Dubai-based Filipino is UN Citizen Ambassador

THURSDAY, 08 MARCH 2012 11:08 MOMAR G. VISAYA | AJPRESS NEW YORK

What if you had an opportunity to chat with the United Nations Secretary General for 30 seconds, in an elevator, what project would you pitch to him?

That was in essence the question posed by the UN to everyone who wanted to be a citizen ambassador.

A 23-year-old Filipino working in Dubai took the limelight late last year as one of the three winners of the UN challenge to pitch a world-changing idea to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in only half a minute.

Jonathan Eric Defante, was chosen as one of the “Citizen Ambassadors” for his entry, “One Bottle, One Life,” which was picked by a panel of experts from the UN among 600 videos, along with entries from Sudan and Guatemala.

“My idea was built around an existing idea. I proposed that each member state has a model community made out of plastic bottles and that their livelihoods are also based on these bottles,” Defante told the Asian Journal when he was in New York to receive his award.

Like a kid in a candy store, Defante still couldn’t believe his luck moments after meeting Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The three citizen ambassadors also had an opportunity to be taken on a special VIP tour of the headquarters, they also received a personal certificate for a two-year designation as a Citizen Ambassador and they attended briefings on humanitarian issues.

In his 30-second video pitch, Defante, an electronics and communications engineering graduate from Mapua Institute of Technology, urged Ban Ki-moon to “create a model community in every nation made out of used plastic bottles or ‘Eco Bricks,’” which can be built by the people themselves as a source of income.

The communities can be organized into cooperatives, he explained, to enable them to sustain their livelihood for years to come, changing lives one bottle at a time.

It was sheer luck that Defante saw the ad calling for submissions while he was browsing the internet. He thought about the idea and together with his cousins, shot the video using a borrowed camera.

Defante arrived in Dubai middle of last year and began working as a sales associate at the Virgin Megastore there.

“I’m just very concerned about how the Philippines always gets visited by typhoons every year. I thought I needed to raise the awareness so that more people would know about this idea, that we can construct schools and homes using plastic bottles as eco-bricks,” he said.

In his video submission, Defante began his pitch by stating that 2.7 million tons of plastic bottles, or more than 75 percent, end up in landfills—a reflection, he said, that “the message across the globe about recycling is not strong enough.”

His idea was inspired by the bottle schools in Guatemala and the similar endeavor of Illac Diaz and My Shelter Foundation in the Philippines.

It was around October when Defante received a call from the UN saying that among the 600 entries they received from about 50 countries, his entry was in the short-list of 20. A couple of days later, he received another call officially congratulating him for being one of three winners.

“I was literally jumping. Hindi ko talaga siya in-expect. I was looking at some of the entries and some of them were professionally edited. Ako, Flipcam lang and we edited it using iMovie,” he shared.

Beyond the title of ‘citizen ambassador’ and the opportunity to tour the UN headquarters, for Defante the highlight of the entire experience is the opportunity to meet and interact with Ban-ki Moon.

“It was very overwhelming. I didn’t expect him to be that kind. He is super humble and very inspiring. Sabi niya, ‘I want you to be inspired by this moment the same way I was inspired back in high school’. Then he told us the story that he was sent to Washington, DC and he met JFK,” Defante said.

The UN Department of Public Information launched The Citizen Ambassadors campaign in 2009 by inviting people to engage with decision-makers through the video-sharing site YouTube.

Participants who are at least 18 years old are asked upload their video response—spoken or subtitled in either English or French—to an assigned topic or question.

The contest is part of Ban Ki-moon’s initiative to utilize the Internet and social networking to give citizens a voice in many diplomatic issues.

For the past two years, UN had citizens react to: the Millenium Development Goals (2010); and to the question “If you had the opportunity to speak to world leaders, what would you say?” (2009).

Five individuals were named honorary “Citizen Ambassadors” in 2009, while six were chosen in 2010.

(www.asianjournal.com)

(Northern California March 9-15, 2012 SomethingFilipino pg.2)