Illac Diaz’ higher education

Cornball homegrown jokes aside, there are certain things youcan’t learn in Harvard, as self-proclaimed social entrepreneur Illac Diaz demonstrates while his beat-up Pajero is halted in lunch-hour traffic. “Kabalikat means supported by,” he explains, after what seems like his own stab at releasing stress, heaving a few of those “Anong tawag mo sa…” Pinoy jokes at me. “It’s like all of these people are sharing in a burden and pulling it forward,” he continues, gesturing with his hands performing a tugging motion above his shoulders before gripping the steering wheel once again.

He finally chuckles to himself after defining such a word, astonished at his having whipped it out in conversation, much more in the guerilla phone interview he’d just granted a local AM radio station minutes before; Illac having to suddenly park the car in the prickly heat as he sweated through his suit jacket and effortlessly answered several live-broadcast questions an announcer fired at him in the local tongue. “That’s what happens if you’re under pressure. It all comes out,” he says with a titter, alluding to his employment of Kabalikat to enumerate all the sponsors and partners that were crucial to the kickoff of his latest heal-the-word initiative: the Millenium School Design Competition for School Buildings in Developing Countries.

While such unexpected eloquence can arise in the most pressing of situations, it also leads to why Diaz is back in the country for two weeks, right before he jets back to his ol’ Ivy League and finishes up his scholarship-backed Masters in Public Administration. Sure, at 34, the guy’s had enough higher education to last him a lifetime of bragging rights in Manila’s cocktail circuit (a scene the guy is quite familiar with, considering his sometime stint as a model-slash-something ‘til he realized he wanted to endorse something more significant than coffee or cereal and be more than a bachelor with the decked-out pad), but despite an extra-chunky educational background that reads like every parents’ academic wish list — full scholarships in Ateneo de Manila (BS Management Economics), the Asian Institute of Management (Master in Entrepreneurship), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, baby; throw in several Grand Prize wins in a few of the school’s Business Ideas competitions), and Harvard, of course — all that noggin-fueling all these years hasn’t totally come full circle until now.

Getting schooled on natural disaster

Several times in your student life, you may have switched the radio on for that titular announcement of whether classes were cancelled or not. Especially when it got a little too windy outside and the dinner table discussion the night before touched upon hard rain and winds that you hoped were on their way to unburdening you from a dreary day of school. But kids in impoverished rural areas ask a slightly different question, maybe along the lines of whether there’s an actual school to run to come whatever natural disaster may hit their town. Say a typhoon blows about 7,000 classrooms away in a six-hour period (as what happened in Bicol) or ravages several towns in Zambales, Benguet, and Antigue, turning homes into scaffolding and displacing 90,000 families in the process (the recent Cosme catastrophe), upping disease because of unsanitary conditions brought about by such, and the unsavory fact that, well, school’s out ‘til further notice. Or flashfloods wipe an area out (Quezon, ’04), and, along with it, that flimsily-constructed public school built out of four posts, bricks, and a roof; the last refuge and meeting place for families whose lives had been ransacked by a vengeful mother nature. And more so in the past few years, when climate change has raised the lever of typhoon frequency in our country: “20 every year, seven being destructive” as National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC) president Tony Golez declares. “23 billion pesos is spent to rehabilitate and reconstruct (schools) and the following year, they’ll be destroyed again, so it’s always one step forward, one step backward.”

“Well, everything has a bottom line of infrastructure and the whole game plan has changed. The predicament we’re in is that we’re a vulnerable island nation and we’ve got to face the facts — such as that the building of schools and communities on former trade routes, areas with access to water, or plantations was based on a demographic consideration,” Illac explains why in 2005, he put up the My Shelter Foundation, which carried out the first earth bag construction practice (full school complexes made from 85-90 percent earth) in Asia, five clinics and 20 classrooms built from recyclable materials around the area without chopping wood or expensively shipping too much of that cement and steel — all contributing to it being the expense of the old mass-produced design and easier to reconstruct when natural disaster strikes. “The old model is so confined. Classrooms had to be built for mass production, so it was simply an efficiency model. But what happens when blueprints for rural infrastructure have become obsolete because of climate change and these kinds of 150-km winds,” he asks. “What happens when schools are getting destroyed faster than you can build them? What can we do other than accept this force majeure — this act of God that we can’t really do anything about?”

Academic sustainability

When Diaz’s My Shelter Foundation clasped hands with Golez’s NDCC and coalesced to establish the Be Better Build Better Program, lower cost and sustainability of construction were given a more practical question: What about building a school that actually saves more lives and keeps those classes going in the process?

With the urgency of such a question, it wasn’t hard to get NGOs and companies aboard the green ‘n’ efficient wagon, with the NDCC, Philippine Green Building Council (go figure), United Architects of the Philippines, Private Sector Disaster Management Network, Redeye (for ad and marketing dispatch), and Department of Education pitching-in resources. And then sponsors like DHL, Holcim, and ABS-CBN’s Sagip Kapamilya who lent a monetary hand providing the $10,000 first prize, $5,000 second prize, $3,000 third prize, and $2,000 for each of the four honorable mentions. Together they called for new designs that can go above and beyond Diaz’s revived earth bag concept and pave the way for greater sustainability, preparation for disaster (enabling a community with proper protocol as well), and a place where life and learning can continue to flourish.

And what Diaz labeled as “appropriate technology” can certainly describe the winners of the competition, from a third place play on eco-sand that thwarts post-disaster unsanitary conditions to the second place “Dancing with Disaster” design that breaks strong-pressure wind apart and funnels it away from the structure. “Others took us by surprise — one even using mounds of earth as speed bumps so wind could flow over the school. One even used trees as buffers — and then there was an A-frame design where the sides of the roof would go up and wind would go through the structure,” says Diaz of the variable solutions the international architectural community reached during the competition. “It’s just the horizon of possibility that expands and convinces you that there’s a way to do things and spin adaptability on its head.”

There is nothing like proving a creatively effective feat, however, especially when the first place design from Malaysia is used in the reconstruction of a Reming-and-Milenyo-devastated public elementary school in Nato, Camarines Sur this month. Then the Philippines will, as Diaz implies, finally be sliding a localized solution across a global table and, in true kabalikat force, push the discussion on sustainability forward; like our country is finally raising its hand in a classroom of positive change as the Millennium School competition becomes a jump-off point that, annually, will contribute to the progression of third-world countries with similar problems in infrastructure.

“This is not even the first step — this is half a step. There are many issues to global climate change, but one thing we know for sure is that whether by nature or by man, it’s exacerbating,” Illac says, furrowing his brow. “I can just imagine the evolution of thought here — with more people thinking about it. I’d call this a growing encyclopedia on what happens when disaster strikes and the global focus with this project is realizing that there are more schools being destroyed than there are funds to build them. It’s to ensure that the kids — roughly 50 percent of the rural area population — don’t find their schools destroyed and end up spending another semester or the next two years in a tent.”

Of course, battling global warming is all about the children, anyway; the future, if you will. Harvard diploma or not, the educated rest of us can learn a little something from Diaz: that there’s a lot more we can do with our diplomas just so all the others who don’t even have a place to learn in can actually get their own as well.

Source:Illac Diaz’ higher education -http://supreme.ph/2008/06/18/illac-diaz-higher-education/

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod