Few cultures in Asia have been so profoundly affected by contact with the West as that of Filipinos. Spaniards and Americans brought to the islands, among other things, their own languages and literary forms. While Filipinos rejected some foreign elements, they adopted others and formed a unique Asian culture of their own. Inevitably, perhaps, the higher arts came to be dominated by Western models. Literature was written in Spanish, or English; everything else was mere Filipiniana. This was the view, at least, of the academic establishment and most members of the Spanish and English-speaking classes. BIENVENIDO LUMBERA has challenged this point of view and restored the poems and stories of vernacular writers to an esteemed place in the Philippine literary canon.

Born in 1932 in Lipa City, Batangas, LUMBERA attended local schools where his teachers remarked on his unusual facility with language. Encouraged, he became an avid reader and entered the University of Santo Tomas with the hope of becoming a creative writer. He published his first stories and poems in 1953, the year before he graduated. A Fulbright Fellowship took him to the University of Indiana where he earned a PhD in Comparative Literature and wrote a now-classic study of Tagalog poetry.

LUMBERA joined the English Department of Ateneo de Manila University and established himself as a drama critic and leading scholar of Tagalog literature. Aside from a handful of poems, however, everything he published was in English, the medium of instruction at the Ateneo and virtually all other Philippine universities. Stirred by the wave of passionate nationalism sweeping Philippine campuses in the late 1960s, LUMBERA included more vernacular readings in his literature and drama courses. And he began, haltingly, to deliver some of his lectures in Filipino, the Tagalog-based national language. In 1970 he became chair of Ateneo’s new department of Philippine Studies and, for the first time, published his own critical essays and reviews in Filipino.

When Martial Law was declared in 1972, LUMBERA left his post at the Ateneo and went underground. Captured in 1974, he spent nearly a year in detention, frankly relishing the companionship of his like-minded detainees. Two years after his release, he was named professor in the Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature at the University of the Philippines.

Years of startling productivity followed. LUMBERA wrote and lectured prolifically on literature, language, drama, and film. He composed librettos for new musical dramas such as Rama Hari and Bayani. He published three award-winning books of criticism and, with his wife Cynthia, an anthology of Philippine literature. He moved actively in literary circles and organizations, edited journals, and contributed introductions to dozens of books written by his friends and former students. As a teacher he mentored a new generation of literary scholars imbued with his own love for the country’s rich artistic traditions and languages.

Language, says LUMBERA, is the key to national identity. Until Filipino becomes the true lingua-franca of the Philippines, he believes, the gap between the well-educated classes and the vast majority of Filipinos cannot be bridged. “As long as we continue to use English,” he says,” our scholars and academics will be dependent on other thinkers,” and Filipino literature will be judged by Western standards and not, as it should be, by the standards of the indigenous tradition itself. Discerning such standards is an important part of LUMBERA’s work. He is learning, say his students, to see Filipino literature through Filipino eyes.

In electing BIENVENIDO LUMBERA to receive the 1993 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the Board of Trustees recognizes his asserting the central place of the vernacular tradition in framing a national identity for modern Filipinos.

Lubos akong nagpapasalamat sa karangalang iginawad sa akin. Alam kong ito ay galing hindi lamang sa Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation kundi galing na rin sa lahat ng dating estudyante ko at mga kagurong naging mabulaklak ang dila nang sila’y usisain tungkol sa akin.

In 1959, I was a graduate student at an American university who had proposed topic of his dissertation approved. “Bakit hindi paksaing Pilipino? Why not a Philippine topic?” The question started a process of reeducation that was to remake my consciousness as a colonized intellectual suddenly face-to-face with nationalism.

This evening, I stand before you, a recipient of a prestigious award, simply because somebody three decades ago has the impertinence to ask: “Bakit hindi paksaing Pilipino?” This Award is awesome, indeed, for it affirms a principal tenet of nationalist literary studies, the centrality of the vast body of native-language literature in the Filipino literary canon.

Kung may nakamtang mga tagumpay ang kilusang makabayan ng dekada sesenta at setenta, ito, sa palagay ko, ang pinakapangmatagalan. Ipagdiwang natin ang pagkaahon ng Panitikang Pilipino sa kumunoy ng neokolonyal na edukasyon!

