IT seemed innocently asked in a small group of “home-school mothers,” that is, mothers whose children are home-schooled and who are the teachers of their children, the question, “So why is our country what it is today?”

The subject being discussed was “teaching History.” I was part of that small group, having a home-schooled 13-year-old daughter in Grade 7 and that small group was comprised of parents of Grades 6 and 7 home-school students. The facilitator, a fellow home-school mother, happened to be looking at me when she asked, as though I had the ready answer to that enigmatic question.

“Well,” I said, a bit jolted out of my listening mode and now readying myself to share my nugget of insight, “I know you’ve heard this many times, but I think it’s really true: Corruption is the main reason for our poverty.”

I thought that they would find my answer a cliché not worth probing into, but there they were, ready to hear some more from me.

So I went on. “Consider how Israel has turned their deserts into productive lands,” I said. “The Philippines is so rich in natural resources, and yet we are so poor. Why? Because of corruption. Corruption has become endemic to the Philippines.”

At this point, a mother tried to reinforce my opinion by saying, “The Filipinos are really corrupt.” On hearing this, I clarified my point. “No, it’s not the Filipinos; it’s the system that has become entrenched in our country. Why is it that when you take the Filipinos out of this country, they thrive, they succeed?” That question made the mothers rethink their assessment of who we are as a people. It was like an “aha” or a “light bulb” experience. Our self-image as a people has certainly been trodden, and we need to see who we really are as a people.

“We have been slaves for centuries,” pointed out the facilitator.

“Oh, but you are looking at only our history during the Spanish times and onwards,” I answered.

Again, the mothers seemed to have been shaken out of a certain mode of thinking. They realized that indeed we Filipinos know very little of who we were before Spain colonized us. I pointed out to them that the Philippine History books that we use in schools go back only as far as our Hispanic times, but we had a “pre-Hispanic” past when our archipelago had great kingdoms and was an established destination for trade.

I shared with the home-school mothers some stories about our “pre-Hispanic” history like the little-known anecdotes about the greatness of Princess Urduja who ruled a pre-Hispanic northern kingdom in our archipelago. I had a reservoir of stories about the Butuan Kingdom that I shared with them. “Before there was the Philippines, there was the Butuan Kingdom, Dr. Sonia Zaide wrote in her monograph Butuan: The First Kingdom,” I said to them. Just a few notes and samplings of our glorious past before we were subjugated by Spain were enough to inspire these women, who have taken upon themselves to personally educate their children.

I expressed to these mothers a conclusion. I said, “I believe that if we could go back to our roots before the Spaniards came and realize that we are a great people, we would be able to rebuild our national identity and move forward better as a people.”

I quoted to them what I had heard from Filipino author and sociologist and president of the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture (ISACC), Dr. Melba Padilla Maggay, who in turn quoted from a book, “If you want to have an impact in history, you must first be rooted in a place.” Dr. Maggay further said, “When people are oppressed, they mal-adjust to the oppressive structures.” This is how she explained the negative traits that have developed in the Filipino since oppressive nations ruled our people.

We therefore should know our real roots as a race before nations came to rule over us so that we can define our true traits as a people before we mal-adjusted to oppressive structures. If we make the effort to discover our pre-Hispanic past, then we shall see that Filipinos are not intrinsically corrupt, otherwise we would not have been for a thousand years, before Spain arrived, a great trading destination; that we Filipinos are not meant to be in mere servitude to other nations for our islands and our forefathers were known for the gold they possessed. When we realize this, we can move ourselves out of the “we are a corrupt people” mode and “we are slaves” mode and say to ourselves instead, “I belong to a great and blest race and I will be part of making this nation great again.”

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