For Timor Leste, centuries of colonial rule and decades of bitter civil strife have killed a third of the country’s population in its struggle to be a free and independent nation. It remains a fragile state, burdened by political dissension, violence, a weak economy, and widespread poverty.  This is a situation in which the work of civil society and ordinary citizens is urgent and invaluable.

MARIA DE LOURDES MARTINS CRUZ, widely known as MANA LOU,was born one of seven children of a well-to-do coffee planter in Liquica, Timor Leste.  Displaying an affinity for religious work as a child, she studied at a Jesuit institute in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where she was exposed to the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutierrez and the pedagogy of Paulo Freire.  She then joined the Canossian Sisters congregation, but left before taking her final vows when she discerned that her personal vocation lay outside the convent walls.

In 1989, she founded Instituto Seculare Maun Alin Iha Kristu (ISMAIK), or Secular Institute of Brothers and Sisters in Christ, a lay institute of men and women dedicated to uplifting the poorest of the poor through projects in health care, education, farming, animal husbandry, and other self-help initiatives. MANA LOU carried out her work in the midst of Timor Leste’s tumultuous transition to independence in 2002,  when the Indonesian army occupied the country and fierce fighting broke out between pro-Indonesia and pro-independence Timorese militias.  Boldly crossing battle lines, she talked to Indonesian soldiers, warring militias, and refugees, spreading, by force of her spirit of solidarity, a gospel of love and peace.  She built a refuge in her father’s coffee estate in Dare, in the hills above Dili; in time this refuge would include a school for girls, orphanages, a home for the sick, and a place where people of opposing faiths and politics could find safety and peace.

From this beginning, ISMAIK has expanded to more than ten such houses across the country.  Called “schools of life” and led by ISMAIK members and volunteers, these houses serve, according to need, as centers for moral and spiritual formation, skills and livelihood training, care centers for tuberculosis patients and children with disabilities, and hubs for community participation.  In partnership with an American doctor, MANA LOU also established Bairo-Ata Clinic, a large, free clinic for the poor that averages 300 patients daily and is the nation’s largest provider of tuberculosis treatment.

Typically, however, ISMAIK’s initiatives are small-scale, needs-based, person-to-person, and practical.  They put the premium on values of self-reliance, the use of locally available resources such as the promotion of herbal medicine and food gardens, mutual help in projects such like labor-pooling for house construction,  and moral and spiritual formation.  MANA LOU says, “We see that Jesus was very simple.  He was impassioned, always ready to do something, ready to act.” “Hence,” she says, “people should take control: if a road needs fixing, we fix it; if someone needs help in farm work, we help.”

Transcending the ethnic, religious, and political divisions in Timorese society, MANA LOU is animated not only by her faith, but also by her love for her people and her conviction that building independent, productive, and ethical persons is fundamental in her country, where a sense of national identity and civic consciousness are as yet undeveloped. “Ours is a new nation,” she says. “It will need people to have a heart big enough to love and bodies prepared to do hard work.”

In electing MARIA DE LOURDES MARTINS CRUZ to receive the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes her pure humanitarianism in uplifting Timor Leste’s poor, her courageous pursuit of social justice and peace, and her nurturing the development of autonomous, self-reliant, caring citizens, so vital in new, post-conflict nations in the world.

Greetings of peace, solidarity and fraternity to all! My honour and gratitude to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for selecting me to receive this award. I thank you, President Abella, and your team for your support. I was full of dreams growing up in a small village, blessed by family and nature in a coffee plantation. All those dreams were destroyed by war; war kills people in ways worse than animals. I started to revolt when I became a victim. But God led me to a different path.

During my retreat, I asked Him what should I do? In the stillness of Jesus’ suffering image, I heard a voice say: Why do you search for Me in the convent? You see, I suffered a lot in a remote area with poor, disadvantaged, illiterate and suffering people. They don’t have any support. I really need your help! This is the real secret of my life’s vocation.

Returning to East Timor after my studies, I was motivated to work, physically and spiritually, to establish IS-MAIK to serve the poor, even if I began with no funds.

