Bonding with TOWNS
I’m not a joiner. I have never been a “club woman.” The last formal group I remember joining is the Girl Scouts of the Philippines when I was in the fifth grade. So you won’t find me joining the likes of the Rotary Club, Zonta, or the Catholic Women’s League. I don’t even care to serve on the board of my school’s alumni association.
Ask me to do a job and I will do it, but don’t ask me to join a formal organization.
But I am a proud member of the TOWNS Foundation, Inc., which I became a part of only by virtue of being an awardee for journalism in 1989. I am not an active member in the sense that I don’t usually attend its events, or aspire for a leadership position, but I accept small assignments like drafting citations of the awardees every three years, which is a great way to get acquainted with each of them. And once in a while, I attend a social where I get to rub elbows with these formidable, accomplished women from various sectors and disciplines who have contributed much to the nation’s service.
At a TOWNS party, eminent as they are, the members are just women being women, who relish the opportunity to let their hair down by singing, schmoozing, exchanging political gossip, and sharing stories about health, heart, and hearth.
Some 40 TOWNS women showed up at the foundation’s annual Christmas party last Tuesday representing various disciplines and age groups. Although we struggled with names of members we don’t see often, we knew of each other by the disciplines we were recognized for. There was no need to break the ice. Immediately, the women bonded with laughter and song. A group quickly formed around the piano player and belted out song after song, passing the mic to whoever knew the lyrics better. The sisterhood was alive and well.
The interesting thing about TOWNS is every member has a story. You will find TOWNS women everywhere — providing psycho-social healing or livelihood assistance in typhoon-devastated Tacloban, distributing relief goods, diving into the ocean to protect giant clams, saving the environment, improving food production, passing legislation, attending to cancer patients, running a school, running a hospital, teaching teachers, building leaders, performing on stage, creating jobs, tackling national concerns as a journalist, broadcasting the news, telling stories through puppetry, teaching math and physics, promoting human rights, women’s rights and children’s rights, writing poetry, writing books, publishing books, managing peace processes, raising funds for worthy causes, raising hell over issues, representing government in international events, running a department, running a museum or creating one, studying DNA, heading the Supreme Court, and exhuming the dead for forensic examination. And that is only a partial list of what the TOWNS women do.
When such a varied and harried group gets together for nothing serious, anything can happen. The instruction was to bring an exchange gift that is meaningful to you. The result was both hilarious and edifying. Noraida from Mindanao gave a head cover that will immediately let a waiter know that the wearer cannot eat certain foods. Amihan, a puppeteer, gave an Indonesian shadow puppet. Rina, a writer, gave a pillow to rest a laptap on. Cathy, a math teacher gave a math puzzle. Lillian, a botanist, gave blooming orchids. Cheche, a budding famer, gave produce from her farm in Laguna. Cora who hails from Pateros, gave a box of balut. I gave a book on the leadership qualities of Pope Francis.
When the TOWNS award was conceived by the Lions’ Club of Manila in 1974, it was called the Ten Outstanding Women of the New Society. Fortunately, the award was not scrapped in 1986 when the New Society was ousted by People Power but its name was re-configured as The Outstanding Women in the Nation’s Service. The name change gave new energy to TOWNS and the search went on every three years for women from ages 21 to 45, whom the board of judges, headed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, deemed most outstanding in their age group.
In 1995, the awardees decided to form the TOWNS Foundation Inc. and handle the search themselves. While TOWNS continues to honor women civic leaders, government officials, educators, lawyers, artists, performers, journalists and the like, it has broadened the search to include NGO workers and activists, as well as women in non-traditional pursuits such as science and technology. The result is an astounding harvest of women leaders quietly engaged in groundbreaking work in such awesome disciplines as atmospheric science, oceanography, tissue culture, DNA, environmental protection, industrial engineering, physics and the like.
In the past 40 years, 158 women have received the TOWNS award (See the complete list in wikipedia.org). Nine have passed on. The oldest living member is 83, the youngest is 25. It’s been a rich continuing harvest of superb talent that administrators, employers, perhaps even political parties should perhaps consider tapping for outstanding and dedicated women leaders and workers. As the older members mature, a fresh batch comes in every three years, ensuring that the organization remains young, energetic, vibrant and eager to share their knowledge, skills and talents to serve our country and people.
The next TOWNS search is in 2016.
