The House That Shahani Built

This photo taken 06 August 2016 is of the members of the Nagkaisa Multi-Purpose Cooperative meeting in the inner room at the ground floor of the 2-story Danggay House, the one that Senator Leticia Ramos-Shahani built in 1996 in her hometown of Asingan in Pangasinan, along with the Danggay Foundation. At the back, the 3 gentlemen seated are, from left, Patrocinio Sapigao, Nagkaisa Board member; Roger Daranciang, Nagkaisa Chair; and Lito Sales, Nagkaisa General Manager. You can't see me, another Board Member, as I am in front of the camera.

As you can imagine, Danggay House has high ceilings in both 1st and 2nd floors, built materiales fuertes, with strong & well-built foundations and materials. When Shahani built something, she meant it to last.

Not to any other group, Shahani had given us Nagkaisa the keys to Danggay House on 12 April 2013, after she discerned that we were after the public good and could be trusted. Like begets like.

She was the Chair of Danggay Foundation. When she died Monday, 20 March 2017 of colon cancer at the St Luke's Hospital at the Bonifacio Global City in Taguig, at 87 years of age, we felt like orphans ourselves. Together we could have done more.

My wife Ampy and I attended her wake in Funeraria Paz at the Manila Memorial Park in Sucat, Parañaque, Metro Manila on Sunday, 26 March. Seeing me, Ranjit, her elder son greeted me, "Mr President." It was odd, wasn't it? Before that, I had seen Mr President Fidel Valdez Ramos, or FVR, and at first I thought it was a joke. The joke was on me, not FVR.

But this was no time for levity. Former Pangasinan Provincial Board member Ranjit Shahani wasn't joking. Frank A Hilario is the (new) President of Danggay Foundation, and Board Chair Leticia Ramos-Shahani had known and approved of it quite a few months before. If you get Shahani's approval, you must be doing good.

Last year, arranged for by Ranjit, Chair of Nagkaisa Multi-Purpose Cooperative Roger Daranciang and I saw her at her vacation house in Tulong at the City of Urdaneta middle of December, and she signed some papers. She knew we were all from Asingan, her own hometown, even as she pleaded for Danggay, "Please don't let it die. That is my legacy." She meant both the Foundation and what we now call the Danggay House, which is in fact the 2-story building at the town plaza that she had built out of her funds when she was Senator. It was the home office of the Pangasinan Crafts & Production Center, constructed in 1996, and was engaged in the production of loom-woven products and garments; it was also a training and display center (philippines.smetoolkit.org). That center was designed as a common service facility. The women were equipped with handlooms and sewing machines. It had a P2 million fund from Shahani. The operation was successful, except that the patient died, due to deficiency in execution. Poor marketing killed the initiative. Not to blame on the founder.

Back to Urdaneta City. At that time, in our December visit, she may have known her days were numbered. She told us, "Please, don't stress me." Because, already, "My doctors have told me my organs are failing me." Except the brain. She was mobile on her own, with a cane.

Back to the wake. Danggay Foundation has been inactive since its former President died, Alejandria Salom-Javier of Bantog, an Asingan village that lies next to Santa Maria in Eastern Pangasinan; Bantog is where you can find one of Shahani's legacy, a buffalo milk project run by the Bantog Samahang Nayon Multi-Purpose Cooperative, now with its own milk processing facility. (Buffalo milk is delicious, I must say.) So our visit to the wake is both a statement of respect and a reassurance that we will honor our pledge to go forth and modify Danggay to the needs of the times.

Also from Asingan, Joe Delmendo along with wife everyone calls Doctora was in attendance at this last day of the wake.

But let's pay attention to the ceremonies now. Here is daughter Lila delivering her last eulogy for her Mom Letty Shahani. Lila is saying:

When I first began preparing for this complex funeral two months ago, everyone resisted the idea: all those I contacted to prepare eulogies thought it ridiculously premature. Everyone was convinced that Mom – indomitable and larger than life, as always – would live forever.

She will live forever, I say.

