Fortunately, Filipinos have talents and ideas that transcend this daily tabloid life. A nation best known for singing and pugilism, the Philippines recently discovered other inventive feats to be proud of, two of which the Inquirer reported earlier this month.
First was the success earned by computer game designer Niel Dagondon and his studio, Anino Games. Since 2003, Dagondon and his crew have been crafting games for various game platforms, including the Internet and Apple’s iPhones, and for entertainment giants like Walt Disney and Electronic Arts. With the average age of 25, Anino’s game makers churn out a new mind-blowing game every month, games that keep apace and perhaps even outrace those produced by the best of the world.
Dagondon’s success is a resounding testament to our nation’s ability to imagine the unimaginable and make them real. Dagondon admits he is living his dream and believes that there is more awaiting Filipino game designers if they just tap into their creativity instead of copying whatever is currently popular.
The creation of games is the purest form of creativity. You make something that other people will power with their own creativity into shapes, sizes and songs. You give other people’s dreams legs and wings. By giving life to what has only been imagined, Niel Dagondon inspires a nation.
Then, we see proof that necessity remains the mother of invention, but in this case, it is the Filipino imagination that has given invention the necessary muscle. In a land that struggled to render enough harvest, and where a people were limited by the scarcity of water for their required crops, someone had a good idea.
To the villagers of tiny Tara, right outside Himamaylan City in Negros Occidental, water was as precious as it was elusive, as their farms lay up from the river. The farmers needed water to be delivered regularly up to their crops to be able to harvest rice and vegetables all year round. For a long time, it was a pipe dream.
Then a nongovernmental organization called the Alternative Indigenous Development Foundation Inc. or Aidfi, encouraged by local government and volunteers, developed the Tara Hydraulic Ram Pump System to deliver water uphill to 40 farmers, and at a fraction of the cost of a conventional pump system. The system has been nothing short of miraculous, with 170 pumps changing the life of some 50,000 people in far-flung villages of Negros Occidental.
This creative achievement has not gone unnoticed. Dubbed “The Only Way Is Up,” the ram pump project won the prestigious BBC World Challenge, a competition held by the venerable British company to celebrate the most transformative of the many life-changing projects around the world.
Slotted along with other deserving projects such as a project in Peru that helped subsistence farmers improve their production and a Guatemalan project that sought to build school buildings from recycled material, the Tara pump project received the most votes online from around the world as the most innovative and transformative of 800 nominations, a $20,000 prize money and worldwide acclaim.
This then is the most meaningful of creativity’s functions: to invent a way of improving lives; harnessing the imagination to enable others to imagine and actually live better lives.
To be sure, many more heroic Filipino initiatives have yet to be discovered. In a country where disappointment can be a common scourge of everyday life, the creativity of Niel Dagondon and the inventors of the Tara pump system show us what it means to transcend hopelessness and seemingly impossible odds. Their achievements prove that we Filipinos can harness our powerful imaginations to break through the darkness of hopelessness with the brightest of our ideas.
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Sourcre: Philippine Daily Inquirer
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