It is not easy to find volunteers to solve social problems in rural areas. So we established branches with like-minded groups, places to empower poor and disadvantaged people like the youth, teach them the realities of life and educate them. We started schools for life, where people learn in a practical way and live with nature; in the process, they developed beliefs that made them work together to transform society. It is like building a house carefully one brick at a time.

We listen to poor people’s voices in times of difficulty and conflict. A genuine concern for the poor and marginalized motivated members and the IS-MAIK family, in a chaotic situation, to be unafraid to take risks, organize teams to bring people to safety and peace. We worked with the police, military and militias, and the international community so that they show respect for human rights. With support from civil and military authorities, IS-MAIK cared for refugees or displaced people to feel safe and respect life. We fed them, gave medical assistance to those in need and protection to those in danger or were “suspects”. We listened to those who experienced violence, helped them settle down with prayers and reflection. This is the work IS-MAIK had done, especially before the 1999 referendum.

With Dr. Daniel Murphy, IS-MAIK established Bairo Pite clinic in September 1999. We treat people using herbal and natural medicine until help from the international community and emergency teams arrive. This was the first clinic to respond to all emergency situations after the conflict, with the dedication and hard work of Dr. Dan and his staff. IS-MAIK intends to continue the clinic’s work, help people with tuberculosis, and children and mothers who lack nutrition. This IS-MAIK offers to the nation as part of its contribution to build a caring society.

I could not have done all the work and mission without the support of all my brothers and sisters. I cannot mention everyone by name—all your names are written in my heart, and I carry you on my shoulders. Our work and mission is not yet finished; there is still plenty to do, I continue to count on you all, so please come and help! God blessed you all.

The five-year Cambodian genocide of 1975-79, that caused the death of at least two million Cambodians, is one of the most horrific episodes in the long, dark history of crimes against humanity. It is imperative to the cause of justice that this horror is not forgotten. YOUK CHHANG, one of its survivors, has devoted his life to the monumental task of documenting and memorializing the genocide to serve the aims of judicial redress, national reconciliation, and collective healing. More importantly, his work assures that the past is truthfully preserved for present and future generations so that it will not be distorted or ever repeated.

Born in Phnom Penh, YOUK was fourteen years old when his family was forced out of their home by Khmer Rouge operatives to work like slaves in a rural commune. He saw his family reduced to extreme privation; was himself tortured and detained; even worse, YOUK suffered the trauma of the death of his father, five of his siblings, and nearly sixty of his relatives. Able to escape across the Thai border to freedom at the age of seventeen, he found his way as a refugee to the United States. Years later, he would earn a graduate degree in political science and chose to return to Cambodia when civic order had been restored, enrolling in the human rights and democracy training programs of the International Republican Institute and the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).

YOUK found his life-long mission in 1995, when the Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Project engaged him to head its Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), charged with investigating and documenting Khmer Rouge atrocities. Two years later, DC-Cam became an independent institute, directed and operated entirely by Cambodians. As its executive director from 1995 to the present, YOUK expanded DC-Cam’s work beyond documentation in aid of the Khmer Rouge War Crimes Trials that began in 2009; he pursued the broader task of promoting “memory and justice as the critical foundations for the rule of law and genuine national reconciliation.”

The scope of this work has been immense, arduous, and painfully difficult in Cambodia’s transitioning, polarized society. Despite the destruction, loss, or absence of records, DC-Cam was able to collect and assemble over one million documents, providing over half of these as evidence in the war crimes trials. They digitized these documents for online public access; produced digital mapping of over 23,000 mass graves in Cambodia’s “killing fields”; excavated samples of human skeletal remains for forensic examination; conducted interviews with over 10,000 persons, both victims and perpetrators; implemented research, publishing, and educational programs on genocide, transitional justice and human rights; and promoted public participation in the whole process. Yet YOUK’s work is not only turned towards the past, it also looks to Cambodia’s future: he recognizes that preserving and understanding the past must serve as a powerful safeguard against all those who may seek to distort or erase it.

