Darlene’s class

Last April during the recognition rites of UP Diliman’s College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, we had as our guest speaker Darlene Marie B. Berberabe, president and CEO of Pag-Ibig. While we were waiting for the ceremonies to begin I told her our college was planning a seminar on housing and wanted to have someone from Pag-Ibig. She volunteered herself.

That’s Darlene for you, a high-ranking official quick to respond to public service. It did help that she is a CSSP alumna and former faculty member, but there’s a spontaneity to her, a readiness to help, that is so impressive.

It wasn’t surprising that Darlene went on that day to give new meaning to an inspirational talk, more like a seasoned teacher handling a class of more than a thousand people. She reflected on her experiences starting from college as a philosophy undergraduate, to law school, and her work in the private sector before joining government under the Aquino administration.

After the recognition rites I heard nothing but rave reviews of her speech, from parents, faculty and students themselves. These were not the usual polite “ang ganda ng speech mo,” which I usually translate to foreigner friends as an anemic “nice,” but superlatives like “grabe, ang galing-galing,” which we tend to reserve for speeches that are not just well crafted but also coming from the heart.

I am sure many of the compliments came from people who have heard other government officials giving speeches, usually rattling off accomplishments through boring statistics. Darlene did nothing of that sort, and yet ended up boosting the Aquino administration’s image (“Wow, with government officials like that, there’s hope!”). I am certain, too, that she encouraged some of our graduates, as well as others in the audience, to consider government service, and that included UP faculty, who are government servants, too, and often internalize a civil-service mentality, which is doing things halfheartedly.

I will give the highlights of Darlene’s speech, but with some trepidation because I will be translating and paraphrasing. Darlene is Batangueña and delivered it in flawless Filipino from beginning to end. But there was more to the speech than elegant words; she delivered it from the heart, and you can see this in the way the speech flowed. I urge you to visit our website for the full text to appreciate it. (Go to https://kssp.upd.edu.ph/459/Graduation-and-Recognition-Announcements- and click on Darlene Berberabe.)

From reel to life

The first part of Darlene’s speech was about life’s lessons. She went to law school right after earning an undergraduate degree in philosophy but realized, after a few weeks of classes, that she didn’t want to go around photocopying thick readings and agonizing in class as law professors shuffled class cards to pick out a victim for recitation. Lesson No. 1 for Darlene: Go back to school if you need more time to think and plan about life.

She began work on a master’s degree in philosophy while teaching. If I remember right, she was the first woman faculty member of the philosophy department. Appropriately, her “homecoming” to UP at the recognition rites was marked by another distinction: the philosophy department now has its first woman chair, Jeanette Yasol-Naval.

After getting her MA in philosophy, Darlene had to make another choice, which she described as “Kwarta o Kahon.” (My expat readers will have to ask Filipinos to explain the game show.) Darlene chose the box, going back to law school, and that, she said, was her second lesson in life: It’s all right to make mistakes. What’s important is you pick yourself up, go back to the game, and don’t lose focus. And so she did become a lawyer, and the third lesson is that if you want something, work hard for it.

From life’s lessons, Darlene moved to a list of “bawal” starting with: “Do not succumb to pressure.” Choosing work after college made her realize how strong pressures can be regarding what job to take and, drawing on our melodramatic films, she said she was determined, early after graduation, not to take the route of imitating scenes of crying in the shower, slowly sliding down to the bathroom floor in anguish. The audience laughed out loud and I suspect it was because a few (or many?) of the women, and men, have done that at some point in their lives.

Darlene ended up in the private sector, five years in a private law firm and another five in the multinational company Procter and Gamble. I’m sure she intentionally mentioned “multinational,” knowing what alarm bells that sets off in UP, to emphasize that we need to stand by our decisions, unpopular it may be with friends. It was difficult and competitive work, but it paid well, and she said something that I’m sure intrigued many in the audience: being in the private sector meant “tahimik ang buhay,” a quiet, settled life.

Then the big challenge came: an offer in September 2010 from Procter and Gamble to work in Singapore. To complicate matters, Vice President Jejomar Binay approached her with another offer: Work with government by heading Pag-Ibig.

I could now understand Darlene’s description of work in the private sector as “quiet.” She knew what government service would entail: “no security of tenure, low salary, intrigues, politics, basically a thankless job.” Yet, she said, she knew that as a UP graduate it was now “payback time.”

She accepted Binay’s offer. And now she was challenging the new CSSP graduates to do something similar, declaring: “Bawal ang puro reklamo” (It is forbidden to keep complaining). In these cynical times, it was important for her to tell the audience that we must build the conviction that we do live in a beautiful world (maganda ang mundo), that we can right wrongs, and that we should always value commitment to service and responsibility to society.

‘Tukso’

Darlene talked about the challenges of working in government. Tukso, temptation, was a central theme. Corruption isn’t direct and in your face now, with more sophisticated and subtle forms of bribery. But it is those nuanced forms of corruption that have to be tackled, especially as they now come to be considered, by government bureaucrats, as “SOP” (standard operating procedure). She talked about returning a P10,000 gift certificate from one developer, and a painting to another, to send a message to Pag-Ibig’s 5,000 employees about right behavior.

“Have your photos taken with your loved ones,” Darlene said as she came to the end of her speech, “and let the photos remind you, always, that you carry the name of your family, you carry the name of UP, you carry the honor of our country.”

“Go forth,” she ended, like a priest at Mass, “and begin the drama (pelikula) that will be your life.”

Darlene was now the darling of the audience, and as she wished the audience “mabuhay,” the applause began even before she could “authorize” them: “Hindi bawal ang pumalakpak.”

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Email: mtan@inquirer.com.ph