The question doesn’t just cross my mind every so often. It rattles my wits whenever I take in the never-ending series of publication plans, pushed deadlines and project briefings that characterize our office lives. It confounds me when I reflect on the more mind-boggling points of my work for Vibal Foundation: publicizing (and playing a game show with) a transgender celebrity; tracking down descendants of the national hero; summarizing hundred-line poems in archaic Tagalog; and covering an adobo cook-off in the United States.
What on earth. Am I doing here?
I always knew that, by choosing to work a few years ago for a newly-established yet ambitious non-profit organization, I would be heading down a road less traveled. Conventionally, fresh graduates armed with degrees in Communication and a background in college journalism seek to build more glamorous careers elsewhere. Since then, I’ve realized that working at Vibal Foundation requires more than just navigating an unfamiliar path; it means forging ahead on a road not taken. By that I don’t mean that no one has ever thought of what we’re trying to do. It’s just that nobody really seems to do it. Or that, probably, nobody even should.
Who is ever going to care if a hundred Tagalog novels and a thousand Filipino folktales are published on Filipiniana.net along with letters exchanged between dead generals and medicinal treatises a century old? If a collaborative online encyclopedia on the Philippines is built with entries in all our dialects? If a platform for alternative journalism is launched online, so that people could not just read more stories that matter to them, but write them as well? If a book that no one could have remembered, much less read, is brought back in print? Yet I’ve long since stopped questioning each of our new projects with a “What for?” Instead, I’ve learned to ask: Why not?
Sab poses next to the photo of literary great Carlos Quirino during the launch of his masterwork, Philippine Cartography
Hamming it up for the camera before a book launch. Sab at the far right
Being an ardent lover of books, Sab enjoys every activity that has to do with them -- even that which includes cataloging old, crisp covers from the Foundation's rare books collection.
Being in Vibal Foundation doesn’t just give us the chance to envision possibilities. It gives us the opportunity to enact them. We don’t just dream of revitalizing the old and pushing the boundaries of the new. We do it. And that’s why I am (still) here, though going down the road to open education entails far less flying—“Lipad tayo!” a foundation catchphrase goes—than toiling, tripping and trudging along the way, or even turning and turning around it. The job is unconventional, yes, and it can be unforgiving and at times even unrewarding. But I’m here because I want to do something different. Even better, I’m here because, through one project or another, I know I make a difference.
Comments