A Purposeful Life in the Philippines
What if your father were murdered and later in life, as a human rights educator and democracy advocate working for an important museum, you found out that some of the people memorialized in your museum had joined the same group that killed him?
Mary Rose D.T. Sarturio, a human rights intern at the 518 Foundation who hails from the Philippines, also works for the Bantayog Ng Mga Bayani, or Martial Law Museum, an organization that has compiled as much information as possible about the atrocities that occurred during martial law in the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos (1972-1986). Some of those who once fought against Ferdinand Marcos joined the New People’s Army (NPA) that claimed to seek “truth, justice, peace and freedom,” four principles that the Bantayog Ng Mga Bayani still espouses.
“My father ran a grocery store and always gave people credit, and helped out with free food when people needed it,” Sarturio said. “He was also asked to pay a ‘revolutionary tax’ by the New People’s Army (NPA), which he always paid. But they started asking for much more money. He stopped when they asked for more. He was shot in front of his own mother. I never saw his grave, I only have a picture.”
Some of the people memorialized at the museum were members of the NPA, creating an internal conflict for Sarturio. She asked, “So why am I working for them? I pray to my father, ‘Why?’ Maybe I need to see their side. I knew their thinking, but it was not enough. Maybe my father doesn’t want me to hate them. Maybe it’s a goal for me to understand it all.”
The distinction between good guys and bad guys is often shifting in the Philippines. Getting a grip on who now represents the people the best is hard because so many of the country’s elected officials, like the dictators before them, are apparently corrupt.
But the NPA created a hard life for Sartorio.
“I was born in 1986 in Bicol, where my father had his store and some land with sugar cane on it,” she explained. “I was nine months old when my father was killed. I was able to visit my home town once before coming to Korea. It took a long time to be able to get back to my home town.”
After her father died, she was sent away to live with an older half-brother; they were adopted together into a home. “But after two years we were sent away from there, and my brother sacrificed everything for me. He saved my life, and my mom’s. Once I got into college, he was worried that I would become an activist. I was disappointed with the activists, they were rude to me, and were pushy, so I waited before deciding. I went to freshmen dorms and talked people out of becoming activists at first.”
By her senior year, though, things had changed. In the Philippines, the decisions you make about whether to be an activist or part of the establishment can easily decide your fate for the rest of your life.
“A small group, just two boys and me, were given community service activity by our sociology department,” she recalled. “We worked with squatters who lived by a river. Our sociology professor said we had to stay there for a number of months as organizers. They were facing government demolition of their makeshift homes, and were going to be removed. The elders there said I would not last long in those conditions, but I was immersed in how to survive and I made it. I realized right then that starving people don’t need ideology or revolution, they need food.”
Mary Rose plans to use the knowledge she has gained at the 518 Foundation, in addition to her university work, to move on from teaching visitors about truth, justice, peace and freedom to teaching in the Philippines’ public school system.
“My main concern is to teach the younger generation about our history,” she said. “Then maybe we can have fewer victims.”