Founded in 1926, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the Council of Islamic Scholars, is today Indonesia’s largest private organization. Its 30 million members are rooted in a vast network of pesantren, or Muslim schools, spread throughout Indonesia but concentrated heavily in East and Central Java. For centuries, scholars at these schools defined and preserved Java’s distinctive Muslim culture, and passed it on. When colonized by the Dutch and opened to new winds from the West, NU’s pesantren rejected the “modern” ideas embraced by many fellow Muslims and became bastions of tradition. And so, by and large, they remained until the early years of independence, when NU emerged briefly as a national political force.

By 1984, however, the year ABDURRAHMAN WAHID became chairman, Nahdlatul Ulama was locked in a no-win confrontation with Indonesia’s authoritarian New Order government. Bound to their rural villages, few of its members filled the ranks of Indonesia’s growing bureaucracy, its prospering business classes, or its powerful officer corps. WAHID immediately withdrew the organization from electoral politics and redirected NU to its original purposes, which were social and religious.

Born in East Java in 1940, WAHID received his formal education in Indonesia, Egypt, and Iraq and became a Muslim scholar in his own right. As the grandson of NU’s founding chairman, he is steeped in the Nahdlatul Ulama tradition. But his approach as chairman has been anything but traditional. To improve education, working conditions, nutrition, and health in NU villages, for example, he has initiated new pesantren-based community development projects. To give farmers and small businesses access to credit, he has launched a rural banking system. Now he envisions a great web of small-scale agro-industries, retail stores, rural banks, and mutual-help projects, raising NU’s villagers from poverty and economic dependency. “Islam,” he reminds skeptics, “is a liberating religion.”

“I am convinced,” says WAHID, “that the Indonesian silent majority is pluralistic in attitude and tolerant of diversity.” He therefore opposes the idea of using government to enforce the Islamic law code, or Shari’ah, and other manifestations of an Islamic state. He prefers, instead, a secular state in which the law applies equally to everyone and in which the values embodied in the Shari’ah become the standards by which Muslims choose to live. In an ultra-diverse nation, he believes, religious politics are dangerous and mitigate against the achievement of democracy. And he is convinced democracy is the best hope for Indonesia.

While WAHID supports government programs that benefit the people and pledges loyalty to Indonesia’s national ideology and the Constitution, he also speaks critically about the indefinite postponement of individual rights in the country, such as freedom of speech. In 1991 he courted official displeasure by agreeing to lead the Democracy Forum, a grouping of Muslim and Christian intellectuals convened to “discuss and reflect on the parameters of democracy” and to explore possible frameworks wherein the country’s citizens can be more effectively enfranchised. He hopes, thereby, to enlarge incrementally “the constituency for democracy” among Indonesians.

Multi-lingual WAHID is a gregarious, cosmopolitan man, equally at home in the village mosque, before the press in Jakarta, or addressing international meetings. Known for his humor, deft maneuvering, and outspoken views, he is sometimes at odds with the conservatives among NU’s vast membership. But in an old organization where many people want to put on the brakes, he says, someone has got to step on the gas.

In electing ABDURRAHMAN WAHID to receive the 1993 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his guiding Southeast Asia’s largest Muslim organization as a force for religious tolerance, fair economic development, and democracy in Indonesia.

In accepting the 1993 Magsaysay Award, I would like to express my gratitude to the board of trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for awarding this outstanding recognition and prestigious acknowledgment of achievements of fellow Asians.

The award is not merely a great personal honor to me and my family, it is also a recognition of the achievements of the Muslim community in Indonesia, at least as expressed by my organization, Nahdlatul Ulama. But it can also be seen as an acknowledgment of the fact that Indonesia as a nation displays currently the remarkable ability to sustain its commitment to a strong and highly pluralistic society without sacrificing the idea of progress. At the present, it often seems as though development should be attained by the splintering of societies and the dismantling of national entities to reemerge as new, smaller ones in the form of narrow-based “ethnic nation-states,” such as is now happening in some parts of Africa and central and eastern Europe. Indonesia’s ability to maintain its unity—which encapsulates within its borders hundreds of ethnic groups and local languages as well as separate geographical territories consisting of more than thirteen thousand islands inhabited by more than 180 million people—is indeed an achievement in itself. The remarkable fact is that, today, this unity is being achieved without significant religious misunderstandings or racial outbreaks.

