The people at the grassroots are not blind to their own miseries. This morning on my way to work, I had a little chat with the taxi driver. He mentioned that he is not familiar with the roads as he is only in Manila for a month or two to earn extra money. He is a school bus driver in Bataan.

I was more obsessed with the one-way movement from the rural to the urban area, and told him that people in the provinces will be faced with more challenges when they move to city – which ultimately exacerbates the never-ending problem of urban poverty. He said he is only in Manila because he hopes that it will provide enough cash flow for his family to subsist while schools are closed for summer vacation.

He said that if it were not for the lack of economic activity in the province, he would not want to move to Manila - not even for two months’ worth of raket.

I melted in my seat as the taxi driver humbly (and unconsciously) deconstructed my well-kept and well-shared wealth of knowledge in the field of economic development. If we – as a nation, as a society that relies heavily on the middle and upper class to fix the country’s structures, and as a collective people – truly want to have a successful take on a continuously appreciating human development, we are never ever allowed to forget to go back to the grassroots.

The grassroots have almost all the answers that we need. 

When I was teaching International Relations over the past 2.5 years, I always imagined tearing down the four walls of the classroom. I think that most of us in the social sciences would learn more if we weren’t as confined and can look, experience, and learn beyond those four walls.

Every single day I remind myself to live more passionately, think deeper about things that matter, preserve this world’s beauty by sharing it with others, discover more, and consequently, write more truths.