The New Nation - Internet Edition

Special Correspondent

The Board of Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (RMAF) today announced that this year seven individuals and one organization from India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Sri Lanka will receive Asia's premier prize, the Ramon Magsaysay Award. The Awardees are:

Grace Padaca, from the Philippines, for Government Service. She is being recognized for "her empowering voters in the Philippines' Isabela province to reclaim their democratic right to elect leaders of their own choosing, and to contribute as full partners in their own development."

Center for Agriculture & Rural Development Mutually Reinforcing Institutions (CARD MRI), from the Philippines, for Public Service. They are being honoured for "successful adaptation of microfinance in the Philippines, providing self-sustaining and comprehensive services for half a million poor women and their families."

Therdchai Jivacate, from Thailand, for Public Service. He is being honored for "his dedicated efforts in Thailand to provide inexpensive, practical, and comfortable artificial limbs even to the poorest amputees."

Prakash Amte and Mandakini Amte, from India, for Community Leadership. They are being recognized for "enhancing the capacity of the Madia Gonds to adapt positively in today's India, through healing and teaching and other compassionate interventions."

Ahmad Syafii Maarif, from Indonesia, for Peace and International Understanding.

He is being honored for "his guiding Muslims to embrace tolerance and pluralism as the basis for justice and harmony in Indonesia and in the world at large."

Akio Ishii, from Japan, for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts. He is being recognized for "his principled career as a publisher, placing discrimination, human rights, and other difficult subjects squarely in Japan's public discourse."

Ananda Galapatti, from Sri Lanka, for Emergent Leadership. He is being recognized for "his spirited personal commitment to bring appropriate and effective psychosocial services to victims of war trauma and natural disasters in Sri Lanka."

Established in 1957, the Ramon Magsaysay Award is Asia's highest honor and is widely regarded as the region's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. It celebrates the memory and leadership example of the third Philippine President, and is given every year to individuals or organizations in Asia who manifest the same sense of selfless service that ruled the life of the late and beloved Filipino leader.

"The Magsaysay awardees of 2008," says RMAF President Carmencita T. Abella, "are indeed pathfinders in a changing Asia, charting new ways to address persistent, often intractable problems in their societies.

Citations

Award for Government Service

GRACE PADACA

Elections are the central institution of Filipino democracy. As Governor Grace Padaca puts it, they give voters a chance "to get the wrong people out of government and the right people in." In practice, however, Filipino elections are almost always contests for power among an elite few. In most provinces, a handful of families controls political power from one generation to the next. Everyone else may vote, but their choices are limited to a cast of all-too-familiar characters. Such was the case in Isabela Province when Governor Padaca launched her unlikely political career.

Maria Gracia Cielo Magno Padaca was born in 1963 and crippled early in childhood by polio. Taunted by other children, she retreated into a world of books and learned to excel at school. She won scholarships to help pay her own way and by twenty-one had qualified as a Certified Public Accountant. At Bombo Radyo in Cauayan, Isabela, she took an accounting job and, almost serendipitously, was soon a broadcaster, too. This suited her, she says, because "I could be heard but not seen."

Every day for the next fourteen years, hardhitting "Bombo Grace" took up the issues of the day over the radio. In Isabela, the Dy family controlled politics from the governor's mansion to the smallest town. As day-by-day Padaca exposed the province's intractable problems-a stagnating rural economy, multifaceted corruption, a plague of illegal gambling and logging, a ravaged environment-she came to believe that many of them were rooted in the intractable Dys. Yet few dared to challenge them. "This is not what I had been taught democracy should be," she said. Vowing not to be someone who complained constantly "without lifting a finger," in 2001 she ran for Congress.

With little money and no political base to speak of, Padaca criss-crossed the province in a borrowed truck, taking her case to the people. She lost. Under appeal, her opponent from the ruling dynasty was declared the winner by forty-eight votes when a congressional election tribunal invalidated ballots marked "Grace."

Padaca returned to the fray in 2004 to run for governor. Her opponent was the incumbent, whose father and brother had also been governor. Bucking the opposition of thirty-three mayors and the hysterical charge that she was in league with terrorists, Padaca urged voters to "Free Isabela." On election day-as her volunteers guarded the ballot boxes-they did. She won by 44,000 votes.

