When Philippine history exploded with Ninoy Aquino’s assassination in 1983, Yvette Reyes was in high school in Bohol, wondering what just happened. An elder sister in Manila began writing letters home about protest rallies, but their parents, both government employees and Marcos true believers, had no answers for their young daughter.

Then they both fell ill, keeping her by their bedside. By 1986, things were bad enough for the family to move to Manila “to be nearer to doctors and hospitals.” That also opened the larger world to Yvette, 17. On a Far East Bank Foundation scholarship, she began earning a Commerce degree in St. Scholastica’s College.

But Marketing and Accounting would not be all for her. “1986 was my political awakening. I was a post-EDSA student activist,” she recounts. “My student years were divided between studies, taking care of my paralyzed father and attending rallies or planning for anti-US bases campaigns and protests against tuition fee increases.”

Sister Mary John Mananzan, SSC’s Mother Superior, also planted a potent seed in her mind: “Every woman is equally entitled to opportunities in all aspects of life – be it socio-political, domestic, professional. We don't wait for it to come to us; we seek it or demand it.”

That decided Yvette’s choice of a first job – marketing Women's Feature Service (WFS) stories on both the marginalization and successes of women all over world to mainstream media in Manila and other key Asian cities. A regular stream of stories on the feminist key bolstered a sense of having found her calling. Soon she too was writing feature articles and taking photos on the theme.

A life-changing trauma

But life had more jolts in store for young Yvette. A few months after her father’s death in 1993, trauma descended on her and her best friend when a notorious criminal gang abducted, robbed and roughed them up, threatening to kill them for good measure.

They begged for their lives and found themselves “thrown in a dark alley near Manila City Hall instead of the Pasig River.” With a psychic wound doubly deep to a feminist, Yvette’s Achilles tendon was “totally ruptured.” She had lost the power to walk. To top it all, “the tabloids reported and distorted our story and I felt twice victimized.”

Yvette Reyes’s story could have ended right there, in wounded bitterness. Instead she touched her depths: “During those scary moments, I made a solemn promise that if I survive the ordeal, I would do something different in my life.” Trauma had tapped into an inner strength that would see her through a long ordeal and far beyond.

With both parents gone, she felt it unfair to burden her sisters, now with their own families, with a huge debt she was incurring for a series of leg surgeries. Yvette, 24, bit the bullet. Resigning from a job she loved, she joined the corporate world and began running the personnel department of a pharmaceutical company “to earn enough to pay my medical debts.”

Money problems on their way to solution, there was a graver challenge. “Limping for three years, finding it hard to get the normal gait again, the physical therapy sessions were very expensive and so painful that I decided to try another option.” That option had character written all over it: “Mountain hiking helped me regain the atrophied muscles – I limped my way to Mt. Banahaw, Mt. Kanlaon and Mt. Pulag.”

Two days after her third surgery, she pushed herself some more. Volunteering for Bantay Banahaw, she joined mountaineers from all over the country in safeguarding a pilgrimage mountain and invaluable watershed from the garbage, accidental fires and massive stripping of vegetation by thousands of Holy Week tourists.

That turned out to be her “first step to healing” a deeper wound: “Being with strangers and trusting them taught me to trust the world again. Observing the faith of people who go on pilgrimage in Mt Banahaw helped me to regain faith in myself. By the time I paid off my debts, I was already walking normally.”

Longer strides

Her leg healed with her psyche, Yvette, 29, was ready for longer strides. In 1998 she left Manila to work with Catholic Relief Services “to help strengthen the organizational capacities of communities” in Mindanao. Soon she was also taking photos of children in teeming camps in North Cotabato, where the CRS provided relief to communities displaced by “Erap's all-out war” against Muslim rebels in 2000.

“Through dark days of depression and self pity,” the photography of her WFS days had become “a therapeutic hobby.” Now it spoke so powerfully that her photos were flown and exhibited in CRS Baltimore. On her first trip abroad, CNN sought out Yvette Reyes for a feature interview in Washington, DC.

In that season of new blossoming, she also worked with women artists in Davao and Manila to raise “solidarity funds” for Afghan women through the CRS. More, she organized a photo trek of Mt. Apo, “incorporating photography, responsible mountain hiking and environmental awareness” that echoed her turning point in Mt. Banahaw.