The main reason for this fact is the country’s ability to avoid the trap of a protracted confrontation between religion and ideology. Islam, as the religion of the majority of the country’s population, is developing into a nonideological identity of Indonesia’s important religious movements within the community of Muslims. Initially, there was a confrontation between Islam, which was then presented in an ideological form, and Pancasila, the five principles of statehood of the Republic of Indonesia. The results of that confrontation were, on the one hand, the rebellion of the militant Muslim groups known in the 1950s as Darul Islam and, on the other, the deadlock in 1959 of the Constitutional Assembly entrusted with the task of drawing up a permanent constitution for the young republic.

As a nation, Indonesia was able to settle the matter by thrashing out the problem in the open. This resulted in the formulation in which Pancasila became the constitutional and ideological base for all Indonesian organizations, including religious ones. At the same time, religious organizations retained religion as their credal base. This acknowledgment of the different “spheres of influence” between religion and national ideology ensures the liberty for people of all religions to respect and follow the teachings of their respective faiths.

The acceptance of Pancasila ensures that all citizens enjoy equal status before the Constitution, regardless of their ethnic, religious, or cultural origins. The liberty to implement the teachings of one’s religion is tempered by the rights of the people from other religions to get full protection from the state against all form of discriminatory acts based on differences in their respective faiths.

My organization takes part in the nation’s gigantic effort to instill this sense of mutual respect among people from different faiths. It is a very complex task considering the fact that political interests of competing power centers and cultural biases inherited from the past tend to nurture sectarian trends and attitudes in the life of a nation, especially in a pluralistic but still poor one like Indonesia. Especially troublesome is the legacy of religious laws that govern all aspects of life. A politically motivated call for the “Islamization of national law,” for instance, would create havoc in the fundamental task of ensuring just treatment and equal status before the law for all citizens. That is why we in Indonesia are still faced with the task of educating the population at large to nurture this very fundamental and basic notion.

But that very task brings with it the imperative of establishing democracy as the main societal framework of the nation’s life. Only in a democratic society can just treatment and equal status be realized, although not all democratic entities do, in fact, deliver these noble ideals. In this sense, the strenuous efforts to develop religious tolerance in a society necessitates a consistent and strong commitment to the democratization process. Between democracy and religious tolerance, there exists a symbolic relationship; one is necessary for the life of the other.

At another end of the rope that binds democracy to religious tolerance is the equally difficult and complex task of socioeconomic transformation: lifting the citizens from poverty. Without a more equitable distribution of wealth, all efforts to promote religious tolerance and democracy come to nothing. Widespread poverty, which leaves people tied to ignorance, backwardness, and deprivation, sustains all kinds of age-old prejudices and injustices. It is clear, then, that socioeconomic transformation, which improves common people’s living standards, is a conditio sine qua non for democracy and religious tolerance.

I would like to conclude here by expressing my satisfaction that so many people—especially the young generation—now participate in this endeavor to serve those three noble virtues in an interrelated way, with great pride and firm confidence that history will redeem the value of mankind through their efforts.

Even today as we approach the twenty-first century, many rural Asians continue to live and die well beyond the pale of rudimentary health services, not to mention modern medical technology. India’s rural women are doubly vexed, for they are handicapped both by poverty and physical isolation as well as by their subordinate position as females in the social order. Dr. BANOO COYAJI has confronted this cruel state of affairs in Maharashtra State, where the modern city of Pune lies adjacent to a parched and impoverished hinterland.

Born into a well-to-do Parsi family, BANOO COYAJI was educated in Bombay and earned an MD degree in Obstetrics and Gynecology. In 1944 she embarked upon her medical career at Pune’s King Edward Memorial Hospital (KEM), a privately funded maternity hospital of some forty beds. As its director and chief medical officer, COYAJI guided KEM’s growth into a full-service hospital of some 550 beds and as a center for teaching and medical research.

