Joseph The Dreamer

For all SANO, PADS and dreamers :

I wish to share with you the autobiographical essay i submitted to the Ford Foundation when i applied for their International Fellowship Program. True, the essay is very personal yet great part of which was enriched by my seminary years.

Please bear with my bold attempt in publishing my life story. May you enjoy reading !



Joseph, the Dreamer


“Happy are those who dream dreams and are willing to pay the price to make their dreams come true.”
- Fulton Sheen


I wanted to become a pilot when I was a kid. It was because of an old faded sepia-brown photograph of my deceased uncle (who was a Major in the Philippine Air Force) standing in front of a vintage Tora-Tora plane. It was one early morning in the year 1976, when my kindergarten teacher asked me and my classmates what we want to be when we grow up. Awed with that “mysterious” photograph and dreaming for a challenging life ahead, without hesitation, I proudly declared that I wanted to fly a plane and conquer the skies…

Twenty-nine years later, I landed a job so much attached to the ground. Being the Provincial Information Officer (PIO) of the Department of Land Reform (formerly known as the Department of Agrarian Reform), my job requires me to have close contact with the earth and the farmer – beneficiaries tilling it. No, please don’t get me wrong. There’s no bitterness or tinge of frustration here. In fact, after serving five different employers, this current job of mine is the most fulfilling and rewarding so far. Many would wonder how I ended up with this present job. What happened to the dream of becoming a pilot, flying a plane and conquering the skies ? Let me then lead you back to the paths I had traveled in reaching this point of my life…

Mine was a difficult pregnancy, according to my mother, Corazon, Cora, as she is fondly called. She had frequent bouts with colds during the nine months that she carried me in her womb. She almost lost her life when she gave birth to me due to her allergic reactions to some antibiotics. Facing death, she made a desperate prayer to St. Joseph to take pity on her child who was not ready to lose a mother. Her prayer was answered miraculously. This explains how I got my first name, Joseph. The name John was added later due to the insistence of my aunt, Milagros, who was once a Pink Sister nun but decided to leave the convent, eventually got married, and later financed my schooling from high school to college.

I got only one elder brother, Graciano III, or Jun-Jun, who’s a year-and-a half older than me. We are very different from each other. Jun-Jun was dark-skinned while I am fair-skinned. He got his color from our father, Graciano Jr., fondly called Nonong, while I got mine from my mother. He was able-bodied while I was skinny, but, as we mature, I got taller than him.

We grew up under a tradition of a very strict and rigid upbringing, handed through generations and adopted by our disciplinarian father. Misdemeanors had corresponding physical punishments. Good deeds were also reciprocated with rewards, usually a treat of weekend at the movie houses. There was no television then; only radio with AM bands provided us with information and entertainment. That is why, watching a movie was then a luxury for us.

Our father was our very first teacher. Being an elementary teacher by profession, he brought home with him plenty of books that we browsed intently or just feasted our eyes with the pictures and visuals. We even had a piece of blackboard each and got a boxful of chalks that we spent by filling the board with writings and drawings. Our father also made wooden blocks with the alphabet and number inscriptions for us to be familiarized with them. Education was our topmost priority.

Our mother provided comfort in an otherwise uptight upbringing. She was noted for the delicious food that she produced from our kitchen. She used to augment her income during Christmases when her fellow-employees in the hospital, mostly doctors, placed orders of homemade ham to our delight because we always provided assistance to her and had the privilege of acting as self-appointed and proclaimed gourmet to taste the quality of her specialty. We got our very first biology and science inputs inside the hospital’s laboratory where my mother worked as a medical laboratory aide, but technically she was a laboratory technician by profession.

Maybe these solid foundations I earned from my parents paved the way for the initial successes I gained from the elementary grades. My very first award was the “Most Cooperative Kinder” when I mopped the entire floor of our classroom instead of just drying up the floor under my desk when I accidentally spilled a drink. I then capped my elementary grades with salutatorian honors.

I really planned to enter the seminary for my high school education. It was because of my brother. Our family was a clan of priests. My parents forced my brother to study in the seminary to continue that noble tradition. I secretly envied him when he became a seminarian. He became the family’s favorite, girls noticed him and, I was awed with his stories about seminary life. As expected, he did not stay in the seminary for long, after two years, he left. That was the right moment I was waiting for. The year was 1983.

Seminary life was Ora, Estude et Labora (Prayer, Study and Work) as the motto of the Our Lady of Peñafrancia Seminary goes. Indeed, our day starts with the Lauds or Morning Praise followed either by mass, recitation of the rosary or novena, not to mention the Angelus, and other formula prayers, and of course, we close the day with the Vespers or Night Prayers. We had monthly recollections that were usually done on first Fridays. It was a whole day of prayerful silence with thematic discourses to guide us in our reflections. Annual holy retreats that lasted for a week were conducted usually few months before the end of every school year. Being a young adolescent, prayer for me then was more of a ritual rather than personal commune with God. It was only during my senior year that I was able to depart from formula prayers and started establishing a personal relationship with the Supreme Being.

The academic formation in the seminary was rigid and had high set of standards. Grades were hard earned. We were forced to use the English language as primary medium of communication. If caught speaking in the vernacular, every non – English spoken word had a corresponding one-peso penalty. In the 80’s a peso was quite valuable. In fact, our seminary rector later revealed that our garden tools such as rakes, shovels, wheelbarrows, grass cutters, hoes and other similar implements were purchased and funded by the accumulated amount from those penalties. Imagine a community of blabbermouths who cannot resist haranguing through the colorful vocabulary of our native tongue! We were taught Latin, Spanish, Italian and even French on the sides, but carefree adolescents that we were, we never realized the value of learning those languages. We were only able to memorize few phrases of those foreign tongues.

Almost the whole morning of Saturdays were dedicated to general house cleaning, which meant, as our rector said, ‘tidying up from the ceiling down to the floor.’ Seminarians were assigned to every nook and cranny of the whole expanse of the seminary, ‘leaving no stone unturned’ as a cliché goes. A senior seminarian was tasked to formulate the rotation of monthly cleaning assignments that was why his contemporaries had the privilege of being assigned to easier areas to clean while the lower years had to exhaust lots of sweat in more grueling tasks.

The bonding within our batch was solidified as we advanced in years. We were like ‘blood brothers’ with a sealed compact. This special bonding sustained us to bear the rigors of the seminary formation and even up to this day of our adult life. (This bonding is now being shared between our wives and kids. We also grew deeper with our social commitment; our batch did a community outreach one Christmas when we had a simple feeding and gift-giving activity to a poor community adjacent our seminary.) True enough, this special bonding may be credited to the high ‘survival rate’ that our batch achieved when we graduated in the year 1987. We started as a loose group of 31 neophytes when we were admitted but ended up as a firm band of 25 graduating brothers. Later, four of our batch mates were ordained as priests, a very good harvest from the Lord’s Vineyard considering that some batches ended with none.

After our high school graduation however, half of our batch made a decision to pursue their callings other than priesthood. I belonged to the other half that decided to sustain and nurture the priestly vocation. I was a college sophomore when I had my very first girlfriend. Being young with vacillating emotions, our premature relationship had tensions as expected. I decided to transfer to the Vincentian congregation not to become a disciple of St. Vincent de Paul but to get nearer to her to save our relationship. But a month before I set foot at the Vincentian Hills Seminary, she called it quits. That was then I honestly confronted myself on my real intentions in pursuing the religious vocation. It was then that I was able to understand that I had impure motivations other than the real intentions of becoming a priest ever since I entered the seminary in 1983. However, my short stint with the Vincentians was not in vain. In fact, they taught me how to love and serve the poor…Evangelizare pauperibus misit me…He sent me to evangelize the poor. Equipped with that ‘gift’ I commenced my journey to the secular world and to my ‘truer’ self.

