Given the clamor of national politics in the Philippines and the dominant presence of Manila in the nation’s consciousness, it is easy to lose sight of the country’s great size and diversity. But in the highlands across the Philippine archipelago live several dozen groups of indigenous peoples whose ways of life stand in contrast to those of the lowland and urban majority. Although theirs is not wholly a world apart, it is a world still on the margins of the country’s major political, economic, and cultural systems. As a young man, Benjamin Abadiano discovered this world and became part of it.

Born in 1963, Abadiano was raised by his grandparents and educated at Xavier University in Mindanao. A mentor there introduced him to the country’s indigenous peoples. During a brief exposure among the Manobo in Bukidnon, he found himself drawn to the spartan simplicity of upland life. In 1988, at age twenty-five, he wandered into Paitan, Mindoro Oriental, where the Servants of the Holy Spirit missionary sisters worked among the Mangyan. Abadiano volunteered to help and stayed on for nine years.

The nuns asked Abadiano to focus on the people’s basic needs. He proposed an education program to emphasize literacy as well as livelihood and leadership skills, and to uphold Mangyan values and traditions. This became the Tugdaan (Seedbed) Center for Human and Environmental Development. Abadiano launched the Center with only twelve students and a small hut, which he shared with them night and day. Soliciting donations from friends in Manila and acting as principal and teacher all in one, he built his small school into a comprehensive learning center with classrooms and meeting halls, a library, science laboratory, preschool, and Mangyan cultural resource center. In time, it served hundreds of Mangyans of all ages who, at Tugdaan, were encouraged to speak their own language and to wear Mangyan clothing. Abadiano learned all he could about them and compiled the first Tagalog-Mangyan dictionary. He recruited new teachers for the Center and raised funds by organizing a business to produce and sell calamansi juice and other local products. When he departed Mindoro in 1997 to enter the Jesuit novitiate, Abadiano left behind a thriving institution. Today, it is training nearly two hundred students and more than half of its teachers are Mangyan.

In 2001, the Assisi Development Foundation called upon Abadiano to lead its efforts in Mindanao to assist hundreds of thousands of people, uprooted by war, to return home and reestablish normal lives. As executive coordinator for Tabang Mindanaw, he developed a rehabilitation program that integrated social welfare, governance, and livelihood measures with peace building. Working tirelessly to coordinate negotiations between local authorities and religious leaders, the military, armed insurgents, and the people themselves, Abadiano helped to set up fifty-four Sanctuaries of Peace across Mindanao. At the same time, he connected with Mindanao’s indigenous groups, or Lumad, and founded the ILAWAN Center for Peace and Sustainable Development. ILAWAN’s Pamulaan Training Center now provides a culture-based education program like that of Tugdaan. Through ILAWAN, which means "holder of light," Abadiano hopes to foster the kind of volunteerism that first led him to Mindoro and to the work that has brought much meaning to his life.

Indeed, Abadiano’s heart is in the highlands with the Mangyan, Lumad, and other indigenous peoples. The passion he brings to everything he does comes from the example of his grandparents and, he says, from "a feeling of gratitude and of being blessed." And if you are blessed, Abadiano believes, "You have to share your best."

In electing Benjamin Abadiano to receive the 2004 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his steadfast commitment to indigenous Filipinos and their hopes for peace and better lives consonant with their hallowed ways of life.