This was "the easy part," Padaca says. As governor, she moved quickly to neutralize efforts by Dy loyalists to sabotage her governorship and astutely prioritized her agenda. She paid off two-thirds of the province's huge debts and restored its fiscal credibility. She abandoned a bankrupt medical scheme for a sounder government-backed plan. And she launched a program to subsidize rice and corn farmers. These programs yielded fresh funds for new infrastructure, better medical coverage for more beneficiaries, and a boon for the province's farmers and agribusiness sector. Meanwhile, Padaca increased the budgets for education and reforestation and made inroads against illegal logging and gambling. With the province on a healthy footing, she challenged the dynasty again in 2007 and was elected to a second term.

As she pursues her ambitious agenda today, Governor Grace stays in close touch with her constituents. She challenges them to reach beyond their political comfort zones and to "defend what is good in society." She reminds them that the people of Isabela are no longer "the victims of cheaters and opportunists." Her victory is their victory, she says. "I will work everyday to prove that democracy is the better choice."

In electing Grace Padaca to receive the 2008 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes her empowering voters in the Philippines' Isabela Province to reclaim their democratic right to elect leaders of their own choosing and to contribute as full partners in their own development.

Award for Public Service

THERDCHAI JIVACATE

Modern orthopedic science, combined with space-age technology, has transformed the field of prosthetics. But in much of Asia-and even more so in provincial areas like northern Thailand-modern prosthetic limbs are well beyond the reach of ordinary people who need them. They are too expensive. They are too time consuming to acquire and maintain. Or they are poorly designed for life in the hills and on the farm. This is why poor people who lose legs from accidents or landmines or diabetes (or from snake bites, for that matter), often resort to makeshift alternatives. They fashion substitute limbs from bamboo shafts and spare bicycle parts and from wood and leather and plastic pipes, or they walk on homemade crutches. Observing this some forty years ago, Therdchai

Jivacate, a young orthopedist practicing in Chiang Mai, decided he could help them.

Therdchai, a graduate of Chulalongkorn Hospital Medical School who also studied rehabilitation medicine at Northwestern University, began to experiment with cheap and sturdy alternatives to the prosthetic limbs available at his hospital, all of them made from costly imported materials. An early breakthrough involved recycling plastic yogurt bottles to fabricate artificial legs. Using his own money and time taken from his private practice, Therdchai tinkered constantly to simplify the fabrication process and to adapt his devices to local circumstances, creating a "farmer's foot" for working in wet, slippery fields, and another foot for wearing flip-flops. To poor patients, he provided these devices free.

In time, Thailand's late Princess Mother Sri Nagarindra came to know of Therdchai's generous project. In 1992, she lent her patronage to create the Prostheses Foundation in Chiang Mai under his direction. With support from the royal family, private donors, and the Thai national lottery fund, Therdchai was able to expand his work.

Amputees from Thailand's remote borderlands were among the least likely to have access to proper prosthetic limbs. To change this, Therdchai initiated field clinics in which teams of doctors, technicians, staff members, and volunteers bring prosthetic workshops directly to the people. Once on the site, he and his team assess the waiting amputees, make casts of their stumps, mold plastic limbs for each one and then test them for proper alignment, comfort, and "gait." On the sixth day, a custom-made limb is presented to each amputee-anywhere from 150 to 300 persons. To date, Therdchai has organized nearly one hundred of these mobile workshops, including several in neighboring Malaysia, Laos, and Myanmar.

In certain high-need areas bordering Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia, Therdchai also set up permanent satellite workshops capable of making artificial limbs on the spot. The Foundation equips these workshops and also trains the technicians, who are often amputees themselves. In ancillary activities, the Foundation has organized artificialleg workshops in Aceh, Indonesia and trained prosthesis technicians from several neighboring countries.

Meanwhile, Therdchai himself established Thailand's first and only school of occupational therapy at Chiang Mai University.

Through it all, Therdchai has remained an inventor, assiduously refining his designs and fabrication techniques in cooperation with engineers at the King Mongkut Institute of Technology and other collaborators. His devices cost about 60-80 percent less than the imported alternatives and are durable. Through the Prostheses Foundation, more than 15,000 people have received them free of charge.

Although officially retired, at sixty-eight Therdchai shows few signs of slowing down. He knows that well-made

prosthetic limbs not only restore amputees to productive lives; they also restore their self-esteem. His work brings

great satisfaction. "Seeing my patients' smiles . . . when they are able to walk on both legs," he says, "I just feel

happy."

