Fundraiser for Ma. Victoria Carpio-Bernido

Update: (16 Feb 2022) Thanks to the overflowing of love and support from all fronts, my uncle, Dr. Christopher Bernido, has decided to put the donated money into the M. Victoria Carpio-Bernido Research Fellowship. Thank you all again for your generous donations!

Update: (07 Jan 2022) Auntie Marivic passed away on January 6, 2022 at 1:24pm. Thank you all for your generous donations.There will be an online mass every night until January 14 via Zoom at 8pm PH / 1pm EU / 7am US-East Coast. Novena masses will be livestreamed and you may join us or watch the previous days' masses and tributes via the YouTube playlist below.

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My auntie Marivic (Maria Victoria Carpio Bernido) has been at St. Luke’s Medical Center since November 26, 2021, for metastatic colon cancer. She had surgery for her stage IV colon cancer in March 2020 and received six rounds of chemotherapy. After the chemotherapy, no residual cancer was found and she was cancer-free for almost a year. However in July 2021, her colon cancer was found to have metastasized, so she was advised to have more rounds of targeted chemotherapy. When she was about to have her seventh chemotherapy session, she became critically ill and has been in the hospital since the end of November 2021 up to now.

Having contributed to upgrading high school education in the country, this fund is an attempt to support the recovery of Auntie Marivic so she can continue her service to the country. We are collecting money to cover only a single item on her hospital bill: "Pharmacy dispensing and compounding" which includes medicines for pain management, heart and kidney support, and her IV nutrition line. Auntie Marivic cannot take in food/water by mouth at the moment because of a blockage in the small intestine. An operation is not possible because of complications brought about by a surgery on her colon done two years ago, which was when we discovered that she had cancer. She now receives sustenance through IV feeding which is also prone to infection. As of December 30, 2021, this item alone on her hospital bill has reached 2,338,581.50 Philippine pesos, beside the other expenses for the room, diagnostic costs, and doctors' fees. It is therefore this amount that we have decided to set as the target of this fundraiser.

Auntie Marivic was a faculty member at the National Institute of Physics at the University of the Philippines, but she gave up her post in 1999 to help run a small high school in Jagna, a third-class municipality in the province of Bohol. In that high school, called the Central Visayan Institute Foundation, most of the students are children of farmers, fishermen, tricycle drivers and others who could ill afford expensive, quality education.

She together with her husband, Christopher Bernido, developed an innovative method of student-centered learning-by-doing to overcome the lack of qualified teachers and provide high quality education in places such as Jagna and other rural towns in the Philippines. Both Auntie Marivic and Uncle Chris won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2010 for this new pedagogical approach, called the CVIF Dynamic Learning Program (CVIF-DLP).

The CVIF-DLP has since been adopted in more than 1,000 schools throughout the Philippines. At the heart of the CVIF-DLP is the concept of independent learning by the students through accomplishing the Learning Activity Sheets (LAS), which were prepared through the hard work of Auntie Marivic.

During the pandemic, the CVIF-DLP turns out to be very well suited to distance learning – students learn at home without face-to-face classes during this COVID. Thousands of the CVIF-DLP Learning Activity Sheets edited by my aunt are now being used by the Department of Education (DepEd) and have been uploaded to DepEd Commons, a website maintained by DepEd, and have contributed to the continuity of learning during this time of social distancing. Even during her months of chemotherapy and at great sacrifice, Auntie Marivic continued her work on the Learning Activity Sheets. The impact of the CVIF-DLP can be viewed in a series of webinars and web fora, and one of these is CVIF-DLP Web Forum.

Beside handling the school, Auntie Marivic and Uncle Chris have continued to do research, publishing between them more than 50 papers in journals such as the Physics Letters A, Journal of Mathematical Physics and more recently in Climate Dynamics and the Biophysical Journal. When they moved to Jagna in 1999, she and my uncle started the Research Center for Theoretical Physics (RCTP), which holds the Jagna International Workshops every three years. The workshops have invited many scientists over the years, including Gerard 't Hooft and Frank Wilczek, who were participants at the very first Jagna Workshop in 1995 and moved on to win the Nobel Prize in 1999 and 2004. My aunt and uncle were also the ones who encouraged me to pursue a PhD, as they have with many other young Filipino scholars and scientists over the last few decades.

Auntie Marivic is among the best filipino phycisists and educators of her generation and for me and many others, one of the most inspiring of teachers. If she has somehow touched your life through her work, her vocation, or her selfless disposition, please consider donating. Even the smallest amount will go a long way.

Thank you very much, on behalf of the Bernido family and the Carpio family.