This German Lady Married a Filipino "Jeepney Driver” and Discovered KAPWA | Culture Bearer 03

0:00 Filipinos have a way of changing their partners. Making them smoother, making them laugh more, making them less stressed out. So it's just this whole spiritual non-material side of the Filipinos. That is what fascinates me,that's what's so worth keeping alive. And I think it's great. I'm Katrin. Basically, I'm a soul having a Katrin experience. That's what I firmly believe. I am German, was born in Germany, Munich. It's an artist's city. So of course, I was destined to be an artist. And eventually, I met my husband with my boyfriend.

0:47 Goodbye boyfriend, hello jeepney driver! He drove a jeepney and he invited us. Very KAPWA! "Oh you want to come along? I'm going to an exhibition!" And the exhibition was about the cross-fertilization of Eastern and Western cultures. So it was very meaningful. It was really the beginning of our lifelong friendship. Eventually, I went to the Philippines. Fell in love with the people right away. It was exactly like how your film showed it. Like you're invited somewhere as a guest, and then you're invited to sleep in the host's own bed while the host sleeps somewhere else. Wow! You know Germans don't do that. You know, you're a guest, just sleep on the floor.

1:33 It's really these differences. But then what I really loved was the street food. Banana lumpia, rice cake, fried bananas, boiled sweet potatoes, and all these things. So yummy. And then when I met my husband's mother, she was such a lovely person. The only thing I didn't understand about her was... Why she powdered her face? She was beautifully brown. And then every morning, she covered it with this crust of white makeup. I literally cried. I said, "Why? Why does she do that? She's so beautiful." Beautiful face, beautiful eyes, and then she covers it all up just to fit this American model. It really really really affected me,

2:20 that Filipinos would hide their own beauty like that. So my interest in knowing the beauty of the Filipino grew even more. And then later on, when our youngest son was 4 years old, I started to enroll in school because already by then it was quite clear that my husband was always on the move as a filmmaker. He was always busy, and somehow I felt with so many artists in my family, I'll just become a psychologist. That was my second love, so I went back to it, and that's when I learned about KAPWA. The beauty of the Filipino. The way it came to this PhD was that I had this indio-genius professor.

3:07 Dr. Virgilio Enrique, who came up with this KAPWA philosophy, and with his whole theory, and he had a master class. He held it in Tagalog. I couldn't speak Tagalog, but I understood everything. You don't need to understand a language to understand a person. So that's how I was encouraged to study Filipino psychology. And I did it swimming against this stream, against this Western terrible framework that cuts out anything that's essential to Filipino people. So I was the first, and, I think up to now, the only PhD in Filipino psychology. Nowadays, everybody squeaks through because it's easier.

3:53 You don't have to fight all the time, but for me I was determined only to study what I was interested in, and that led to the writing of this book, and then it led to the publishing of this book, and to several conferences on Filipino psychology and indigenous people and artists. It's just this whole spiritual non-material side of the Filipinos. That's what fascinates me, that's what's so worth keeping alive. And I think it's great. Once you learn about KAPWA, you see it all over Filipino culture. Something that made me feel a little bit shy in the beginning... When you sit in a bus and you sit there squeezed pretty tightly beside somebody,

4:43 and then they eat pork rinds or a little bit of peanuts, and then they offer you! And in the beginning, I didn't know how to behave, you know? So I ate actually, and then they offered me more! And I ate more, until I realized it's the gesture. Filipinos will offer you everything and anything they have. But it doesn't mean you should actually take it. So I felt again, "Oh what should I do?" So there are lots of learning like that, but that's also KAPWA. If you share your food, you share your energy. I was also amazed about how open most of the artists here in the Philippines were about what they did. You know, their techniques, like whether Pandy Aviado,

5:30 or Ben Cab, all of them shared their technologies, their ways of doing things. German artists wouldn't do that. They would just show you what they do, but if you ask them, "How do you do this?" They would say, "Blah, blah, blah, blah!" "You know, don't ask me anymore." But here, everybody was so open, and for me this is KAPWA. So many examples! Guests will sleep in the bed, instead of on the floor. People always share food. In fact, in Enrique's class, everybody brought something to eat and it was all in the middle and there was never a meeting where it was just classroom style... Everybody just looks at the guru in front and nothing happens. It was always collective, always communal, and it's so beautiful.

6:25 Being married to someone like Kidlat has really shaped how I see things and who I am. I don't know if people who are really totally individualistic and only in their own world, if they would ever want to stay here or if they're too shocked because your heart just melts... If you can survive it, if you can break down your hard walls, then you can become a very beautiful warm heart-being also. I would say not just because of contact with the Filipinos. They're really many ways. There are good people everywhere around this world. But Filipinos have a way of changing their partners. Making them smoother, making them laugh more, making them less stressed out. So this is extremely important, and maybe that's why my professor always said,

7:14 "We Filipinos, we'll re-educate the world." "We will re-populate the world." "We change everything." Maybe there's really an impulse, coming from the Philippines that could come from nowhere else. Our son, the one that just died, He was very very talented, he could do anything, fix anything, he was the favorite of his teachers. And so his wife, she once asked Kidlat, "So what do you want to do?" "You want to be a filmmaker," "you want to be a photographer," "you want to be a businessman, what do you want to do?" "What did you come here for?" And then he said, after just one-second reflection, "I just came here to love people,"

8:01 "to make people happy and to serve." And this is just so beautiful. "I just came here to make people happy and to serve." And for me this is the essence of KAPWA, and the essence of Filipino. People who live who they are. This is the beauty of the Filipinos that I fell in love with. This why I wanted to be a part of this culture, and this is what Filipinos can contribute to the world. Hi I'm Bani Logroño, the writer and director of The Filipino Story. Thank you so much for watching this video and if you want to hear more inspiring stories about the beauty that lives within every single Filipino, then please check out our YouTube channel: The Filipino Story Studio,

8:47 and consider subscribing to join us and support us on our mission of awakening the next generation of BAYANI who will reclaim the greatness of our people.