Discerning the gap between medical services available to Pune’s urbanites and those in rural areas, COYAJI launched the Vadu Rural Health Project in 1977. In cooperation with the state government of Maharashtra, she trained a team of community health guides to bring critical public health education and first aid to villagers. Working primarily through women’s groups, COYAJI’s community workers bore basic lessons in sanitation, hygiene, and nutrition to fellow villagers and promoted acceptance of family planning. They referred people at risk to KEM’s doctor-staffed rural medical center in Vadu or to the main hospital in Pune. At periodic “camps,” KEM doctors immunized the children and treated ear, nose and throat ailments, and cataracts. Meanwhile, researchers at KEM probed rural health issues scientifically and monitored the dramatic decline in infant mortality and other positive trends in the area.

Surveying the strengths and weaknesses of her program in the mid-1980s, COYAJI noted that the needs of pre-adolescent and adolescent girls were almost wholly neglected. Burdened by poverty and their low status as females, these young women entered upon their adult roles as mothers and breadwinners with little formal schooling and virtually no instruction in vital matters of family life. Through the Young Women’s Health and Development Project, inaugurated in 1988, she introduced community welfare workers to eleven villages. Their task is to instruct girls and young women in new livelihood skills such as sewing and embroidery and in other practical arts. They also provide essential information about women’s health and family life and encourage frank discussions about caste and gender relations. Songs, games, and holiday festivities complement the formal classes. Through their ongoing exposure to the program, young women are gaining confidence to pursue educations and to resist unwanted early marriages. On their own initiative, several of them now lead village cleanliness and tree planting campaigns and teach their mothers to read.

Tireless at seventy-five, COYAJI carries on her busy life overseeing the work of KEM and several other projects. She eagerly works with government, believing that private organizations must do so in order to spread the benefits of successful micro-projects to citizens at large. COYAJI’s thoughts today are often focused on India’s women. Their enlightenment, she believes, is the key to a more humane society for India, a “better tomorrow” in which women “walk shoulder to shoulder with men, matching their stride.”

In electing BANOO COYAJI to receive the 1993 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes her mobilizing the resources of a modern urban hospital to bring better health and brighter hopes to Maharashtra’s rural women and their families.

Thank you very much for electing me as the 1993 Ramon Magsaysay awardee for public service.

I feel particularly privileged not only because it is such a prestigious award but mainly because it has been established in honor of your great president, the late Mr. Ramon Magsaysay, who rendered such distinguished service to the people of the Philippines when they needed it most. I bow my head in homage to him on this, his birthday anniversary. “He worked to build a nation—a world—in which all people were free and lived in honor and peace one with another. The world is richer and better because Ramon Magsaysay lived. His spirit will continue to be an inspiration.”

I must confess that I have not done any great public service nor any biomedical research, outstanding or otherwise. I have only done what I thought was necessary for the underserved and underprivileged people living in the slums of Pune City and in the three hundred villages of Pune District in rural Maharashtra.

I humbly accept this award in the name of KEM Hospital-Pune, the KEM Hospital Research Centre, its very supportive Council of Management, and my colleagues—the heads of departments; the consultants; the residents; the nursing, administrative, technical, and other staff, whose unstinted loyalty, support and hard work has made this day possible.

I have been fortunate in having helping hands throughout my life. I am grateful to them all. First of all, my late parents Bapaimai and Pestonji Kapadia, who endowed me with their genes and provided the environment for me to flourish, and my late husband Jehangir for his lifetime support. I was educated in the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Pune. I am grateful to the nuns and priests who inculcated in me real values that have stood me in good stead all my life. I am grateful to the professors of Grant Medical College and my mentors who guided and encouraged me throughout my life.

I thank the trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation and all others who have extended their courtesy, kindness, and warm hospitality from the moment I landed in Manila.