In electing Therdchai Jivacate to receive the 2008 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the board of trusteesrecognizes his dedicated efforts in Thailand to provide inexpensive, practical, and comfortable artificial limbs toeven the poorest amputees.

Award for Public Service

CENTER FOR AGRICULTURE AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT

MUTUALLY REINFORCING INSTITUTIONS

Among the many strategies to lift the world's poor, one of the most hopeful has been microfinancing. Launched by Muhammad Yunus in 1976, the Grameen Bank provided small loans to destitute Bangladeshi women-to fund small businesses-and repudiated the conventional wisdom that the poor are not credit worthy. Today the Grameen model is applied around the world. In the Philippines, the Center for Agriculture and Rural Development Mutually Reinforcing Institutions, or CARD MRI, has been a leading innovator.

Jaime Aristotle Alip, the Center's founder, was introduced to microfinance as a young staff member at the Philippine Business for Social Progress. In 1986, along with Dolores Torres, Lorenza Bañez, and other rural development workers, he founded CARD to assist landless rural women working in the coconut plantations of Laguna province. With a start-up fund of twenty pesos and Alip's "magic" typewriter-for writing up grant proposals-the group set to work.

In the early years of trial and error, the Center applied the Grameen micro-credit model. Its women borrowers guaranteed each other's loans and pledged to make loan payments and savings deposits every week. The strategy worked. By 1996, CARD had thirteen branches and 7,000 members, many of whom were now self-employed-raising chickens, goats, and pigs; operating tricycles and street-side restaurants; and working as tailors, market vendors, and mini-storekeepers.

Alip and his partners complemented the Center's lending program with livelihood-skills training and, in a strategic mid-course correction, modified their model to stress individual responsibility. They also launched a microinsurance program as a safety net against emergency expenses, so often a catastrophe for the poor.

In 1997, Alip converted four of the Center's micro-lending branches into full-service banks, or CARD Banks. In 2000, CARD's insurance program became a separate mutual benefit association offering life and disability insurance and a retirement savings fund. In Alip's concept, these units-the banks, the insurance operation, and the micro-lending branches-were "mutually reinforcing institutions," hence CARD MRI. In 2005, CARD's training center also became a separate "reinforcing institution."

Today CARD MRI's 337 branches span the Philippines. More than half a million poor women are members and nearly two-and-a-half million people are insured. The Center's loan- repayment rate is above 99 percent. This has permitted CARD MRI to wean itself from outside grants for its banking and insurance programs. Instead, it relies on profits. It now achieves a return-on-equity of 12.5 percent on assets of US $18 million. Alip is targeting a membership of one million in the near future. Meanwhile, CARD has expanded to Cambodia and beyond.

The Center's newest "reinforcing institution" is its Business Development Services. Its task is to help successful microentrepreneurs expand their businesses, accrue assets, and move into the economic mainstream.

This is the aspiration of every CARD member. But, as Alip and his colleagues acknowledge, only a few have advanced to become "mature clients," owning an income-generating business with over $2,200 in working capital and capable of employing from five to fifteen workers. Most remain poor. Even so, their lives are better, thanks to CARD MRI. It is one of the insights of microfinance that even small additions to a family's income can have profound consequences-for better housing, for better nutrition, and, most of all, for better education. Over time, these small benefits accumulate, securing and improving the lives of members and offering better hopes to the next generation.

Microfinance is not a panacea for poverty. But as practiced and enhanced by CARD MRI in the Philippines, it is a hopeful path. Through it, says Alip, the poor are gaining control "over their resources and over their own destiny."

In electing Center for Agriculture and Rural Development Mutually Reinforcing Institutions to receive the 2008 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the board of trustees recognizes its successful adaptation of microfinance to the Philippines, providing self-sustaining and comprehensive financial services for half a million poor women and their families.

Award for Community Leadership

PRAKASH AMTE and MANDAKINI AMTE

Hidden amid the dazzling human mosaic of India are millions of tribal people. For centuries they have lived apart in remote highlands and forests. The Madia Gonds, for example, occupy a 150 square-kilometer swath of eastern Maharashtra, bordering Andhra Pradesh and Chattisgarh States. In a thousand isolated villages, they survive by hunting and gathering and shifting cultivation. When Prakash Amte and Mandakini Amte arrived in their midst thirty-four years ago, the region had no modern services. Government officials considered it wild and served there only reluctantly. By contrast, the Amtes, medical doctors, came by choice.

