cannot get to a transistor radio. Indeed, for millions it is their only window on the world. In Infanta, Quezon, there is a cultural minority called the Dumagats. They are men who go barefoot and their only clothing is a G-string. One day during the rainy season a Dumagat warrior was seen coming down a muddy mountain trail, barefoot, clad in only his G-string, but carrying an umbrella! The umbrella, it turned out, was not for himself, he had no need of it, but for the transistor radio that he was holding to his ear!

The most spectacular media contribution of the Church in recent years was EDSA, the Philippine revolution that took its name from the street, Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, on which the lines between the government and the people were drawn. On St. Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1986, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines said, loud and clear through the media, to the Philippines and to the world, that the recent Philippine presidential elections were a fraud; that the government had no valid moral basis. The true will of the people, the Church said, should be followed, but without violence. In these words the bishops offered a blueprint for the EDSA Revolution.

The revolution was the first in the history of the world to be “run” by radio. Even when government forces smashed the transmitters of Radio Veritas, the Church’s station (the Federation of Catholic Broadcasters) carried on with Radyo Bandido (Outlaw Radio), and June Keithley, the voice of the Catholic broadcasters, was called by General Ramos, “the commander in chief of the people’s army.”

It was an accident of history, or the grace of God, that the Church was in position with equipment, organization, and courageous men, women, boys, and girls. I just had the remarkable good fortune, or, again was it the grace of God, to be part of it. The award says “Journalism.” I think that refers mainly to my little weekly newspaper, The Communicator. The Communicator was “honored” earlier when eleven vehicles swept into the courtyard of Xavier House where I live. The vehicles were filled with soldiers and armalites and led by six majors and colonels! The military confiscated all the copies of The Communicator, closed the press where it was printed, padlocked my office, and placed armed guards in front of my house for two years!

The award also says “Literature.” I think that refers to the plays that I have done on some figures in the Catholic Church, for example, Mateo Ricci, the first great missionary to China; Mother Ignacia, who founded the Religious of the Virgin Mary; Lorenzo Ruiz, the first Filipino to be canonized; Camillus de Lellis, the Gentle Warrior, whose religious order gave rise to the Red Cross; and Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit, the strongest of them all. And also for the plays that I have done for the underprivileged: Jenina, for the children of the streets; The Dolls That Nobody Wanted, for the handicapped; and The Night Before Christmas, for the children who have never been born.

The award adds, “especially teaching.” It is true that I have been teaching all my life. But most of it has been outside the classroom: on the stage, in the auditorium, in the sound studio, on the floor of the television barn, in the bus, in the plane, in the plaza.

On the cover of the brochure that describes the award is printed: “in recognition of greatness of spirit shown in service to the people.” This seems to me to be a deep, religious statement. Service means love, and love is the heart of the gospel. Love consists in giving and sharing all that one has and all that one is with the one you love. If you say “I love God, but I cannot stand him,” pointing to a man over there, you lie. You cannot love God, whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor, whom you see. Greatness of spirit is seen in service to others; that is the heart of the gospel.

I am very grateful to the Board of Trustees for this award and to all of you for coming this evening. I only want to add that when I die, I wish I could be judged by all the beautiful things that have been said during this award presentation!

As Asia’s governments grow and assert themselves against national diversities and pluralism, benefits earmarked for economic development often bypass the needy in favor of bureaucrats and those already affluent. Observing this, LAKSHMI CHAND JAIN rejects the assumption that profound socioeconomic problems can be solved best through the machinery of the state. In his view, democratic village associations and voluntary agencies are better catalysts for rural advancement and social change. Softly and urgently, he insists that people who are alienated from the task of development will also be denied its fruits.

Born in 1925, JAIN was a child of India’s struggle for justice and dignity. As a young graduate at the time of independence from Britain and partition of the subcontinent, he threw himself into organizing relief for destitute refugees created by partition. By helping introduce cooperative societies for farming and cottage industries into rehabilitation camps, he instilled self-reliance and hope.

Later JAIN helped Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay organize the Indian Cooperative Union and applied its principles to the handicrafts industry. As secretary of the All-India Handicrafts Board, he fostered decentralized production and directed training, technical services, and loans to India’s struggling self-employed spinners, weavers, carpenters, and metalsmiths. JAIN set high standards and applied modern marketing techniques to promote handicrafts sales abroad and organized the Central Cottage Industries Emporium to expand the market at home. He championed artisans against mechanization and mass production and continues to do so. His efforts helped millions of independent craftsmen carry on traditional livelihoods in security and pride and assured the survival of precious arts and skills.