Today, YOUK is engaged in building the Sleuk Rith Institute, an ambitious project which will house a museum, archives and library; a research center; and a graduate program on crimes against humanity to sustain what DC-Cam has accomplished and serve as a resource center for a world deeply scarred and still threatened by genocide.

All this is not an abstract mission for YOUK but one that is profoundly personal. Of his mother, who, borrowing five US dollars, pushed him to flee Cambodia and whom he would only see some twenty years later, he says: “I do this for my mother who suffered… I want her to be a free woman, not to carry all the tragedy in her heart and in her life.” It is a deeply-felt commitment he has widened into the work of remembrance, justice, and healing for all Cambodians.

In electing YOUK CHHANG to receive the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his great, unstinting labor in preserving the memory of the Cambodian genocide, and his leadership and vision in transforming the memory of horror into a process of attaining and preserving justice in his nation and the world.

Salamat Po. I am humbled by this most prestigious award. In receiving it, I am reminded of a thought I often have as a survivor: “If you have survived genocide, you are blessed in many ways. You can begin again. You find a place to live, get a job, make friends, and start a family. But physical survival is the easy part. You can also be unlucky in just as many ways. Genocide breaks you. Your heart aches from losing the people you loved. You are haunted by your memories. You feel guilt at merely surviving when so many died. And worst of all, you can lose hope.”

I am reminded every day by survivors and the people who advocate on their behalf, to not lose hope. I take heart in the relentless strength of survivors and the heroic, kind-hearted people who help them. This award is a reminder, on behalf of my mother and all mothers in Cambodia who have survived the genocide, of the kindness of the Filipinos. The Filipinos opened their country to Cambodian refugees in the wake of the Khmer Rouge regime’s collapse in the 1980s. The Philippine government and people, along with other countries including the United States, rose to the occasion in helping us. In receiving this award, I want to take the opportunity to thank the Philippines for their kindness back then. Your help to the Cambodian people was a shining example to not give up hope.

I also want to say that it is important to remember the mistakes of the past. We must remember mistakes as a decisive act at all levels of society from individuals to communities and governments. Remembering mistakes is not easy because it requires us to consciously accept additional pain in the present so that our children will not relive our mistakes in the future. But this is the pathway to justice. Justice will always begin and end with the duty of memory.

Again, salamat po, mula sa kaibuturan ng aking puso.

Poverty eradication. Indigenous people’s rights. Social justice. Peace building. Each of these issues involves complex aspirations, seemingly intractable conflicts, radical implications. All are interconnected, elusive, yet crucial to building a progressive, inclusive society. In the Philippines, no one private citizen has been as directly engaged in addressing all these issues as HOWARD DEE.

DEE was born to a middle-class Chinese family engaged in the lumber business. Living in Tondo, Manila, working in a lumber yard while a student, and raised in the values of frugality, hard work, and concern for the poor, DEE developed his social sympathies early. After his studies at Manila’s University of the East, he carved out a successful business career as shareholder and president of United Laboratories (Unilab), a pioneering local pharmaceuticals company. Even then, his interest in social work was evident, when in 1970 he helped establish Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP), composed of business corporations, modeled after a Venezuelan initiative in which member-companies commit to donate 2% of their profits to social development. PBSP was a response to a deep political and economic crisis that would lead to the declaration of martial law in 1972.

This historical moment marked a crisis of conscience for DEE. He withdrew from Unilab; feeling that PBSP was “too little, too late,” he decided to commit himself wholly to the cause of social development. With Jesuit priest Francisco Araneta he founded Assisi Development Foundation (ADF) in 1975, a foundation that, invoking the saint who loved the poor and lived with them, seeks to “pursue peace through development with justice.”