Prakash Amte grew up in Anandwan, an ashram and rehabilitation center for lepers in Maharashtra founded by his father, the renowned Gandhian humanitarian Murlidhar Devidas Amte, or Baba Amte. Prakash was busy with post-graduate surgical studies in Nagpur when Baba Amte called him, in 1974, to take over a new project among the Madia Gonds. In a leap of faith, he and his wife Mandakini abandoned their urban practices and moved to remote Hemalkasa.

The young couple settled in a doorless hut without a telephone or electricity or privacy. They practiced medicine beside the road and warmed themselves by a wood fire at night. The Madia Gonds, shy people and suspicious of outsiders, spurned their help at first. Prakash and Mandakini learned their language and patiently gained their trust. The miraculous cures of an epileptic boy with terrible burns and a man near death from acute malaria turned the tide. "Once a patient is cured," says Prakash, "he comes back and brings four new patients."

Beginning in 1975, SWISSAID provided funds to build and equip a small hospital in Hemalkasa. There Prakash and Mandakini performed surgery and treated malaria, tuberculosis, and dysentery, burns and animal bites. To conform to tribal sensibilities, they placed most of the hospital's facilities out-of-doors, beneath the trees. They charged nothing.

Illiteracy had made the Madia Gonds easy prey for corrupt forest officers and other greedy outsiders. The Amtes helped them assert their rights and intervened to mediate disputes and rid the area of abusive officials. In 1976, they opened a school. The Madia Gonds were reluctant to send their children but, in time, the school prospered and became a center for both academic and vocational education. Prakash and Mandakini's own children were educated there.

The Amtes have used the school at Hemalkasa to introduce the Madia Gonds to settled agriculture-growing vegetables, fruits, and irrigated grains organically-and to encourage them to conserve forest resources. This includes wild animals, a tribal dietary staple. The Amte's popular animal sanctuary at Hemalkasa promotes the survival of animals as part of nature's balance.

Simplicity and respect guide the Amte's work with the Madia Gonds. Prakash wears only a singlet and white shorts as he goes about his work, so as not to identify himself with "well-dressed" outsiders. Where applicable, the couple incorporates tribal cures in their medical practice. In school, children perform tribal songs and dances.

Today, the Amte's hospital has fifty beds, a staff of five doctors, and treats 40,000 patients a year free-of-charge. It is a regional center for mother-child welfare and health education. Its "barefoot doctors" bring first aid to outlying villages. The Amte's school, meanwhile, has grown to five hundred students and is comprehensive. Among its graduates are the Madia Gonds' first doctors and lawyers and teachers as well as officials, office workers, and policemen.

"More than 90 percent of the students have come back to serve in the community, including my sons," says Prakash, reflecting on his and Mandakini's legacy. "Maybe it's the way we have led our lives."

In electing Prakash Amte and Mandakini Amte to receive the 2008 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community

Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes their enhancing the capacity of the Madia Gonds to adapt positively in today's India, through healing and teaching and other compassionate interventions.

Award for Journalism,

Literature, and Creative Communication Arts

AKIO ISHII

Behind Japan's famous façade of social harmony and homogeneity lie complicated realities. Often hidden from view are troubling elements of the country's social life involving stigmatized communities such as the burakumin and minority ethnic groups like the Ainu or the many Koreans, Filipinos, and other foreigners living in Japan today. Also hidden, and often denied, are troubling accounts of Japan's past role as an imperial power. Discrimination, exploitation, predatory colonialism, war crimes: these subjects are taboo, especially in print. Akio Ishii thinks it should be otherwise. As head of Akashi Shoten, a publishing house, he is exposing the underside of Japan's smooth social surface and bringing difficult subjects to light. In pre-modern times, the buraku were social outcasts and reviled as dirty. Despite official emancipation over a century ago, this stigma lingered. Ishii himself experienced it as a boy. He was five years old when the end of World War II ushered in Japan's post-imperial era.

As a politicized youth in the 1960s, he agitated against injustices in Japanese society and also opposed the renewal of Japan's security ties with the United States. In the 1970s, he joined a study group dedicated to eliminating discrimination against the buraku and became editor of its magazine. This led to Akashi Shoten in 1978, a publishing company of his own. Ishii determined to build his company as "a bastion for the movement to eliminate discrimination in thought and culture."

