Parang kahapon lamang, but it’s been 20 years since we, the ladies of Winner Foundation, under the leadership of the First Lady then, Ms. Amelita Ramos, and Mayor Alfredo S. Lim signed a memorandum of agreement for us to build a forest—just a tiny one, really, as forests go—on 2.1 hectares in Arroceros, where no more than a few trees remained standing amid largely concrete ruins left unsorted after a fire.

A forest felt like a good, moral revenge for the neglect, and it seemed the mayor was just the right man in the right place. He wanted a cool place for rest and recreation for Manileños, a sanctuary from the pollution and heat of the city. He envisioned a campsitecum-open-air classroom for the young.

The place was perfect: an archaeological site and a watershed protected by law from the greed of encroachers.

Ms Ramos, herself a lover of plants and trees, was another perfect fit. She reoriented the Winner Foundation, intended originally as a campaign force to help her husband, Fidel Ramos, get elected president, into an environmental crusade.

She gave us the forest to build and tend, and also the initial fund for the undertaking, to which we added through a yearly Earth Day auction and other efforts, in partnership with the Makati Garden club and Catholic Women’s Club.

The mayor, for his part, bought the property for the city from the Land Bank, and President Ramos approved the sale. With help from the Manila Seedling Bank and volunteer foresters and landscapers, the forest was built.

Cut off

It struggled for existence during the term of the succeeding mayor, who cut off our water and power supply. We also lost a portion of the forest. It was cleared, and many of the trees in it killed, to make way insistently, notwithstanding alternate sites, for a concrete building for the Manila chapter of the Department of Education, the same former owner that had hocked it irredeemably.

In the end, we, its caretakers, were ourselves locked out of the forest park. Not only did we fight City Hall, we sued City Hall!

But Lim was back as mayor to replace the unfriendly one. And just minutes after taking his oath of office, he walked with us to the park and unlocked it. It has stayed open since.

For our part, we revived the park, resuscitated some trees, and planted new ones. Alas, we could do only so much, given the great damage wrought. Still, we’re grateful and happy to be the forest park’s caretaker.

Now a new mayor has been elected, and the park’s fate, not to mention our own as its caretakers, becomes uncertain again. Anyway, there’s been enough cause for celebration.

And on Tuesday Alfredo Lim found himself in the center of it. At the invitation of Nina Yuson of the Museo Pambata, NGOs of Manila—Soroptimists, Inner Wheel, Community Chest, Girl Scouts, Child Hope Asia, and us Winner, among others—gathered for a pasasalamat party for him at the Museo.

Butchie Lim Ayuyao came as a personal friend and practically sister. Her mother, the late Pilar Hidalgo Lim, taken with Police Capt. Alfredo Lim’s sense of integrity and public service, adopted him as a son. Indeed, every year he joined the family for Christmas dinner. When he ran for president, the Hidalgo-Lim ancestral home became his headquarters.

Generation

My own family’s friendship with Lim dates back a generation. My husband, Vergel, chronicled some of its highlights in his biography of my uncle Joaquin P. Roces, Chino and his time:

“Chino marched his column past a police company commanded by Alfredo Lim… they had known each other—long and well. As a young Manila policeman, Lim had been assigned as a bodyguard to Chino when he became the target of death threats from enemies made through his newspaper’s uncompromising reporting. He accompanied him out—walked alongside him, rode with him in his car, or otherwise kept him within shielding distance in one bound; he fetched him and sometimes joined him at supper in his home when he delivered him back. The companionship lasted for months…

“A proud, unscrupulous, and conscientious cop, Lim had been thought ill-fitted in the conspiratorial and patronage-oriented culture of martial law. He was deprived of command and shunted to exile posts… and passed over in the promotions in favor of his more docile colleagues. Now on Edsa duty, he knew he needed only to not do his job to do it right, and for starters he did not stop Chino and his band.”

Following the praiseful remembrances and before the merienda, Fr. Sanny de Claro of Ermita Church blessed him and presided at a pray-over.

Lim felt so overwhelmed he didn’t mind if it all felt like a necrological service, he said, and went on, in response, to speak of his humble and nebulous beginnings at the Hospicio de San Jose under the care of “the very good but also very strict” Spanish nuns.

“It was the loneliest place for a child,” he said. Circumstances of his mother’s remarriage had forced her to leave him there. He celebrates his birthday there, on Dec. 21, and our foundation joins him, with Christmas presents to distribute to the wards.

“It was the happiest day of my life,” he said, when his grandparents traced him at the hospicio. He was only 13 when he lost them in the war, though not before promising them he would finish college and become independent—a lawyer, in fact.

Which, indeed, he did, and for which we, and many others like us, have benefited as non-political beneficiaries.