Peace, development, and justice are the intertwined issues driving DEE and ADF. In over four decades of work, ADF has implemented 4,123 projects that have served 10.5 million Filipinos. It incubated ASA Philippines, established in 2004, that has become one of the largest, best-performing microfinance institutions in the country.  Working with the Catholic Church, ADF initiated Hapag-Asa, an integrated nutrition program that has fed 1.8 million children. During the period 1998-2002, DEE initiated a concerted response to life-threatening emergencies in Mindanao, southern Philippines, caused by drought and famine, people displaced in the armed conflict between Muslim separatists and the government, and the deportations of Filipinos from Sabah. Mobilizing a multisectoral task force of corporate, civil society, media, and church groups, the Tabang Mindanao (“Help Mindanao”) program provided over 2,000,000 families with food relief, shelter, water systems, farm support, and health and education assistance. Subsequently, ADF took up the cause of indigenous peoples (IP) rights through legislative advocacy, scholarships, leadership training, and IP development programs, like the innovative Pamulaan Center for Indigenous People’s Education in Mindanao.

DEE does not present himself as a “leader” but a “convenor” choosing to remain mostly invisible as he resolutely assembles people, institutions, and resources in addressing a societal problem. It is in this role that his impact has been far-reaching. He is a person who thinks strategically and works quietly but effectively, one whose dedication to social service and personal integrity are unquestioned. For this reason, he has been asked by government and civic leaders to lead peace-building and reform initiatives such as the National Peace Conference (1990-92), Social Reform Council (1993-95), Peace Talks with the Communist Party (1993-94), and the Bangsamoro Basic Law Peace Council (2015). That he did not shirk the challenge of facing the most intractable issues demonstrates his deep capacity for service. That he served five Philippine administrations in four different capacities shows the deep trust he enjoys across sectoral and party lines.

If DEE sees his many engagements as part of an integral whole, the work he does is also integral to the man. Deeply spiritual, DEE explains himself thus, “Loving others is an expression of being human. We can’t be human unless we are just.”

In electing HOWARD DEE to receive the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his quietly heroic half-century of service to the Filipino people, his abiding dedication to the pursuit of social justice and peace in achieving dignity and progress for the poor, and his being, by his deeds, a true servant of his faith and an exemplary citizen of his nation.

It is with a deep sense of profound gratitude, and unworthiness, that I receive this great and distinct honor, the Ramon Magsaysay Award for 2018. The accomplishments attributed to me, in truth, are not mine alone, but of many co-workers. We receive this Award on behalf of our Lord and Master for whom we work: the “Omnipotent One in Three”. He is our motivation and our inspiration, the source of our strength and the strength of our cause. All that we do is to follow His commands and do His holy will. Nothing is impossible for Him.

There are a number of people I wish to thank. First of all, my wife Betty and my family for their love, prayers and sacrifices to support and sustain my work. Then, I wish to thank the five presidents of the Philippine Republic who gave me their trust and the privilege to work for five administrations: their Excellencies, President Cory Aquino, President Fidel Ramos, President Joseph Estrada, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and President Benigno Simeon Aquino III.

There are many colleagues, associates and co-workers who gave me invaluable help in my social apostolate of 50 years. I wish to thank all of you: in public service, in the peace office, in foundation work and development agencies, local and international, for your dedication to the cause of the poor and for your work for justice, peace and development. Special thanks to our Catholic bishops, priests, religious and laity and to our Muslim brothers and indigenous peoples of the Philippines.

Some of you have written me: and I detect a general sense of discouragement and even despair during these difficult times. This is my advice: “Do not be discouraged. Do not despair. It is in the darkness that our lamps should be lit. It is in the darkness that we see the stars of heaven. The victory promised by our Blessed Mother at Fatima is near. Goodness and righteousness will triumph! Justice and peace will reign in our land.”

And finally, my heartfelt thanks to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for keeping alive the legacy of President Magsaysay’s greatness of spirit, so that “those who have less in life would have more in law.”

Mabuhay Ramon Magsaysay! Mabuhay Pilipinas, ang bayang magiliw! Aming ligaya na pag may mang-aapi ang mamatay ng dahil sa iyo!

In few countries is the contrast between great wealth and extreme poverty as stark as in India. Of the latter, a popular image are its street people, dirty, disheveled, and famished, huddled on pavements, in train stations, bus stands, and public shrines. An estimated 400,000 of them are mentally ill, victimized not so much by poverty as by a problem society has not sufficiently understood and addressed: the problem of mental health. Stigmatized and feared, the response of many to these street persons is to pretend they do not exist.