At first, Ishii concentrated on the buraku issue itself and on other beleaguered Japanese minorities. But he soon expanded to other human rights issues. Koreans had been colonized by Japan and compelled into forced labor during World War II. Ishii published accounts of this brutal episode and also of the plight of Koreans living in Japan, where they were discriminated against in housing, employment, and marriage. Similar forms of discrimination faced a new wave of foreign workers who flocked to Japan in the 1990s.

Ishii exposed their dilemma to readers in a stream of new books. He published a Human Rights Handbook for

Foreigners in Japan in Urdu, Vietnamese, Persian, and fifteen other languages, to guide migrants through Japan's vexing laws and procedures and to steer them to services and support groups. In a similar spirit, Ishii published a book in Japanese on the 1990 United Nations convention on "The Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and their Families," which Japan declined to ratify. Over time, Ishii's books drew attention to the "comfort women" of World War II, to Filipino women trapped in Japan's exploitative entertainment industry, to the physically and mentally disabled, abused children, and victims of domestic violence-to everyone, in fact, who was invisible behind Japan's curtain of respectable normality. Ishii also published books that countered rightwing efforts to exaggerate the beneficial influence of Japanese colonialism, to cover up Japan's war crimes, and to depict its former military leaders as heroes.

In recent years, many of Akashi Shoten's books have introduced Japanese readers to human rights issues outside Japan, including the caste system in India and the struggles of other oppressed groups around the world. In the twenty-first century, says Ishii, "We must create an era where the human rights of individuals are truly respected."

Ishii is not a public figure but his influence is large. Some 2,800 Akashi Shoten books are in print. They sell

well among intellectuals, scholars, university students, and civil society activists. Ishii is content. What is important for a publisher, he says, is "how often he can publish books of universal and permanent impact. These books," he says, "are my real assets."

In electing Akio Ishii to receive the 2008 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative

Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his principled career as a publisher, placing discrimination, human rights, and other difficult subjects squarely in Japan's public discourse.

Award for Peace and International Understanding

AHMAD SHAFII MAARIF

In Islam, authority rests in knowledge. In times of crisis and for guidance in day-to-day life, Muslims turn to scholars. It is their role to apply the truth of the Holy Quran and the lessons of the Prophet Muhammad to human life in matters large and small. Yet, Islam's religious scholars-who these days may be teachers or preachers or public intellectuals, and are often all three-do not always see eye-toeye. Their debates over the centuries have produced the heterogeneous world of Islam today, with its various sects and schools of law. In such debates, the authority of individual thinkers weighs heavily. And in countries like Indonesia, with vast Muslim majorities, intellectuals such as Ahmad Syafii Maarif can influence millions and shape the character of national life.

Syafii Maarif was born in West Sumatra in 1935. Through his family and early schooling, he was exposed to the teachings of reform Islam as espoused by Muhammadiyah, one of two mass organizations that dominate Muslim life in Indonesia. After university, he shifted naturally into teaching and later earned his doctorate in Islamic thought at the University of Chicago under the eminent scholar of Islam, Fazlur Rahman. By the 1980s he was an intellectual of serious reputation and a rising leader in Muhammadiyah.

The Indonesian nationalists who declared their country independent in 1945 created a secular state. They chose not to enshrine the shari'a, Islamic law, as the law of the land for Muslims. Instead, befitting Indonesia's extraordinary diversity, the new nation's creed became Panca Sila, whose ecumenical five principles began with "belief in one God" and otherwise spoke to the ideals of a just and civilized humanity, national unity, democracy, and social justice. This decision became a matter of bitter dispute among Indonesian Muslims that lingered under the thirty-year-long dictatorship of Suharto. His downfall in 1998 brought a new era of openness, reform, and democratizaton to Indonesia but also tumultuous sectarian conflict. It was at exactly this time that Syafii Maarif assumed leadership of Muhammadiyah and its thirty million members and sympathizers. Syafii Maarif embraced his country's fresh hopes for democracy and good governance and, in the stormy seas ahead, became a force for calm and moderation. When violence erupted between Indonesian Muslims and Christians, he reminded Muslims that Islam teaches the equality of all people; he took the lead in interfaith dialogues and warned against provocateurs who fanned fear and hate. When activists revived the call for an Islamic state and pressed urgently for implementation of the shari'a, he opposed them; the nonsectarian principles of Panca Sila, he said, were the right ones for Indonesia's plural society. And when the impact of 9/11 and the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq reached Indonesia, and when terrorism struck home in Bali and Jakarta, he stressed that "Terrorism is not the authentic face of Islam." In concert with other moderate leaders, he denounced it as a "crime against humanity." He said much the same about the new American wars but urged Indonesian Muslims to reject spurious calls to Holy War, and to make their protests peacefully. He did so himself.