Scaling her inner mountains was leading Yvette to new ones to scale in the outer world. In 2001, at 32, she marked a milestone – a development leadership fellowship from the Institute of International Education to learn program management in health and development in South Africa.

This petite Filipina from Loay, Bohol kept climbing. The following year she returned to the US to study Non-Profit Management. Not wasting a minute, she also joined a UN volunteers program online in her spare time. This would soon earn her a citation for outstanding work, one of only ten singled out from 20,000 volunteers.

By 2003, Yvette at 34 was Finance and IT director for World Vision in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, headquartered on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem. Living world history’s Agony in the Garden, “she was there during the death of Yasser Arafat, the illness of Ariel Sharon and the takeover of Hamas in Gaza,” her friend Fatti Alcantara writes from Auckland in tones of awe.

“The most challenging moment was the Lebanon-Israeli war in 2005. I was the acting country director and had to plan for relief as well as possible evacuation,” recounts Yvette. That brought her “a number of close calls, like being caught in a firing line while driving through Ramallah, and being attacked by an angry mob during Ramadan in 2006 – young Muslim men angry at Israeli check points preventing them from visiting the Al Aqsa mosque, further fueled by the Mohammed comics.” Succinctly, she adds, “Survived both.”

Her stint with World Vision stint ran till 2007, but Yvette took a motherly sabbatical in Uganda in 2004 – having raised money for 1500 HIV AIDS-positive children, she also “helped to make school uniforms, distribute lunch and teach mothers to cook vegetables.”

The miles she was covering for suffering humanity were beginning to match Yvette’s original pain.

Another global hotspot

She landed in another hot spot in 2007 – war-torn Sudan – as Global Roving Finance and Administration Manager for Medical Relief International (Merlin). In a reprise of North Cotabato, again she was facilitating assistance to refugee camps and host communities, this time in Darfur and Khartoum.

Compassion is a necessary virtue for her ilk and diplomacy part of its armory. Faced with striking employees threatening to stop work in medical clinics serving 1000 to 1500 patients daily in a camp in Gierida, Darfur, Yvette knew that “the impact would have been massive.” And so, “through four hours of negotiations in Arabic,” she managed to avert it. She had a translator, but her own working knowledge of Arabic from her Jerusalem years became a crucial sensor for picking up cues in negotiation.

Still, people problems continued to hound her as she “established and reviewed systems.” One of her discoveries was decisive – a staff member at the central office, also the son of a police commissioner, was padding the payroll with ghost employees. Investigating and disclosing the case was met with a threat that Madame Administrator “would not leave Darfur alive.”

That ended Yvette’s stint in dysfunctional Darfur. Ordered into hibernation, moved to a safe house and taken back to Khartoum, she “left Sudan for good two weeks later.”

That brief time saw an un-programmed gain, however – not missing a beat, she found time to rally Filipinos in Darfur to protest against the controversial POEA circular number 4.

“I like it here”

Yvette at 39 has just “completed a challenging first two months” on a new job for Oxfam in Sierra Leone. She has already “successfully negotiated two proposals with UNICEF on water sanitation and hygiene” and started work to empower women in a country the UN Human Development Report calls “the worst place to be a woman in Africa.”

Typically, she says, “I like it here. Once again it feels like this is my calling. After the scary days in Darfur, I thought I would never get this feeling again.”

But she’s paying a high price for being both interim country director and deputy director: “No rest, long hours at work, mostly working weekends, always trying to beat deadlines. I know this is not sustainable; this will have a toll on my health and sanity. It feels like I hit the road running and I haven't stopped.”

There’s always the Internet to keep in touch with friends and loved ones, however. And there are always Filipinos – “they’re everywhere,” she quips – to share “savory sinigang” and Karaoke evenings with.

Beyond that, Yvette Reyes has her art: “When I’m stressed and lonely I break glass then put the pieces together into glass panels, windows, mosaic tables. It has become an antidote because it’s such a metaphor of my own life – make something beautiful out of broken pieces.”

Ninoy Aquino would have beamed with pride in this Filipino heroine living the lesson he gave his life to teach.

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