JAIN became a sage and independent-minded expert on development, applying unique organizational skills to wed theory to practice. In 1966 he led in establishing a chain of consumer cooperative stores where urbanites could buy food, clothing, and tools at a fair price. In 1968 he co-founded a service-oriented consulting firm. By seeking the advice of farmers and workers, JAIN and his like-minded colleagues helped government, industry, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) design modernization projects that are relevant and effective.

JAIN has found his niche as a bridge between peasants, artisans, women, and members of scorned castes, on the one hand, and development agencies as well as government committees and boards, on the other. His counsel is not always popular or heeded, yet it is sought by the powerful and powerless alike, for JAIN is a constructive critic whose love for India and its people is deep and clear.

Intellectually a cosmopolitan JAIN is at ease in international circles and among India’s most influential leaders. At home he prefers a life of simplicity, a life he shares with his wife, Devaki, and their two sons. A practical and modern man, JAIN nevertheless perseveres as a pragmatic visionary in advancing Mahatma Gandhi’s humane aspirations for India.

In electing LAKSHMI CHAND JAIN to receive the 1989 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes his informed and selfless commitment to attack India’s poverty at the grass-roots level.

Thirty-two years ago I came to this great country to study the Agricultural Credit Cooperatives and Farmers Associations Program, popularly called the ACCAFA Program. It was a most inspiring and instructive experience. The visionary Ramon Magsaysay, who had initiated ACCAFA, was still alive. I really received my first Magsaysay award in being able to study here at that time.

People like myself — engaged in the reconstruction of India, or in what Mahatma Gandhi called the tasks of the second revolution, the first being liberation from colonial domination — were thrilled with the creative potential of your experiment. Nowhere in the world had we come across such a well-conceived cooperative program, supported by the state through effective legislation and policies, which aimed to support the rural people in their endeavor to improve their lives.

Ten years earlier, on attainment of Indian independence, Prime Minister Nehru had awakened our interest in cooperatives, which he regarded as the embodiment of social and economic democracy and vital for reinforcing political democracy. Nehru also broadened our horizons beyond national boundaries. A vibrant Asia, asserting its personality and potential, was his dream. To achieve this dream he invited the leaders of Asia involved in the struggles for national independence to the Asian Relations Conference, held in New Delhi in 1947 — the first firm step toward Asian cooperation. Here, too, as I served on the secretariat of this conference, I received an enduring gift: the awareness of greater Asia.

In the fifties an award such as the Ramon Magsaysay Award was accepted casually. Those were times when all newly independent countries, and those recovering from the ravages of war, were full of verve and the confidence that they could banish poverty and inequality. But today’s ceremony is a grim reminder that in the past thirty years, poverty and disparities have continued to defy our prescriptions and methods. Today, when the promise of Gandhi’s second revolution remains still unfulfilled, which one of us can really feel comfortable with this public honor?

Where do we turn for light? In a village in Maharashtra a woman was elected as the president of the local village council, the panchayat, as it is called.

At a recent meeting she told our prime minister that when she assumed office there was no school in her village, no source of safe drinking water, no road to link the village with the outside world. However, she did not rush to the government to complain or plead for assistance. She gathered the village people and asked: “What good are we if we let the lives of our children be ruined without education as we have ruined our own?” The people, she said, were spurred to action.

“But,” asked the prime minister, “how could you mobilize the village community? Is it not divided by conflicts drawn from caste, class, and family feuds?”

“Yes, it is divided,” she replied. “We have all these troubles and more. But we talked and talked and talked. Then the people said, we have talked enough, let us do something.”

Responded the prime minister: “Surely that could not have ended your problems.”

“No,” the woman leader answered, “it did not.”

“So what did you do?” asked the prime minister. Said the panchayat woman: “Very simple, we talked more, we gathered again and again and talked more till agreement was reached and then the action was swift.”

The story of this woman leader is not an isolated one. In our state of Karnataka we have some fourteen thousand women elected to village panchayats out of a total of some fifty-six-thousand elected representatives who took office less than three years ago. They have lit up the countryside. They have brought about a dramatic change in the mobilization of local resources, in the purposeful and efficient use of these resources, and in the promotion of equity. And all these accomplishments have been far better and more satisfying to the village population than those achieved, in the preceding decades, through reliance on the bureaucracy to deliver development and social justice.

These grass-roots institutions and their leaders –not always women — have thus broken the Gordian knot of Third World development. The moral of the story is clear: while leaders have failed to dispel the darkness, millions who have a real stake in building a bright future have been able to light the lamp.

Victims of war and social upheaval must fend for themselves. Yet many cannot, especially the children. Amidst a general struggle for survival, rare is the person who will reach out to help others. All the rarer in bleak, poverty-stricken surroundings like those encountered by KIM IM SOON on Koje Island, South Korea, in 1952. 

It was to this remote place that KIM IM SOON fled when her husband vanished during the Korean War. She took up teaching to support herself and her young daughter. One day a desperate welfare official left seven abandoned infants in her charge. Accepting this daunting, unasked — for responsibility as a challenge from God, KIM set up Ai Kwang Won — the Garden of Love and Light. 

KIM started with a stony patch of hillside overlooking Koje Bay, in a crude hut built of earth and thatch. Year by year she made improvements, adding new and better buildings on adjoining lands that she bought with money given by her parents and friends. She also received help from church congregations and her former classmates at Ewha Woman’s University. But KIM managed largely on her own, building Ai Kwang Won without regular external support. 

KIM later founded an institute where older orphans and needy girls were trained to become self-supporting, eventually adding a technical school for boys, a day nursery, and Korea’s first youth hostel. All the while she accepted more children, some 750 of them by 1978. In that year, there being few abandoned children or orphans in now-prosperous South Korea, she converted Ai Kwang Won into a home for mentally handicapped children. A special school and new facilities for physical and occupational therapy and vocational training followed. 

In 1986 KIM opened Dandelion House for severely retarded children. Life there is full of cheer. The children live with music and bright colors, amidst fruit trees and flowers, overlooking the grand landscape of Koje’s hills and bay. Every child is given special attention; for most, a cake and brightly wrapped gifts on their birthdays are the first in their lives. In running this home, KIM is inspired by the thought: “If you raise a child with love, he will grow up to shed light in all the world.”

From Ai Kwang Won, KIM has energized community life on all of Koje. She has helped aid-giving organizations find the neediest groups and individuals and led in founding Koje-do Christian Hospital. She has taught local villagers about family planning, helped organize a credit union benefiting thousands, and opened a library for children. Recently she established the Koje branch of the Korean Legal Aid Center for Family Relations. KIM’s good works have inspired others to follow her lead, one reason why her grateful neighbors call her the “Queen of Koje Island.”

Today Ai Kwang Won is staffed by more than eighty professionals and aides. Aside from monies earned selling its own handicrafts and farm products, it receives a partial subsidy from the government, as well as funds from patrons near and far. As superintendent, KIM presides cheerfully with no thought for herself. Her own accommodations are spartan, her day-to-day clothes hand-me-downs. At sixty-four, she moves nimbly about the sloping grounds of Ai Kwang Won from dawn to dusk. She says, “When God calls me home one day, I will be able to say I’ve tried my best.”

In electing KIM IM SOON to receive the 1989 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the Board of Trustees recognizes her nurturing hundreds of abandoned and handicapped children to adulthood in an atmosphere of beauty and love.

It was November 1952. In the midst of confusion due to the North-South conflict on the Korean peninsula, I, as a twenty-six-year-old woman, after fervent prayer, made a promise to God. Since then I have pulled a heavy cart up the hill, utilizing all my strength. There were times when my work load overwhelmed me and times when people insulted me. Nevertheless, the wide eyes of the little children sustained my strength and their undivided pure love gave me new hope and courage. 

Although at times I felt as if I were standing in the wilderness alone, I became a fearless soldier to protect their rights and a comforting mother to dry their tears and ease their heartaches. My endless prayers became hymns of praise as I kept pulling the cart. 

These thoughts came to my mind when I heard the amazing news that I was chosen for the Ramon Magsaysay Award. However, a voice from within warned that the prize is not for me alone. It is for the many whose names are not known and who receive no glory, those who through thirty-eight long, hard years have supported, helped, and enabled me to pull the cart. I accept this totally unexpected honor as a representative of the many who have worked for the success of our endeavors; I also accept it with a deep and serious sense of responsibility. 

I humbly offer this aging body and soul to continue to work for the betterment of mentally and physically disabled children. I pray that God uses the rest of my life to help me guide these children to live as dignified human beings and to utilize their God-given talents for greater happiness and hope. I see this award as a manifestation of God’s grace and of his renewed promise for the disabled children at Ai Kwang Won. 

We realize and truly appreciate how fortunate we are through observing those who are less fortunate, and we learn the precious lesson that their suffering and pain might have been ours. I appeal to all of you. It is not only a nation or government’s responsibility but also the responsibility of churches, social groups, and individuals to reach out and provide assistance to the less fortunate. I consider myself an early-morning church bell, reminding the world that some of our neighbors need us and that we must share whatever we, as “normal people,” have — our love, health, material gifts, time, and talents.

During my long years in this work, I have come to realize that the miracle in the Bible, of how Jesus fed the multitudes with five loaves and two fishes, was not only a miracle of two thousand years ago. I have personally witnessed and experienced this kind of miracle over and over all around me. 

As I use this prize money to reconstruct the old school classroom buildings for my two hundred disabled children, I call on all of you to pray that the same miracle may happen again.