One man chose not to pretend. Psychiatrist BHARAT VATWANI was out dining in a restaurant with his wife Smitha, also a psychiatrist, when they were appalled at the sight of a thin, unkempt man drinking water from a street canal. Taking time to talk to the man, a mentally-afflicted college graduate, they decided to bring him to their clinic to be washed and treated. This show of empathy was not entirely surprising. VATWANI knew what poverty was like. Losing his father when he was only 12 years old forced him and his brothers to take odd jobs, like peddling books door-to-door. Struggling through school as a self-supporting student, VATWANI successfully completed his medical studies in psychiatry at Grant Medical College and at G.S. Medical College & Hospital, both in Mumbai.

After their encounter with the man who drank water from a canal, Dr. VATWANI and his wife started an informal operation of bringing mentally-ill street persons to their private clinic for treatment. This eventually led to the establishment of Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation in 1988, aimed at rescuing mentally-ill persons living on the streets; providing free shelter, food, and psychiatric treatment; and reuniting them with their families.

Starting with a two-room tenement that could take only three people at a time, Shraddha drew public attention when they rescued and treated a street person who turned out to be a respected lecturer at a Mumbai art school, who had inexplicably disappeared. Learning about what the VATWANIs had done, the school’s faculty and students organized a major art exhibition that drew 141 participating artists in India and abroad, and successfully raised US$22,357. Using this seed money, the VATWANIs bought a piece of property in Mumbai for a 20-bed facility that they opened in 1997; the unexpected donation inspired them to further expand their work with the help of private donors, volunteer professionals, and social workers. In 2006, they moved to a bigger 120-patient facility in Karjat outside Mumbai, which had five buildings on a 6.5-acre land. By then, they had strengthened their three-phase therapeutic program, consisting of the rescue and treatment of mentally-ill street persons, reuniting patients with their families, and promoting awareness of mental health in communities.

Their rescue work has been aided by the police, social workers, and referrals. Shraddha’s free custodial care and treatment ranges from personal hygiene, medical check-ups, psychiatric treatment, to appropriate medication, all done in the open, healing environment of the Karjat facility where patients can engage in simple farm activities and find solace in a multi-religious meditation center. The foundation tracks patients’ families, arranges reunions, and uses such opportunities to spread a supportive and enlightened understanding of mental health among the families and their communities. In a one-of-a-kind mission that began in 1988, VATWANI and the foundation have by now rescued, treated, and reintegrated into their families and communities more than 7,000 of India’s mentally-ill roadside destitute, with a remarkable reunion rate of 95%.

VATWANI’s painstaking, humane undertaking has had to contend with numerous challenges. A deeply spiritual person, the good doctor is often beset by doubts whether he has done enough, given the magnitude of the mental health problem in his country. Notwithstanding these self-doubts, he remains confident in his faith that in the end, “Good work shall continue when there is inherent goodness in the work.”

In electing BHARAT VATWANI to receive the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his tremendous courage and healing compassion in embracing India’s mentally-afflicted destitute, and his steadfast and magnanimous dedication to the work of restoring and affirming the human dignity of even the most ostracized in our midst.

From the beginning of Time, the world has always been a conflict between between Right and Wrong, between Truth and Evil, between Justice and Injustice. Ultimately, community leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Vinoba Bhave, Martin Luther King, The Dalai Lama, Baba & Prakash Amte, irrespective of their particular sphere of activities, support, and are torch bearers of the former. And have ended up becoming emissaries of Truth itself. Often reaching far beyond where the stone thrown into the pond of Life falls, are the implications of the ripples that the stone hitting the water has caused. And the Ramon Magsaysay Award, by recognizing individuals from Asia, has further added to the distance of the ripples created by Asian social Emissaries. It is not individual causes that we as Awardees represent, it is the hope of a collective good, a hope that Truth and God shall prevail within Mankind. And that ultimately we shall join in eternal bonding to the greater Cosmos of a God’s Creation beyond.

