Regis Cebu Leadership Leader Dovie Sainz Reflection Paper 3 - My Passion

Regis Cebu Leadership

Leader Dovie M. Sainz

Reflection Paper 3 – My Passion

What is your passion (What is it that you love doing)?

In my Call To Arms speech, I mentioned that my passion is teaching people to raise children of character. When parents teach their children proper values and inculcate in their minds a sense of responsibility towards the world we live in, these children can grow up to be mature and compassionate human beings. This is the most important responsibility of parents. However, the greatest impediment to this responsibility is the cycle of poverty.

The fact is that many parents are leaving their children with their grandparents or guardians to seek employment overseas. Families are torn apart because of mothers and fathers who work abroad to provide the basic needs of their children.

The most basic of these needs is food to feed their families. Many people who live below the poverty line struggle daily to provide safe and nutritious food for themselves and their families.  People who are constantly hungry become weak or are prone to illness.  They become less productive.  They find it difficult to work everyday. Their income becomes very limited which means that they will not be able to send their children to school.

Some parents let their older children skip school to look after their younger siblings while they look for food. Even if these children can go to class, they will not have enough nourishment to be able to learn to their fullest.  Lack of education prevents these children from getting good jobs in the future. Without good jobs, the next generation is trapped into a life of poverty. Thus the cycle of poverty and hunger begins again.

How is it reflected in you work, daily life, and life's journey?

Whenever I start a project, I usually ask myself if what I will be doing can help bring families closer to one another or will it just make the shareholders richer?  If the vision of the company is for the good of many people, I am usually quick to accept the challenge. I am happy when these projects provide decent paying jobs to people who are also happy to be working for the company.

In the companies I manage, the employees know that I value family time. They are aware of my priorities. Before I hire people, I ask them to tell me what they value most in life so that I can see if they are a good fit for the company. When they ask to go on leave for personal reasons such as children's school activities or health issues in the family, I try to find ways to grant their leaves. I know that if they are happy with their family life, they will also be happy to work for the company.

This is not very easy to do especially when we have deadlines to follow and orders to fill. However, most of our employees are willing to help each other during difficult times. We have several staff who are willing to do extra work so one of them can go home to the province to attend to family matters. Once we had an employee who had breast cancer, some of our employees volunteered to take care of her children while she was in the hospital. They look out for each other and treat each other as family. This is the culture in our company that has been passed on from generation to generation.

My husband and I believe that another way to help our employees get out of the cycle of poverty is to help them send their children to school.  We agreed to pay for their children or relative's full tuition fees, books and monthly allowances. However, due to our limited resources, we can only sponsor one new scholar every year. I hope to increase this number in the future when our own children graduate from the universities and can contribute to this activity already.

Reflection

What is the new learning?

I believe that many of the world's problems today are caused by people who have neglected to provide the basic needs of their children: food, clothing, shelter and education.  When these are not met, most of these children will not be able to get out of the cycle of poverty. It is also very difficult to educate children when their stomachs are empty or have no decent roofs over their heads.

According to statistics, the world's population is projected to exceed 9 billion by 2050. It will be a very huge challenge for humanity to provide enough food for everyone to eat. And even if we can find ways to increase food production or secure sources of food, the main challenge would be on how to ensure that all families have consistent access to food.

Regarding OFWs, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration has reported that every day about 4,000 Filipinos leave for work abroad. This means that more and more parents are leaving their children to the care of one parent, grandparents or guardians. Most of them will not have supervised upbringing and may have a tendency to take their education for granted. When these children are exposed to visual and physical stimulations, they will not be able to know right from wrong.  There is a need for more parental guidance before these children become involved in various forms of illegal activities or physical intimacies.

What is the relation to what I already know?

Parents who work overseas may be providing the basic needs of their children but if they leave their children when they are still in their formative years or if they are gone too long, their children may resent their absence and may not value their education as much as they should. These unsupervised children will not learn to their fullest. They will take their education for granted and can also end up in the cycle of poverty. The worst part is that many of these parents may not even know where they went wrong in bringing up their children.

There is a greater challenge for fathers and mothers to be good parents these days. As one Jesuit priest said in his homily last Sunday, "I believe that we can measure the well being of our society by the well being of the families that comprise it."

What have I done, am doing, will be doing for this topic?

My advocacy is to provide more jobs to people here in the Philippines so that parents will not have to seek work overseas.  I would like to see our skilled workers coming back home knowing that there are better opportunities for them here than in the Middle East, Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore or even the USA. I know that to be able to raise children of character, parents must be present in their children's lives. Good parenting is possible when parents spend more quality time with their children and have a balanced work and personal life.

In our native delicacy business, we have about 30 employees who are high school graduates only but we give them above minimum wage. Most of them are married and have families.  They have complete SSS, Philhealth and Pag-IBIG coverages. Aside from these we have a 50-50 set-up for their Maxicare health insurance. They also receive other benefits such as rice subsidy and uniform allowance. Many of our employees have been with us for more than 20 years.

I have seen many of them get married, have children and have sent their children to college. Every December, we get to meet their families during the Christmas party. In summer, we bond with them through a summer outing at the beach. All of their children are in school and doing well. A few have children who have graduated already and have jobs at construction sites and call centers.

We do not have to be as rich as Bill Gates or Henry Sy to be able to help people get out of the cycle of poverty. We can start with the people in our households, our relatives and the people we see at work and in our community. To be able to help these parents raise children of character, we must first address the root cause of poverty: Hunger and the lack of decent education of unsupervised children in their formative years.

(www.poea.gov.ph/stats/statistics.html)