As Muhammadiyah's president, Syafii Maarif spurned the trappings of power and resisted the call to politics. Today, at 73 and retired, he relishes his role as an independent thinker and mentor to the young. We must learn to look beyond our individual nations, he says, and see the world from a global perspective-"from a human perspective and from a justice perspective." Indeed, justice is the key to "global wisdom." Without it, he says, "I think the world will go astray forever." In electing Ahmad Syafii Maarif to receive the 2008 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes his guiding Muslims to embrace tolerance and pluralism as the basis for justice and harmony in Indonesia and in the world at large.

Award for Emergent

Leadership

ANANDA GALAPPATTI

No one is ever truly prepared for a natural disaster. The humanitarian interventions that follow are inevitably improvised and hasty, as relief workers make urgent arrangements to provide water, food, shelter, and sanitation and to relocate the displaced survivors. Such was the case in Sri Lanka when the great tsunami of 2004 left thousands of people dead and tens of thousands homeless. But as Ananda Galappatti knows, victims of catastrophes like this one are also burdened by shock and grief, and by fear, insecurity, depression and rage-psychosocial consequences of trauma similar to those of war. As a young psychologist, he is devoting himself to these neglected needs.

Ananda Galappatti was born thirty-three years ago in Colombo. After attending high school at the American International School in Dhaka, Bangladesh, he studied psychology at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. The Sri Lanka to which he returned in 1996 was locked in a bloody civil conflict of many years running. The following year, he assisted Dr. Gameela Samarasinghe in a psychosocial epidemiological survey of Sri Lanka's conflict zones. This revealed that 50 to 60 percent of those in the affected areas displayed signs of post-traumatic stress linked to war and violence. Yet, in all Sri Lanka there were fewer than ten psychologists specializing in trauma. To help fill this gap, Galappatti and Samarasinghe formed the War Trauma Psychosocial Support Program (PSP).

As head of PSP's capacity building arm, twenty-four-year-old Galappatti trained 160 psychosocial "helpers" to serve the towns, villages, and refugee camps of Vavuniya, a war-demoralized district six hours from Colombo, and otherwise enabled the area's primitive psychosocial sector with skill-building seminars, new intervention strategies, and resources such as databases and procedure manuals. In Vavuniya, Galappatti observed that psychological suffering cannot be separated from the real-world circumstances of its origins, including war itself and "deeply rooted political divisions." His approach adapted lessons from Western psychology to Sri Lankan conditions and religious practices.

Then, on 26 December 2004, came the tsunami. Hardest hit was Batticaloa on Sri Lanka's east coast, a district like Vavuniya already traumatized by years of war. In January 2005 Galappatti took the lead in founding The Mangrove, a network of organizations and individuals in Batticaloa dedicated to coordinating psychosocial aspects of the relief effort.

Not wanting to be a "fly-in fly-out" expert, Galappatti moved directly to Batticaloa. As the Mangrove's coordinator, he lobbied incessantly for better psychosocial services. He liaised with local, national, and international agencies; convened meeting after meeting for aid workers and psychosocial practitioners; and briefed newly-arrived aid organizations. He set up a rapid assessment system for orphaned children, organized training workshops, and mediated quarrels between aid organizations. Constantly networking, Galappatti spread word of "best practices" and warned of harmful ones. Meanwhile, he and his collaborators made countless humane interventions, insisting that women in refugee camps have private places to bathe and sleep, that anxious students have their examinations postponed, that orphans be placed with relatives or familiar care-givers, and that families be granted privacy when identifying their dead.

In time, political violence and instability in Batticaloa forced The Mangrove to scale back its work and Galappatti embarked on his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh. Today, with his wife and small child, he is again living and working in crisis-torn Batticaloa. Despite his Western education, his colleagues say that he "thinks and acts as a Sri Lankan," embracing his country's pluralism and also its dangers. As a leader, they say, "he works with the group as one of them" and "gently and firmly gets them to think and act." In electing Ananda Galappatti to receive the 2008 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his spirited personal commitment to bring appropriate and effective psychosocial services to victims of war trauma and natural disaster in Sri Lanka.