A Japanese historian who helped Cambodians preserve the Angkor temples and a Sri Lankan teacher who counseled war widows and orphans to overcome their nightmares are among the six winners of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Awards, regarded as Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize.
The other recipients named on Thursday are an Indonesian working for the return of large tracts of forest land to indigenous communities, a Singaporean who leads the cooking of 6,000 meals a day for the destitute, a Philippine theater group which stood up to a dictatorship and a Filipino who oversaw the opening of job-generating export processing zones.
The awards, named after a Philippine President who died in a 1957 plane crash, are to be presented in Manila on August 31. The winners were unafraid to take on large causes and “refused to give up, despite meager resources, daunting adversity and strong opposition,” said Carmencita Abella, president of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. “Their approaches are all deeply anchored on a respect for human dignity,” he added.