Archives are the mines of a nation’s history. Without their rich lode of raw materials, the past cannot be investigated with rigor or reconstructed accurately and History gives way to Myth. Hence, in 1957, the leaders of newly independent Malaya set up a Public Records Office to salvage and preserve the decaying stores of documents they had inherited from the British. This later became Malaysia’s National Archives. As a young graduate from the University of Malaya, DATO’ ZAKIAH HANUM binti ABDUL HAMID joined its tiny staff in 1961. Advancing as the Archives grew, she learned every critical process firsthand and played an important role in the professionalization of the system. In 1977 she became chief.

As director general, ZAKIAH presides over Malaysia’s primary repository of historical materials in the capital and a network of branches countrywide. In these archives a hoard of official documents, letters, reports, and private papers in nearly a dozen languages rests alongside maps, drawings, newspapers, sound recordings, photographs, and films. The oldest are baptismal registers from the 1640s, the newest, essential current files of government departments shipped regularly to the Archives — modern, ultrafireproof facilities for safekeeping. As ZAKIAH adds constantly to the collection, preservation specialists save older items from insects, mold, and corrosive chemicals and copy the most fragile items on film. Others on her versatile staff of more than four hundred evaluate, catalog, and store the materials so that they will be accessible to government and the public. Some two thousand researchers now use the National Archives every year.

With the farsighted backing of her government, ZAKIAH has made Malaysia’s National Archives the most professional and technically advanced in all Southeast Asia. Through it, systematic and modern records-management systems are being introduced to Malaysia’s bureaucracy. ZAKIAH has placed Malaysia at the forefront of regional cooperation as well. Apprentice archivists from throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific come to Malaysia for training.

“We Malaysians seem to have so little sense of the past,” says ZAKIAH. She is using the Archives to change this. ZAKIAH has expanded its oral history collection, for example, and sponsors lecture series in which prominent figures relate their experiences for posterity. Using unique archival materials, she has mounted special exhibitions and set up permanent memorials to commemorate great events and figures in Malaysian history. In 1980 she initiated a daily television program called “Today in History,” and later introduced a national “History Quiz.” 

Outside the office, ZAKIAH writes short stories, television scripts, and plays and has authored four books on Malay culture and tradition for schoolchildren. Since 1972 she has been president of the Muslim Women’s Action Society, or Pertiwi, which provides kindergartens, scholarships, and other benefits for needy Malaysian youngsters. And she is a leader in seeking innovative ways to aid her country’s efforts against drug abuse.

Armed with humor and equanimity, fifty-two-year-old ZAKIAH shifts from her private life as wife and mother of three to her multifarious public one with apparent ease. Moving confidently from one task to the next, she is happy in her work, conscious of its contribution to making Malaysia, as she puts it, “a knowledgeable society.”

In electing DATO’ ZAKIAH HANUM BINTI ABDUL HAMID to receive the 1989 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes her showing Malaysians how an expertly run archive system can illuminate their country’s past and play a vital role in its present.

I bring greetings to you from the people of my nation. I thank you for the privilege accorded me to visit your wonderful country, and for all the hospitalities you have extended to me. I am deeply moved with a sense of gratitude to the Board of Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for the great honor conferred upon me, and I am honored as you honor my country today on its Day of Independence.

In accepting the award, my thoughts are of my country, my family, my friends, and those with whom I share the responsibilities of government service. This honor is not only for me but for all the people of Malaysia. For this recognition I am thankful to God and to all who have helped me and made this honor possible.

I am happy that the award links me, however remotely, with the name of a great soul, known to the world for his ideals, integrity, and devotion to service. Thus I am proud to receive the award in the name of Ramon Magsaysay — the illustrious son of the Philippines whom the world pauses to remember on his eighty-second birth anniversary today. For me, it is a moment of humility, a moment of awareness that it is the service that counts and not the individual who is its instrument. Therefore the award will always remind me of how much still remains to be done. It will inspire me to strive for excellence in my calling and to serve the best interests of my fellow citizens.

The award is also an honor that I shall not forget to share with the women of my country, since I am the first Malaysian woman to receive it. Also, I can honestly imagine no greater recognition for the archival institution that I represent. It will be a source of continuing inspiration to my colleagues at the National Archives of Malaysia, as well as to my counterparts in archival institutions elsewhere in Asia. All will be gratified to note that the unglamorous and unobtrusive work of the archivist does not go unacknowledged.

There were days when archives called to mind the image of a dusty storehouse of unused papers and faded documents. This impression, fortunately, is fast changing as the world moves from industrial to informational societies and as the archivist steps into society to become involved with the forces of change and community development. It is my earnest hope that archivists will continue to move in this direction without the slightest thought of reward or recognition. It is a moral responsibility, and one that also adds meaning to one’s role as a public servant.