I thank you all once again for the honor you have done me—a humble community health worker. I accept it on behalf of the women of India. I rededicate the few years left of my life to the service of underprivileged, dispossessed men, women, and children, and particularly the most vulnerable of them in our society—women and girls—to their health and development in the sacred memory of your great president Ramon Magsaysay.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, eighteen-year-old NOBORU IWAMURA was busy conducting an experiment in the laboratory of the Hiroshima Institute of Engineering and Technology when the atomic bomb exploded just 1.2 kilometers away. Heavy cement walls collapsed over him. Three days later rescue workers found him alive beneath the debris. Of his classmates, only he survived. Contemplating the loss of his friends and the miracle of his own survival, IWAMURA resolved to become a doctor and to live his life for others.

IWAMURA undertook his medical training at Tottori University School of Medicine and, in 1958, joined its faculty as an associate professor. In 1960 he applied to go abroad with the Japan Overseas Christian Medical Cooperative Service. With his wife, IWAMURA spent the next eighteen years in Nepal. Working at first in the city of Kathmandu, he learned that many of his patients reached the hospital after trekking great distances and, all too often, only when their diseases were already fatally advanced. Why should sick people imperil themselves trying to reach me, he wondered, when I, a healthy doctor, can go to them?

IWAMURA became a “barefoot doctor,” striking out on foot and on horseback into the mountain fastnesses where many Nepalis dwelled without benefit of medical services and where tuberculosis was pandemic. In time he came to understand the relationship between the sickness of villagers and their poverty end ignorance. IWAMURA began experimenting with public health and livelihood projects. In doing so, he encountered a cardinal truth of rural development: “Uplift” programs driven solely by outside donors and specialists are bound to fail. Only when such efforts are geared toward self-reliance and when these are led by dedicated people from within the communities themselves do they truly succeed and endure.

In 1980, having returned to Japan, IWAMURA joined the International Center for Medical Cooperation at the Kobe University School of Medicine. From 1985 to 1987 he led a Japanese government team assisting in primary health care in Thailand. By this time IWAMURA had traveled throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America and discovered the ubiquity of the sort of poverty he had first encountered in Nepal. Yet to IWAMURA, the Japanese seemed to be enjoying lives of abundance without being aware of their country’s relationship to its poorer Asian neighbors, or its dependence upon them. Calling upon the insights of his years in Nepal and Thailand, he began guiding the philanthropic instincts of his fellow Japanese to focus on urgent needs abroad, and on modest but practical ways in which these needs can be met.

In 1980 IWAMURA founded the Peace, Health, and Human Development Foundation (PHD) to bring grass-roots community leaders from Nepal and Southeast Asia to Japan for technical training. And in 1985 he established the International Human Resources Institute to sponsor young rural development workers for their master’s degrees in Community Development at the University of the Philippines in Diliman and Los Banos. IWAMURA takes a personal interest in choosing students for the program, prizing above all those candidates who are committed to carry on in community work and who possess a missionary spirit.

Fearing the genetic consequences of the nuclear blast, the Iwamuras chose to have no children of their own. While in Nepal, however, they raised and educated twelve Nepali orphans. These children are grown now. And it is with them, each year in Nepal, that 66-year-old IWAMURA celebrates Christmas.

In electing NOBORU IWAMURA to receive the 1993 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, the Board of Trustees recognizes his heeding the call of the true physician in a lifetime of service to Japan’s Asian neighbors.

To receive this award is the greatest honor. I feel very lucky.

Many years ago I was sent by the Japan Overseas Christian Medical Service to Nepal. For eighteen years, I worked among the rural people there; I treated their sick, learned their culture, and set up grassroots programs to control tuberculosis in the most remote villages.

By working closely with these rural people, I came to see that disease and poverty were linked in a vicious circle that enlarged the gap between rich and poor. And I came to see that, in poor countries, this same vicious circle often undermined the stability of the political order and thus caused even more misery. Over the years, I observed this not only in Nepal but in several other countries in Asia and the Third World.

How can this hateful chain of poverty, disease, and disorder be eliminated? I asked myself this question. And I posed it to others such as Dr. Krasae Chanawongse of Thailand and Dr. Juan Flavier of the Philippines. It seemed to me—to us—that donations of money and materials to poor people did not get to the heart of the problem, especially when these donations were channeled through governments and large aid-giving agencies. The real solution to improving living conditions and livelihoods among Asia’s rural poor was self-reliant development. Individuals and communities had to learn to act for themselves. And for this to happen, effective and committed community leaders were indispensable.

