001 ~ Writing History

The two full years spent on building the Filipino police officer's basic international-peacekeeping record, which appears in PART FOUR: THE BODY section of the coffee-table book, was obviously not a breeze.

The process involved the acquisition and filtering of existing lists from several PNP official channels, the adding of facts that had been omitted by mistake and the ridding of erroneous entries, as well as the counterchecking of results with other sources (including retired UN veterans, families of those who have passed on, and external agencies here in the Philippines and abroad), made twice or thrice over.

It took that long, considering the assortment of factors that came well beyond the collaborators' control. (Some factors were outright beneficial, while others could be blessings in disguise.)

It took that long, considering the assortment of minute details that the collaborators had wanted corrected.

To achieve that, it meant having to create new, exclusive, comprehensive databases that could, among countless tasks:

> generate per-person demographic information;
> map ethnicity, career, and other important profiles
(that are hoped to someday contribute
to the PNP's force-generation procedures); and
> estimate (wo)man-hours for each police officer,
for each mission, for each host country.

To think that this activity covered just one of the book's four main sections.

But it was worth all the effort, to have somewhat connected with more than a handful of the 1,075 Filipino policemen and -women who served within the first fifteen-year period of the PNP's involvement in overseas peace-building campaigns (including non-UN missions, such as the 1994-95 multinational operation in Haïti and the 2003-04 humanitarian endeavor in Iraq).

Just by this sub-process, among the many that it took to put the book together, the collaborators would learn, yet again, that patience is indeed an indispensable virtue. And so are sound judgment, tact, temperance, tolerance, thoroughness, and humility above all.

One cannot be too proud to face the issues that are inherent in the chronicling of events and in the construction of milestones that should have been there already. One cannot stop toiling without making sure that all available resources have been exhausted, and without making sure that all perceived and potential resources have been unearthed.

Otherwise, history ---pillar of a people's culture and the springboard to a nation's future--- would be a farce that could erode the edifice of an emerging peace-building power.