Outstanding

Receiving the Outstanding Filipino (TOFIL) awards recently were Fr. Marciano "Rocky" G. Evangelista, SDB, Antonio P. Meloto Jr., Socorro G. Ramos and Ramon G. Orlina.

The Tuloy Foundation, Inc. in Makati’s Don Bosco Parish, which was established by Fr. Evangelista in 1993, has taken care of orphaned and abandoned children, making more than 5,000 of them productive citizens to date.

The Gawad Kalinga which Mr. Meloto founded has built homes for the poor in over 850 communities here and in four other countries, and has benefited some 200,000 people. Mr. Meloto aims to build 7,000 communities by 2010.

In passing, Mr. Meloto shares his award, in some measure, with among others a non-Filipino, the millionaire Englishman Dylan Wilkes who, after looking around for a beneficiary of his fortune, was so impressed by Mr. Meloto’s mission, he decided to join it. He poured his millions into Gawad Kalinga. He eventually married a daughter of Mr. Meloto, and is now living a simple life with his family in Quezon City. (I got the information on Mr. Wilkes from Jill Beckingham, wife of the UK ambassador.)

Mrs. Ramos and her late husband opened a small bookstore in 1942. It later became a one-stop shop. The National Bookstore has now 83 branches throughout the country, and has licensing agreements with US publishing houses which allow it to make their titles available to Filipino readers.

Mr. Orlina’s rare originality, enterprise, imagination and resourcefulness led him to experiment with left-over glass pieces from glass factories, transforming them into art. Now his glass sculptures are permanent acquisitions at the CCP Complex, the National Museum, the Singapore Museum and Guangzhou’s China Hotel.

What these four individuals have done to give meaning to the lives of thousands! What refreshing and pleasant news they make in the midst of the turbulent and depressing times caused by factious politics, widespread poverty and all-pervading corruption, suffocating pollution and perennially congested traffic!

Earlier, TOYM awards were given by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to several Filipinos, including Heracleo Oracion and Romeo Garduce, the first Filipinos to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. A third claims to have reached it from the other side but his claim has not been officially recognized. (I believe it should.)

On the other hand, I have information on an American – Myles Osborne, a Harvard U. student – who is hailed as a hero for having failed to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. The Harvard U. Alumni Quarterly Colloquy sent me tells his story which follows.

Student proves heroic on Everest

This May, Myles Osborne, a fourth-year PhD student in history and African studies, joined a five-man team attempting to scale Mount Everest. At about 10,000 feet, Osborne and his colleagues encountered a fellow climber in a near-death condition from oxygen deprivation. Rather than pass the man, as other climbers had, Osborne’s team stopped to help.

According to his entry on EverestNews.com, an Australian climber named Lincoln Hall was sitting cross-legged and changing his shirt in the sub-zero temperature. Osborne writes, "He had his down suit unzipped to the waist, his arms out of the sleeves, was wearing no hat, no gloves, no sunglasses, had no oxygen mask, regulator, ice axe, oxygen, no sleeping bag, no mattress, no food nor water bottle . . . [H]e had sustained severe frostbite in every finger, and did not want to keep his gloves or hat on. His fingers looked like ten waxy candle sticks. His head wagged and jerked around, his beady eyes embedded in a frosty face, trying to focus on something, anything. He seemed to be in deep distress, shivered uncontrollably, and kept trying to pull himself closer to the edge of the cornice, to the point that we physically held him back and eventually anchored him to the snow."

Osborne and the team gave Hall food, hot water, and their precious oxygen. When they radioed for help, Osborne and his team learned that Hall had already been reported as dead by a sherpa the previous day. The information had been conveyed to Hall’s family.

Osborne’s team spent four hours with Hall until he was delivered to base camp by "a massive rescue effort." By this time, they realized they had sacrificed their own, very expensive climb." So after years of fundraising, and months of training and climbing, we made the tough call to turn around," wrote Osborne.

The team returned to base camp and talked with the rescued climber. Wrote Osborne: "During the conversation, I could not help but wonder; ‘How in any way is a summit more important than saving a life?’ And the answer is that it isn’t. But in this skewed world up here, sometimes you can be fooled into thinking that it might be. But I know that trying to sleep at night knowing that I summitted Everest and left a guy to die isn’t something I ever want to do. The summit’s always there after all." – Compiled by Susan Lumenello

The saying goes: "Greater love hath no man than this: that he gives up his life for his brother." Another saying should go: "Greater love hath no man than this: that he gives life to his brother."