Despite this, the cause of the wandering mentally ill roadside destitute which our NGO Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation espouses, does deserve its place under the sun, as an unspoken tragedy that has befallen mankind. This is because the mental illness causing the destitute to end up on the roads, is not of his/her own making. The wandering mentally ill are shunned, rejected and denied. They brave the chilling winters, the searing summers and the torrential rains for months, years, often decades on end. And continue to be shunned, rejected and denied. To the point of non-existence. And to correct this Injustice, at least in India, was born Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation.

We had naively thought during its inception, that in the span of our lifetimes, a lot would change for India’s wandering mentally ill. But today, having read a lot of literature on the psyche of social workers, both the famous and the not-so-famous, the heard and the not much written about, I am well aware that the laying down of one lifetime may well be inadequate for a cause. Lincoln had his bouts of deep soul-searching depression. But the cause which he fought for viz racial discrimination has not been sorted out in its entirety, till date. Nobel Laureate Tagore wrote ‘Into that Heaven of Freedom, my Father, let my Country awake..’ 75 years on, his Country is yet to realize his vision. Lincoln and Tagore and those millions of silent strugglers all over the world, who have partaken in ideological wars over innumerable years, have taught us that Change is a Slow Process. However strong and deep rooted be the emotions, however piercing the inner outcry against social disparity or injustice, howsoever passionate the associated intrinsic desire for change, the wheels of the Gods move slowly, albeit very slowly.

And to silently continue on your chosen path, with your nose to the grind, like the faceless, nameless, anonymous soldier carrying the half-hoisted flag of Truth on his shoulder, becomes at some point of time, the wheel of silent revolution in your own silent unwritten destiny. Leading one to understand the Gospel Philosophy of the Sages of Yore that truth is Truth only when it has the capacity to stretch beyond the limits of all endurance, light is Light only when it has the capacity to pierce the darkness. I end this outpouring with a few lines from one of my earliest poems,

If Life,
could be founded on hope,
And Wisdom,
on mere understanding,
Then the horizons would be mine,
The rainbows notwithstanding,
But I had nothing,
Just this pen, paper and a few words,
And my feelings for you,
From the beginning of time…

Vietnam is one of the fastest rising economies in Southeast Asia. As in other newly-emergent economies, social services have sadly not kept pace with impressive economic growth. A social concern that is inadequately addressed involves the rights of persons with disabilities (PWDs). In recent years, government has enacted legislation for PWD protection and support services but the implementation gap remains huge for the estimated 13 million PWDs in the country. In such a situation, the action of citizens is vital, and where civil society is weak, as in Vietnam, the leadership of gifted, dedicated individuals is especially crucial.

VO THI HOANG YEN, born and raised in a remote village in Vietnam’s Dong Nai province, contracted polio when she was two-and-a-half years old. In many other cases, particularly in the rural areas, this condition would have consigned her to a life of dependence. But with a supportive family and her own courage and will, she succeeded in getting an education. Braving discrimination and the constraints of her disability, she earned college degrees at Ho Chi Minh University, and a scholarship brought her to the University of Kansas, where she obtained a master’s degree in human development in 2004. Turning her back on opportunities for a comfortable life in the US, YEN returned to Vietnam.

She had been exposed to the issue and practice of PWD rights in the US, and experienced the stark contrast in Vietnam: the barriers to PWD mobility, access, and employment; the cultural bias that fosters passivity and dependence; the lack of public awareness of PWD needs and rights. Despite her qualifications, her first job application was turned down because of her condition. Undaunted, YEN immediately set to work.

In 2005, with three other PWDs, she founded Disability Research and Capacity Development (DRD), a non-profit organization based in Ho Chi Minh City whose guiding vision was to create “an equal and non-discriminatory society” for PWDs. DRD embarked on public awareness raising activities; livelihood and life-skills training for PWDs; employment and job placement; and diverse other initiatives. Raising funds from international organizations, proactively working with government and the private sector, DRD systematically established its presence as the leading, most innovative PWD advocacy and support group in Vietnam.