This is why, in 1985, I founded the International Human Resources Institute (IHI) in Tokyo. Since then, IHI has been providing promising youths from Nepal, Thailand, Japan, and the Philippines the opportunity to develop themselves as community leaders. We help them through advanced training at two branches of the University of the Philippines—the College of Social Work and Community Development in Diliman and the College of Agriculture in Los Banos—as well as at the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction in Cavite. During two years of living and studying together, the IHI Fellows also share their cultures, habits, and ways of life with each other.

I am very happy to receive this award in the presence of the IHI Fellows who are with us today. It is my wish to donate the stipend from this award to support and further the activities of the International Human Resources Institute.

Everywhere in Asia farmers are called upon not only to feed their growing nations but also to produce rice and other commodities for export. In Vietnam, efforts to meet this challenge are complicated by the troubling legacies of recent war and economic policies that stifled individual enterprise and inadvertently limited growth. Helping Vietnam’s farmers to overcome these impediments, and to thrive, has been the life’s work of VO-TONG XUAN.

Born to a poor family in southern Vietnam, XUAN learned English as a boy and won a scholarship to the University of the Philippines in Los Banos. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agricultural chemistry and was appointed research fellow at the nearby International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Returning to South Vietnam in 1971, XUAN joined the faculty of the University of Cantho and headed the department of Agronomy. He completed his PhD at Kyushu University in 1975.

Still abroad when the Saigon government collapsed, XUAN elected to forsake safer and more lucrative possibilities elsewhere and returned home to resume his post at Cantho. Overcoming administrative and political obstacles in the now reunified Socialist Republic of Vietnam, he managed to extend his activities beyond the university and into the fields. A soil scientist, he explained, needs to be with farmers.

Understanding the complex environment of the individual farmer was the key, XUAN thought, to improving his country’s agricultural productivity. With farmers, he studied the intricate relationships between soil and water, plants and animals, machines, credit, markets, and government, indeed even between men and women—the whole “farming system.” This holistic approach yielded more practical solutions to farmers’ problems than those suggested by the more narrowly scientific approach, or by ideology. Through extension work and weekly radio and TV programs, XUAN introduced his innovations to farmers. They succeeded, and XUAN’s credibility rose.

XUAN pondered the lessons of “farming systems analysis.” Crop yields increase, he noted, when land tenure is secure and when the state interferes as little as possible in determining prices and distributing essential inputs. Moreover, farmers are more likely to invest in new tools and machines if they are permitted to own them themselves. Genial and self-effacing, XUAN worked patiently within the system to promote such reforms. His efforts were timely. New policies providing for long-term land leases and production incentives in 1989 led to Vietnam’s first post-war rice boom and yielded a large surplus for export. XUAN cautioned, however, that further reforms and vast improvements to the rural infrastructure are needed to sustain such a boon.

Despite the country’s isolation, XUAN assiduously cultivated Vietnam’s links to the outside world. He attended international meetings and arranged scholarships abroad for his promising young faculty members. With his help, international NGOs established grass-roots programs in Vietnam, and IRRI resumed its research there. In 1988, he helped to found the region-wide Asian Farming Systems Association. In time, XUAN became vice-rector of the university and won a seat in Vietnam’s National Assembly.

Today, 52-year-old XUAN uses his higher profile to plead the cause of Vietnam’s rural folk and to promote better training for the country’s up-and-coming scientists. Still a working scientist himself, he stays attuned to life on the farm and to promising new developments: nowadays, small-scale agro-industries are blossoming everywhere in the countryside.

In electing VO-TONG XUAN to receive the 1993 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes his combining practical scientific research and effective advocacy to improve the lives of Vietnam’s farmers.

This is a great moment for me to be bestowed this award named after the great president of the Philippines, Ramon Magsaysay. President Magsaysay won the hearts of the Filipino people because “he cared for all people as individuals and believed in their dignity and importance.” His great ideals inspired my own thinking during my student days at the University of the Philippines at Los Baños during the 1960s. With my wife, I strove to belong to the circle of those who place the interests of the people above all things in life.

