Through the years, the phrase has seen countless permutations. But it never lost its essence of sharing. "Give for life" played on the Sybaritic "live for life" to appeal for donations to soup kitchens. There’s "give even if it’s not Christmas." Todo-bigay is about pitching in, as opposed to bigay-todo which is more of giving it one’s best shot. "Know what it means to give" tempts the target to try and find out. And when he does, he’d sing about the "joy of giving."
Though the ’70s were a period of red banners and fiery street demos, giving didn’t lose its roots in the Filipino psyche. It just acquired a new activist meaning, as in "giving one’s time freely" to "serve the people." The ’80s professionalized such giving of free service through nongovernment organizations and foundations for various socioeconomic causes. The ’90s saw a resurgence of the Focolare Movement’s "culture of giving" to counter the "culture of having" that the consumer economy promised.
The movement was born as far back as the Second World War in Fascist-held Europe. As it attracted activists who later became politicians, it gave a modern ring to Christian socialists’ old concept of a welfare state. It spread to Latin America alongside the Jesuit theology of liberation that preached self-help and self-determination, oftentimes through revolution. What made the movement more popular among the middle class was its knocking on the conscience while greedy globalization was on the rise with attendant international mergers and business buyouts.
In 1991, Chiara Lubich, one of the movement’s leaders, visited the little town of Araceli in Brazil across the river from the capital city of Sao Paolo. She was deeply troubled by the irony. In Sao Paolo was one of the densest concentrations of skyscrapers in the world, flanked by a moat of slums in Araceli. Such stark poverty on the fringe of luxury was common sight in Africa and Asia, too. Lubich felt driven by the urgency to provide food, shelter, medical assistance, and if possible employment to Araceli. The Movement responded first with social work and eventually by setting up cooperative-style businesses and liveable communities out of the small town. Its example soon became a model for activists of the ’90s to replicate worldwide.
Few Filipinos may have heard of the Focolare Movement. But its commonsensical approach to happy living through sharing is being practised all over the islands. Some are institutional. Catholic schools take a day or two off each month for "outreach" in slums. Some of the biggest, often most-maligned capitalist enterprises adopt poor public schools for computer donations and subjects. Even after "volunteer worker" former US President Jimmy Carter came and went in 1999, the Habitat for Humanity continues to build thousands of homes for the poor mainly through corporate donations coupled with free labor.
Most other Focolare-type culture-of-giving projects are smaller and individual. We’ve all heard of rich friends, for instance, not only frequently donating to charity but actually rendering free service in orphanages and hospitals. A growing number of middle-class subdivisions informally are reaching out, too, to squatters across the street with livelihood and family employment schemes. Appalled by news that Grade 4 pupils at Balara Elementary School in Tandang Sora, Quezon City, have only one of the eight textbooks required by the curriculum, a group of students from nearby Ateneo and U.P. this month pitched in P500 each (for them, the cost of one lunch in a restaurant) "to help make a difference." They didn’t stop there. They hit their friends and classmates for more donations, passed out leaflets listing their names and cellphone numbers, and asked for cash or checks sent to the EDSA Shrine. At the rate their project is catching fire, the new age activists will be adopting more public schools by yearend.
Giving till it hurts has always been a sterling Filipino value. Early Spanish historians told about how, in Igorot villages before the planting season when everybody was running out of stocks, the chieftain would gather the menfolk to a palaver and assign who shall bring food and drinks, firewood and livestock for the communal farm work and the cañao to cap it. In poor barrios, everybody would pitch in for bayanihan, free service during calamities and fiestas or, as depicted in a famous painting, to literally move house. To this day, entire communities would mobilize for weddings, old enemies would bury the hatchet, neighbors would try to outdo each other pinning cash on the bride’s skirt or groom’s shirt.
Giving till it hurts is what could save the country from economic collapse. Over five-and-a-half million are out of work. Another eight million do not earn enough to feed the family three square meals a day. The government is at a loss on where to start making a dent in the antipoverty campaign. But Filipinos know everything should start in the spirit of sharing.