My first job was with Batibot, a production popularly known as a television show for kids. I was one of the ‘tour guides’ for their “World of Children Expo ‘93” held in Shangri-La EDSA, the prelude of the Museo Pambata. It was then I learned the basics of survival in the city. I must admit, I really led a comparatively secured life inside the seminary compared with the hardships that any ordinary student may have had encountered. I made some drastic adjustments in my way of life; I became a ruthless commuter during rush hours, learned to wash clothes, which I never did in the past. And the most important, I learned how to properly budget my meager earnings. I arrived in Manila with only P600.00 in my pocket. With my ‘batibot’ salary, I was able to pay the last account I had with the seminary, P900.00 to be exact. This is another reason why I always cherish my last days in the seminary because I paid for those days with my very first hard-earned salary. If the Vincentians taught me how to love the poor, Batibot taught me how to love the children. More than what I taught the children about the world, the children in return taught me more about life.

I did not withstand the traffic and pollution of Manila. In 1994, I decided to go home to Sorsogon and landed a job in a local electric coop as their information officer. The job and my employer gave me the opportunity to explore my creative side. I even surprised myself when I did my very first composition, “The Enercon (short for energy conservation) Rap” that was done in Bikol. That paved the way for more jingles that augmented my income during elections and original compositions that conferred me with awards in songwriting competitions, worth mentioning were “Sarong Kanta, Sarong Musika (One Song, One Music)” that was the grand prize winner during the Kanta-Kasanggayahan Pop Category Songwriting Competition; “One Voice, One Dream” – an environmental piece that placed as Bicol Region’s Grand Prize Winner and finalist of the First Philippine International Songwriting Competition; and “Just Love” as Bicol’s Top Prize and finalist to the second outing of the same competition. My visual interest was also rekindled when I joined the Sorsogon Arts Council when it sent me to workshops that I later shared the techniques to my colleagues and students. I also became a professional broadcaster during my stint with the electric cooperative due to my regular functions in handling radio programs and producing video presentations. However, due to impending strike brought about by labor unrest, I was forced to leave the coop to try my luck with the banking industry. But luck was not on my side, Prime Bank had a bank run and closed shop.

It was at this point that I decided to pursue my interest with the broadcast arts. A local radio and television network hired me as production manager for their in-house ad agency but later transferred me to the marketing department that also gave me the chance to do radio boardwork in their AM station. This new assignment paved the way for my conceptualization and launching of “Radyo Pambata,” a radio program advocating children’s rights with kids running the entire show starting form the program hosts, to the newscasters, reporters, researchers, news and scriptwriters, talents and director. It was launched in 1999 after the entire cast completed a crash course series in radio broadcasting which I almost accomplished single-handedly. The program is still on –air up to this day with new cast trained by my original protégés. Because of this trailblazing initiative in the radio industry, the program was adjudged as 1999 KBP – UNICEF Alay sa Kabataan Awardee for Best Children's Radio Program Provincial Radio Category and finalist during the Catholic Mass Media Awards 2000 for Best Radio Entertainment Program. It also mustered a wide listenership rating when it notched as the top weekly radio program in Sorsogon during the 1999 KBP - PSRC and 2001 RRC Surveys. It was because of this program that I was invited to join DZGN – FM, which is owned and operated by the Good News Sorsogon Foundation of the Diocese of Sorsogon. I was later assigned as religio-pastoral programming desk officer of the Commission on Media for Evangelization. But due to financial woes that the station faced in the year 2002, I decided to join the government service.

After that circuitous and bumpy journey, I finally reached a ‘plateau.’ At age 28, I finally committed myself to marital vows with my partner, Jeanette in 1998. Our union is blessed with the birth of our lovely daughter, Joseanne in 2000. Finally, I landed a job that is a happy mix of my love for the media and my commitment for social development. Being the PIO of DLR, I am given the rare chance to witness the struggle of the tillers of the earth to regain their dignity and uplift their situation; to tell the story of their daily struggle in winning the battles of life that I articulate through the words, pictures, videos I publish and broadcast.

But what about my dream of flying and soaring the skies? I just recently realized that I already did. Not through a plane though. It was through the airwaves that I flew and soared the vast and borderless skies of my dreams proclaiming hope and a wish for better world despite despair and apathy.

Dreaming is never a worthless mission. Without dreamers, this chaotic world will not have a vision. The dreamers and visionaries provided the conscience or the soul that is necessary to unite the otherwise discordant notes of dissention into a harmony of humanity trying to make this world a beautiful place to live in after all.

It is when we dream that we renew life and live to its fullest.