Over the past thirteen years, DRD has directly assisted some 15,000 PWDs with skills and capacity building activities, scholarships, job placements, donations of assistive devices and computers, and, using social media, a website on laws for the disabled and a digital map showing PWD-accessible public infrastructure. DRD’s innovativeness was showcased in a pilot “motorbike taxi service,” with a hotline for free transportation for PWDs on specially-designed motorbikes. The project became so popular that DRD could not meet the huge demand. Moreover, DRD has worked with government and the business sector in crafting PWD-related policies and promoting PWD-friendly environments, as in buildings and transportation.

YEN is the quintessential achiever. Confident, hardworking, and articulate, she teaches at Ho Chi Minh Open University and has recently completed her doctorate studies in social work from La Trobe University in Australia, continuing to direct DRD even while doing her studies. It is YEN’s own drive to be able to live independently, and to see this in other PWDs as well, that is at the heart of her advocacy. Autonomy, inclusion, a sense of dignity, releasing and enhancing the capacities of the differently-abled, this is what she is about. Despite the continuing challenges and frustrating resource constraints, YEN remains inspired. She says, “PWDs write or call me, thanking me for helping them change their lives… This is what drives me to continue.”

In electing VO THI HOANG YEN to receive the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes her dauntless spirit and prodigious energy in rising above her condition; her creative, charismatic leadership in the sustained campaign to break down physical and mental barriers that have marginalized PWDs in Vietnam; and for being a shining, inspirational model for the young in her country and elsewhere in the world.

First of all, I would like to offer a very special thanks to the Board of Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for selecting me. I have never expected to be here tonight to receive this noble award and to join past recipients who I have long admired and respected. I could not believe it when I got the news! And at that wonderful moment, I thought of my late mother and her unconditional love and sacrifice for my education. I learned from her the value of gratefulness, empathy and sharing.

I also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the support of the Ford Foundation office in Vietnam for the IFP scholarship and their confidence in me, giving me the very first grants, helped change my life. I am also truly grateful to the support of my colleagues and volunteers at DRD as they are very much a part of my success.

Without them I cannot be who I am today.

For me, it is a great honor to accept this award on behalf of people with disabilities in my home country and other developing countries because I am one of them, who are considered as the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. It is all types of discrimination and the struggle of people with disabilities for a more decent life that have inspired me to do my best to make a change. This good cause transformed me from a helpless person with no future into a determined leader and a change agent with a challenging-but-worthy journey.

This award really reaffirms my belief that everyone is born equal in dignity and worth, and that everyone is entitled, as a human right, to live a life to the fullest extent of his or her abilities. It strengthens my hope that we can have more support and resources to build a better society that addresses the needs and wellbeing of people with disabilities.

We all want to live in a world of love, peace and happiness, but as Mahatma Gandhi said, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” If we make ourselves better persons, we will change our world.

Ladakh in the northern India state of Jammu and Kashmir, is a high-altitude, cold desert region where some 300,000 people struggle in the midst of a harsh environment, wars arising from the rival claims of India, Pakistan, and China, and now even climate change.  Yet here the will to autonomy, creativity, and empowerment remains vibrant.

An inspiring example is SONAM WANGCHUK.  Born in the small, remote village of Ulaytokpo in Ladakh, one of many children of a local leader, he had a difficult education because minorities were discriminated against, schools were lacking and poorly-equipped, teaching standards abysmal, textbook content locally irrelevant, and the medium of instruction alien in the mountains.  Left mostly to fend for himself, he took control of his life early on.

He was a 19-year-old engineering student at the National Institute of Technology in Srinagar, Kashmir, when he went into tutoring to finance his schooling and help woefully unprepared students pass the national college matriculation exams.  Renting a hotel function room, he advertised a coaching program that, exceeding expectations, drew close to a hundred students.  Teaching basic subjects like English and Math, using strategies like peer-to-peer teaching, it was a financial success. But the experience also demonstrated to him how poorly educated the students in village schools were.

In 1988, after earning his engineering degree, WANGCHUK founded Students’ Education and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) and started coaching Ladakhi student, 95% of whom used to fail the government exams.  To create lasting impact, SECMOL partnered with local government in a joint program of educational reform.  Piloted in a village school, the program involved training teachers in a “creative, child-friendly, and activity-based” education; introducing curricular changes to make subjects relevant to the Ladakhi culture and context; prioritizing English over Urdu to better prepare students for higher education; and promoting the Ladakhi language.  Village education committees (VEC) were organized to support schools, monitor teacher performance, and become true stakeholders. Successfully piloted, this initiative of “localizing” schools was replicated in 33 schools and became a veritable movement.