Lila says:

At the Senate, we heard past and present senators – Sen Jun Magsaysay, Nene Pimentel, Rene Saguisag, Bam Aquino, Dick Gordon, Alan Peter Cayetano, Loren Legarda and Tito Sotto. As one of them said, it was Sen Shahani's talent to bring together politicians from different sides of the aisle – "from the Yellowtards to the Dutertards" – to work together for the greater good of the country.

Shahani had the moral suasion.

"To work together for the greater good of the country" – this has been largely either forgotten or ignored in the last 10 years. What did Noynoy Aquino & Company work together for the millions of poor? They provided billions of pesos for easy cash transfers to the registered poor certified by their village leaders – and everybody knows that with the poor to whom you give cash, there is no multiplier effect, and that is putting it mildly.

The easy cash continues to this day, with an even larger budget for doleouts, and so government agencies are working together for the common cultivation of the mendicant mentality of poor Filipinos!

At her Senate eulogy, Lila said of her Mom:

She believed that legislation was a means to further democracy, not a cudgel for beating the poor and terrorizing the weak.

Sounds familiar?

For these reasons, Mom put forth such bills as the rape law, which radically altered the definition of rape from a crime against chastity to one against persons.

My Mom was an untiring champion of women's rights, seeking to protect women from domestic violence and promote reproductive health. She had a clear and unwavering vision that women's rights were integral to human rights; that human rights were indissociable from national development; and that national development, to be truly just, had to be founded on international norms and coordinated with international governance.

To be national, it must be international.

About reproductive health, I'm with Senator Tito Sotto. In any case, Sotto paid tribute to Shahani about another occasion:

Sen Letty, principal author of the anti-rape bill, was an excellent legislator. I enjoyed every minute of my debates with her! God bless her!

Shahani was a no-nonsense lady and she knew whereof she spoke.

She pushed for laws that would protect our maritime resources against foreign expropriation, and safeguard our natural resources from wanton exploitation.

For this reason, sovereignty for my mother never meant the right to do what you alone determined to be right, free from the criticism of others.

A great reminder about what we ought to be doing about Scarborough Shoal and Benham Rise. And about our environment.

Sovereignty was about self-determination but always in concert and in sympathy with the rights of those who often could not even claim their rights: with those (whom) we might call the wretched of the earth.

She fought for the rights of human beings, who included the poor and the oppressed.

It is for this reason that one of my Mom's most memorable programs was her campaign for Moral Recovery. Like Rizal and Mabini, she believed to her dying day that a far better way to address social ills like corruption and crime lay in the education of the soul rather than in the incarceration and execution of the body.

Prompted by Shahani's Senate resolution, it was on 30 September 1992 when FVR as President signed Proclamation 62, "DECLARING A MORAL RECOVERY AND ENJOINING ACTIVE PARTICIPATION OF ALL SECTORS IN THE FILIPINO SOCIETY" (gov.ph). It was seen that "there is a need for moral renewal in order to eradicate the social ills that have plagued us for the past several decades, such as graft and corruption, patronage politics, apathy, passivity, mendicancy, factionalism and lack of patriotism."

Interestingly, the Philippines seems to be the only country in the world where there is really no separation between Church and State!

I love that. We can credit it to Lila's mother, who saw that it was the duty of the Church, whatever denomination it was, to educate the soul; concurrently, it was the duty of the State to eliminate crime without curtailing human rights. Look whom Shahani is talking to now!

And that such moral education could best be achieved by the studious attention backed by generous funding to the indigenous arts and the native genius of the Filipino people in all their diversity.

We Filipinos are not hopeless. Calling for generous funding and support from public and private sources to cultivate the indigenous arts and that native genius of the Filipinos – I myself see the fulfilment of all that in the actualization of the federalization of the Philippines. Those federated states could and should individually cultivate their history, cultural arts and geniuses where they are, and give glory to the larger Philippines.

In sum, for my Mom, diplomacy, culture and moral education were always preferable to partisan confrontation and violent outbursts.

Will partisan confrontation and violent outbursts in this country ever cease? Nobody asked her that question. If Leticia Ramos-Shahani did not think so, she must have died with a broken heart.

We owe it to ourselves, and to Shahani, to keep building that house Shahani was building, a moral Philippines. @

30 March 2017. Total word count, excluding this line. 1615