As a youth from a poor family, I had to work to supplement my parents’ meager income, to help take care of my two brothers and three sisters, and to support myself in school. As a newspaper boy, I hopped from one passenger bus to another early every morning. At night, I tutored children who were better off than I was. I learned to treasure the value of labor and I determined to work on the side of the less privileged people in my country. In particular, I was determined to help educate millions of Vietnamese in the vital field of agriculture, and to imbue them not only with technical competence but also with ideals that promote national development.

I presented my Doctor of Agriculture dissertation at Kyushu University in 1975, just before the end of the Vietnam War. I then found myself rushing home even as thousands of Vietnamese were fleeing in the other direction.

The first two months under the new government were full of joy and anxiety: joy because the Vietnamese nation was finally unified, but anxiety because of uncertainty about whether people who worked under the old government would be welcome to participate in the postwar reconstruction. But the new university leaders started assigning me responsibilities and I soon found out that the ideas of my life converged with the goal of the new government: “For the happiness of the people.” This ideal has given me and my wife magical strength to overcome most of the difficulties and inconveniences in our life.

Peace in the Mekong Delta allowed agricultural scientists to infiltrate areas that had been untouchable during the war. We walked through thousands of hectares of burnt rice fields, withered forests, and deserted meadows. We traveled by sampan, bicycle, and motorcycle; sometimes we had to cling to the door of the last passenger bus. Yet we did not feel exhausted. On the contrary, we felt happy because each day we grew professionally and accumulated practical experiences that were not available in our textbooks. From these encounters with reality, I could see why the lack of appropriate science and technology was the main cause of the backwardness of agricultural development of the Mekong Delta.

I therefore concentrated on two things: first, training agricultural graduates and agricultural extension agents in research in food production, particularly pest-resistant rice varieties and integrated farming techniques on difficult soils; and second, transferring appropriate technologies to government administrators who administered the country’s food production plans.

At the university, I integrated classroom instruction with scientific research and extension work. Outside the university, I concentrated on multifaceted agricultural extension projects: from weekly TV programs to informal lectures during provincial or district cadres’ meetings; from discussions with top political leaders to talks with farmers. Eventually, I was able to convince the government to adopt agricultural policies that stimulate farmers to use new technologies for improving household incomes. Today I feel happy seeing the successes of our students who have become young cadres working in the agricultural offices of their respective localities, and I am even happier seeing the smiles of our collaborating farmers.

Obviously, these successes do not belong to myself alone but to a larger body of people. Being elected the 1993 Ramon Magsaysay awardee for government service, I recognize that this great honor must be accredited first to the doi moi (renovation) policy of the Vietnamese government leaders who have approved and supported my ideas, and to my colleagues and sympathizers who have been collaborating with me in putting my ideas into reality. Many high officials in the Council of Ministers, the Ministry of Education and Training, the Ministry of Agriculture, the provincial and district governments, and the University of Cantho have been promoting my work and reiterating my faith in the bright future of Vietnam. My collaborators include colleagues at the University of Cantho; undergraduate and postgraduate students now working in various agricultural organizations in the country; scientists in various provinces of Vietnam; many foreign experts and leaders of several international organizations; many newspaper, radio, and TV reporters; and, of course, the farmers of Vietnam themselves.

Finally, I wish to dedicate this honor to my parents, to my wife and three children, and to my brothers and sisters who have sacrificed long days, weeks, and months without their son, husband, father, and brother so that I could devote my time to serve other people. My wife, particularly, has been the most steadfast home base, always managing things to make sure that any plan I am involved in can be accomplished.

The road ahead is still far and full of humps and potholes. But the path we have chartered, I believe, will create a new environment for the Vietnamese people to move faster toward prosperity. I pledge to try my best to continue the work I have chosen for so that I can be forever proud of this prestigious award, and so that I can live up to the expectations of the people I mentioned above and of the Ramon Magsaysay Ward Foundation, to whom I am very grateful. I beg your continuing patience and valuable support to help me fulfill my ideal.