| The Filipina In Me Is The Filipina In You |
Dove recently concluded their "Search for the Dove Discovery" with the revelation of two winners: Avegail Alapilde and Jennifer Manguiat. The two couldn’t have come from more different perspectives, yet here they are, sitting together in a friendship that was born out of this very contest. They were voted by friends and audiences nationwide from a pool of 10 finalists – women who shared snippets of their lives on TV in unrehearsed, unguarded moments, women who expressed not insights or stories that were necessarily extraordinary, but that were mirrors of other women’s everywhere. These are not your typical beauty contest winners; it was not a requirement to have luminescent skin and refined pores – what was expected, however, was the acknowledgment that beauty is expressed in a multitude of forms, from the simple physical ritual of daily cleansing to the daily acts of kindness perpetrated unbeknownst to the greater world. That the name of woman is not defined or limited to the role she plays or the status at which she is perceived, which are but facets in the entirety of being. The Dove Discovery was a search for a few good women, but more than that it became a search for the searched women themselves, a discovery of their own "inner beauty," an awakening within.
Most women find themselves trying out many different careers in their youth. Most women do not find themselves in and out of a convent. Avegail Alapilde, or Avi, left college when she was 18 to enter a life that she thought was her calling. The rigors and demands of growing up in a Catholic school run by missionaries induced in her a destiny of servitude, a guilt-compassion complex that got her off to the nunnery, where she spent three years. The initial years were one of discovery and adjustment, of learning and praying – but the daily hour spent on meditating and reflecting was pulling her thoughts in a different way. What, really, was she doing in here? Was she perhaps missing out on something larger? While still devoted, her doubts grew nonetheless and it was only six months before she was supposed to profess that she instead tearfully declared her intentions to leave. It was not an easy decision, she says, but the very fact that she was in crisis was telling enough of her inability, or unreadiness to commit. It was out in the world where she would be more fulfilled.
Once released, the ex-novice still went to mass every day, but slowly readjusted, letting her friends take her out, and eventually even finding a boyfriend. She first worked in production and TV editing, then switched to sales and marketing which suited her talkative and people-oriented disposition more. Currently, she is finishing her psychology masters and working at the Philippine Mental Health Institute where she finds a culmination of everything she was compelled to: a challenging life of service and compassion in the healing profession. "Winning the Dove Search, at this point, is an affirmation of my life’s work," Avi beams gratefully. Indeed God must have been on her side, she had all her nun friends praying for her. Will she ever return to the convent? No, she says, but she’s very happy about living each moment as she had felt it. And it’s not like it was a whole separate life that she left behind and has forgotten about. When she went on to finish college after she left, she graduated with a degree in Religious Studies.
Jennifer Ortega-Manguiat’s story is one of family. Her mother, basically, is the foundation of her own life. Growing up on sound beauty advice and told to "always look your best," Jenny now passes the same wisdom to her children. She considers her mother to be her best friend and has always, always listened to her advice and admonitions growing up. She realizes the kinds of sacrifices her mother made, like giving up her job to raise the kids, and thus made no claims of her own even during the troublesome teen years. "So you’ve never been rebellious?" she is asked. "Never," Jenny proudly smiles, "I was the nerdy one." Indeed she says that in high school and college she was much of a loner and never really felt she had a
barkada. That, however, changed during the course of the Dove search, where she met nine wonderful women with similar and dissimilar experiences alike, with whom she spent much quality bonding time with.
Her motivations in joining the contest were more prosaic. She wanted to do commercials. "In my family, you’re either in showbiz or politics," Jenny explains. While she is now working for her father, who is the congressman of La Union, she’s had some minor stints in acting and performing which she wants to hone, and this she definitely enjoys more. Also a psych major, she was a schoolteacher who taught variously at Assumption, Poveda and Rosemont, but ultimately had to quit as the miasmatic atmosphere of schoolyards and classrooms proved to be harmful to her health. As a mother herself, she needed to be in the pink of it, although as a tenacious modern woman, she said she wouldn’t give up working completely. Being a Dove winner will give her the opportunity to do more of what she really wants to do. And who wouldn’t want to be herself?
If womanhood is a journey – no, make that many journeys – in coming back to that one place, "I", then we’ve got a heck of a lot of stories to tell. And yes, some may be incredibly unique, some may be intensely personal but universally generic. What matters, really, is what we make of the experiences, how we integrate what we’ve learned into our lives, or perhaps more importantly, how we let things go. Dove senior brand manager Alex Tacderas is a "femininist" in the sense that he doesn’t value career over motherhood in women, or vice versa. "Women have to be seen in their totality," he stresses. "The Dove search is about finding the common thread in Filipina women, no matter where they’re from or what they do." Indeed, beyond soap and skin, beauty
is the search itself, and it is not in its finding, but in its becoming.