In 1994, with WANGCHUK in the lead, “Operation New Hope” (ONH) was launched to expand and consolidate the partnership-driven educational reform program.  Taking a life of its own, to date ONH has trained 700 teachers, 1000 VEC leaders, and dramatically increased the success rate of students in matriculation exams from just 5% in 1996 to 75%  by 2015.  In 1998, WANGCHUK opened SECMOL School, with a permanent faculty, volunteers, and a yearly average of 300 students. An alternative boarding school that offers review, certificate, and associate-level courses, it rebuilds the students’ confidence, develops lifeskills, revisits the fundamentals and offers courses ranging from leadership training to solar power installation.  Also a model in its use of renewable energy and indigenous technology, SECMOL has produced students who have gone on to become pioneering entrepreneurs in different fields.

A natural innovator, WANGCHUK works out of local experience.  Seeing how climate change has affected the natural water supply for agriculture, he seized on the idea of building artificial glaciers in the form of “ice stupas” for irrigation during the dry summer. Called “stupas” (for public appeal in a Buddhist land), these are conically-shaped ice mountains, that store water in winter and in summer melts to supply farm irrigation water.

Six stupas he and his team have created store roughly 30 million liters of water. Beyond Ladakh, WANGCHUK has shared his environmental and educational innovations with mountain peoples across the whole Himalayan belt,  and as far as Switzerland.  Simple and non-confrontational in his leadership approach, SONAM WANGCHUK, continues to dream of ways to help the people of Ladakh. He confidently says, “The possibilities are endless.”

In electing SONAM WANGCHUK to receive the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his uniquely systematic, collaborative and community-driven reform of learning systems in remote northern India, thus improving the life opportunities of Ladakhi youth, and his constructive engagement of all sectors in local society to harness science and culture creatively for economic progress, thus setting an example for minority peoples in the world.

I humbly accept this award, not as an individual but on behalf of all the students, teachers and people of Ladakh in the trans-Himalayas.

This award is a recognition to our efforts of the last 30 years to make education meaningful, applicable and contextual in our remote mountains and to make it available to all… rich, poor, rural and urban through government school system.

Unfortunately when it comes to education, the world is still stuck with a system that is three hundred years old when at the onset of industrial revolution, the focus was on exploiting nature for human need or greed. A kind of war was declared on nature and our schooling system unfortunately became a training camp for this plunder.

In this war we evaporated half of the forests on earth and half its wild life vanished in just the last 50 years. Nature, too, has responded with equal fury, unleashing cyclones, storms, droughts, floods and made our air unbreathable, water undrinkable, temperatures unbearable.

We suffer the consequences in the mountains of Ladakh, where the glaciers are disappearing, causing droughts and flash-floods.

At our school in Ladakh, we try and come up with measures to respond to climate change by sensitizing each citizen, arming the youth to build solar heated houses, build seasonal artificial glaciers to restore climate-damaged valleys.

Yet people ask in despair how will you scale it up globally? Where’s the money?

Whether we have resources for environment and education depends on how we look at it!  There seems to be no dearth of resources when it comes to defence and arms. The world spends 1.7 trillion dollars a year on defence. But defence in future will hardly be about India arming itself against China or China against the US.

It will have to be all countries pooling their budgets for defence—for defence against new environmental catastrophies and climate change.

Let me clarify this: in just one year the world loses 10 million lives to air pollution alone, (this is a rate similar to World Wars I & II) and half of these lives are lost in India and China. And it happens without a single bullet fired from across borders.

So don’t we need to invest in declaring peace with nature, by re-designing our education system to heal the planet and its people.

As a symbol of beginning this peace with nature I want to dedicate the prize money of this award to start an international model school in Ladakh where government and community join hands to prepare our children for these challenges of tomorrow.