Over the weekend, I attended the graduation at the Sisters of Mary–Boystown in Cavite of about 70 boys, mostly grade 7 level, and a handful of their teachers who completed a four-module course, “SuPeer Heroes,” on mental health intended to train them on how to provide support and guidance to their peers who may be suffering from depression.

The Rotary Club of Makati in cooperation with Jeanne Goulbourne’s NGF Foundation launched this advocacy to champion a key service area of focus of Rotary International. The high demand we have experienced for the seminar — our third school so far of what we expect will be many more — is an affirmation of the growing recognition of the gravity of this silent killer if left unchecked, particularly for the young who are generally reluctant to seek help from their parents but instead turn to their peers.

The most recent published data as of February 2024 showed a 57.3-percent jump from 2019 to 2020 (from 2,810 to 4,420 cases) in the number of suicides in the Philippines. Note that this data is only as of 2020 which was just the beginning of the pandemic, pinpointed as the leading cause of depression and anxiety, together with social media pressures on the young, that trigger self-harm.

Exacerbating the situation is the limited number of mental health professionals in the country.

Unbelievably, as of March 2020 Department of Health data, we have only 548 psychiatrists, 133 psychologists and 516 psychiatric nurses for a nation of over 115 million Filipinos. We have only 46 psychiatric in-patient units and 29 outpatient facilities for the whole country. Anyone trying to get an appointment with either a psychologist or a psychiatrist will easily experience a waiting time of at least a month before being seen, which for those who have never been treated could mean a deathly wait that might be too late.

The miseries of poverty that half of our population are experiencing such as poor education, shelter, and hunger are aggravated by this sinister mental health problem which is largely ignored and not given enough attention.

One community that has recognized the urgency of this need are the Sisters of Mary. The Sisters of Mary readily accepted our offer to conduct the mental health workshops not only for the boys town but girls town as well.

Who are the Sisters of Mary? The Sisters of Mary World Villages for Children are a religious congregation of about 400 nuns who operate charitable programs particularly in the Philippines, Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, Honduras, and Tanzania.

This hardy band of Sisters are providing a Christian education and board and lodging for FREE to over 20,000 children yearly, of whom about 8,000 boys and girls are in the Philippines in four schools, i.e., Minglanilla Boystown in Cebu, Biga Girlstown in Cavite, Adlas Boystown in Silang, and Talisay Girlstown in Cebu.

Although the schools are Catholic, qualified non-Catholics who pass the entrance exams are eligible. They also have hospitals and vocational training programs to round off their charitable works. The children are elementary school graduates recruited after an entrance examination who must be from the poorest of the poor families and who once admitted are required to stay in the boarding schools on campus until they finish high school.

They have graduated over 60,000 children in these four schools since their founding in the mid-1980s. In the campuses we visited in Cavite, we saw spacious, well manicured grounds with sturdily built residence, classroom, and administration buildings; laboratories where technical and vocational courses are taught. All the premises and facilities are cleaned and maintained by the children and manned by alumni. There is a farm where they grow their food and a chapel where the remains of their founder, Fr. Aloysius Schwartz, who was decreed a Venerable by Pope Francis in 2015, one step away from beatification or sainthood, are interred.

The Venerable Fr. Al, as he is fondly called by his community, was born in Washington in 1930 and started his lifelong love affair with the poorest of the poor in Pusan, South Korea a few years after his ordination as a priest in 1957 where he founded the Sisters of Mary to help in his advocacy of serving the poor.

Fr. Al died in 1992, three years after suffering heroically the agonizing side effects of Lou Gehrig’s disease which painfully eats away at the nerves, muscles and bones of the afflicted. Although Fr. Al was wheelchair bound and could hardly speak or control his muscles, he continued his advocacy and even founded another school in Mexico. The miracle of the Sisters of Mary should be enough for Fr. Al to be beatified.

The Sisters of Mary Schools survive solely on the generous donations of benefactors. For those in search of truly meaningful CSR projects to support, this congregation needs your help.

Until next week… OBF!

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