VIEWPOINTS

I have been watching The Lord of the Rings for as long as I can remember. Long before I knew what a university was, long before I imagined myself leaving home, I knew Middle-earth.

A city reveals its values not through speeches or slogans, but through sidewalks, buses, corridors, crossings, and doorways. It reveals who it welcomes—and who it quietly leaves behind. And the uncomfortable truth is that far too many of our cities and municipalities are still built for only a portion of the people who live in them. Persons with disabilities remain afterthoughts in design, tolerated rather than enabled, accommodated rather than empowered.

History, we are told, is written by the victors. For a country like the Philippines—conquered, traded, occupied, and reshaped by forces far beyond our shores—that phrase has never been merely a saying. It has been a lived reality. For centuries, our narrative was crafted not by the people who tilled our soil, built our communities, and carried our culture, but by those who claimed dominion over us. And for too long, we accepted their version of our story as the truth.

Governments around the world are making grand declarations about their ambitions in artificial intelligence. Strategies are unveiled, taskforces formed, and glossy visions laid out in conference halls. Yet one truth remains stubbornly ignored: you cannot develop indigenous AI capacity without giving your next generation of thinkers—the students—the raw compute power they need to learn, experiment, fail, and build again.

There is a quiet turning point in life that arrives without warning—when the things that once made you shrink suddenly become the things that make you stand taller. I did not recognize this moment at first; it revealed itself slowly, in hindsight, as I began to appreciate where I came from and who I had become. For years, like many Filipinos conditioned by generations of subtle and not-so-subtle pressure, I believed I had to sand down the parts of myself that felt “too provin

I recently had the honor of being introduced by my counsellor, Vimbai Masiyiwa – and I’m still processing what that moment meant for me, not just as a young leader, but as an indigenous person trying to find my place in global conversations.