When Philippine history exploded with Ninoy Aquino’s assassination in 1983, Yvette Reyes was in high school in Bohol, wondering what just happened. Her elder sister in Manila began writing letters home about protest rallies, but their parents, both government employees with unshaken faith in the Marcos government, could not answer their young daughter’s questions to her satisfaction.
Then both her parents fell ill, focusing Yvette on their care. It would have stayed that way had illness not forced a family move to Manila in 1986, “to be nearer to doctors and hospitals.” It also opened a larger world to Yvette. On a Far East Bank Foundation College Scholarship, she began earning a BS in Commerce in St. Scholastica’s College.
Marketing and Accounting would be far from all for her in those years, however: “1986 was my political awakening. I was a post-EDSA student activist. My student years were divided between studies, taking care of my paralyzed father and attending rallies or planning for anti-US bases campaigns or protests against tuition fee increases.”
In that hothouse, she also came under the influence of SSC’s progressive Mother Superior, Sister Mary John Mananzan, who planted a powerful seed in her young mind: “Every woman is equally entitled to opportunities in all aspects of life – be it socio-political, domestic, professional etc. We don't wait for it to come to us; we seek it or demand for it.”
Feminism decided Yvette’s choice of a first job – marketing stories for the Women's Feature Service (WFS), about the marginalization and successes of women all over the world, to mainstream media in Manila and other Asian cities. Everyday a constant stream of stories on a feminist theme bolstered her sense of having found her calling. Soon she too was writing WFS feature articles and taking photos showcasing equal rights and opportunities for women.
A life-changing trauma
But life had more jolts in store for her. A few months after her father’s death in 1993, a life-changing trauma descended on Yvette and her best friend – a notorious criminal gang abducted, robbed and roughed them up for several hours, threatening to kill them for good measure.
When they begged for their lives, they found themselves “in a dark alley near Manila City Hall instead of thrown into the Pasig River.” Besides a psychic wound doubly deep to a feminist, Yvette’s Achilles tendon was “totally ruptured.” 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. But she was made of sterner stuff, gradually turning pain into a discovery of 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,” she recalls. Crisis had become an encounter with an inner strength that would see her through the ordeal – and far beyond.
Yvette was unable to walk. Both her parents were gone, no longer able to bail her out from the huge debt she began incurring for a series of leg surgeries. She felt it would be unfair to burden her sisters, who now had their own families. And so Yvette, 24, bit the bullet. Resigning from a job she loved, she entered the corporate world and ran the personnel department of a pharmaceutical company “to earn enough to pay my medical debts.”
Money problems on their way to solution, there was more serious work to do on herself. “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.” Her alternative 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, Yvette volunteered for Bantay Banahaw – mountaineers from all over the country safeguarding a pilgrimage mountain from the garbage, accidental fires and massive stripping of vegetation by thousands of Holy Week tourists. That turned out to be the “first step to healing” her 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.”
Yvette takes longer strides
Her leg healed with her psyche, Yvette was ready for longer strides. In 1998 she left Manila for Mindanao to work with Catholic Relief Services “to help strengthen the organizational capacities of communities.” Soon she was also taking photos of children in teeming camps in North Cotabato, where the CRS provided relief assistance for people displaced by “Erap's all-out war” against Muslim rebels in 2000.
The photography she took up in her WFS days had become “a therapeutic hobby through long dark days of depression and self pity.” Now it began to speak so powerfully that her photos were flown and exhibited in CRS Baltimore. On her first trip abroad, CNN would also do a feature interview with Yvette Reyes in Washington, DC.
In that season was also when she 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 Bantay Banahaw.
Scaling her inner mountains was now leading to challenging new ones to climb in the outer world. In 2001 Yvette marked a milestone – an invitation to South Africa to learn program management in health and development as a development leadership Fellow of the Institute of International Education.
This petite Filipina from Loay, Bohol kept climbing. The following year she returned to the US for further studies on Non-Profit Management. There she involved herself with a United Nations online volunteers program that won her a UN citation for outstanding work one of only ten singled out from 20,000 volunteers.
By 2003, Yvette Reyes was Finance and IT director for World Vision in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Atop the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, where she both lived and worked, she would suffer her own Agony in the Garden of world history. “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.
“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,” Yvette herself recounts. It gave her “a number of close calls, including 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 World Vision job ran till 2007, but in 2004 Yvette took time for hands-on community work in Uganda. She not only raised money for 1500 HIV AIDS-positive children. On this motherly sabbatical, she “helped to make school uniforms, distribute lunch and teach mothers to cook vegetables.”
Another global hotspot
By 2007 it was back to another global hot spot for a young development executive – war-torn Sudan, this time as a “Global Roving Finance and Administration Manager for Medical Relief international (Merlin), providing medical assistance to various refugee camps and host communities in Darfur and Khartoum.”
Compassion is a plus for Yvette’s ilk, but so is practical diplomacy, like negotiating with employees of medical clinics in a refugee camp in Gierida, Darfur, who were threatening to stop work due to labor issues. Serving 1000 to 1500 patients daily, “the impact of the strike at the clinic would have been massive.” Yvette managed to avert it “through four hours of negotiations in Arabic.”
She had a translator, but her own working knowledge of the language, picked up in her Jerusalem years, was a priceless extra for picking up crucial cues in negotiation. (She also picked up “enough Hebrew to impress an Israeli for a few minutes and manage to get through army check points or order food at restaurants.”)
But people problems continued to hound her as she established and reviewed systems. Her discovery of theft in the central office was decisive – no less than the son of a police commissioner on the staff 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 and moved to a safe house until she was taken back to Khartoum, she “left Sudan for good two weeks later.”
That brief time in Darfur saw an un-programmed gain, however – ever the activist, Yvette found time to rally Filipinos to protest against the controversial POEA circular number 4 that she believed unbeneficial to OFWs.
Back to her calling
At this writing, she has just completed “a challenging first two months” on a new job as deputy country director for Oxfam in Sierra Leone. She has already successfully negotiated “two proposals with UNICEF on water sanitation and hygiene,” as well as started to work to empower women.
She has also discovered Sierra Leone to be 'the Worst Place to be a woman in Africa,' according to the UN Human Development Report. 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.”
As always, she’s paying a price for a special high: “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.”
But there’s always the Internet to keep in touch with friends and loved ones all over the world. And there are always Filipinos “who’re everywhere,” to share “savory sinigang” and Karaoke evenings with.
Beyond that, Yvette Reyes, now 39, has her art: “When I’m stressed and lonely I break glass then put them 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.”
