Every morning before school, Glenmar Montaño watched the sun rise over a runway.
It wasn’t built for children. It wasn’t meant for dreams. The makeshift airstrip in Rizal town, which is 209 kilometers south of Puerto Princesa, cut through forests and rock, was designed for helicopters delivering medical supplies or evacuating the sick.
But to Glenmar and the other neighborhood kids in their agricultural town, it was a kind of lifeline. They played tag between faded markers. They lay on the tarmac and imagined planes that never came. It was the flattest ground they knew.
He didn’t know it then, but he was already learning what would define the rest of his life: that some people get playgrounds, and others grow up chasing hope down a runway.
Years later, in a bright studio in Quezon City, that same boy—now 22, a senior at the University of the Philippines Diliman—stepped under the lights of Bilyonaryo Quiz B: College Edition, the lone representative of his hometown and the only contestant with roots in one of the country’s most rural municipalities.
A future math teacher with the posture of someone used to earning his seat at the table, Glenmar buzzed in with the kind of quiet certainty that comes from years of fighting for opportunity, not just for himself, but for a community too often left behind.
“I always ask myself,” he says, “Para kanino ka bumabangon?”
Long before he knew the word for it, he understood scarcity.
The books in his elementary school were falling apart, passed down like heirlooms from class to class. There were no math workbooks, no decent libraries, and most of the teachers were overworked and under-equipped. But his mother, a firm believer in education, drove him to school every morning.
His father, a fisherman, came home with enough fish for dinner but little else. His town, so remote it sometimes disappears from Google maps, gave him little, but it gave him purpose.
By Grade 1, he was competing in national math tournaments. By high school, he was leading student organizations. But what shaped him more than the medals was a trip to a mountainside village in Barangay Punta Baja, where his school had organized a community service project.
He was 16. The children he met were younger, barefoot, bright-eyed. They had no notebooks, no crayons. Some had never even held a storybook. That day, Glenmar didn’t teach them derivatives or integers. He taught them how to read their names.
“That was the moment,” he says, “when I stopped thinking only about teaching in a classroom. I started thinking about education as justice.”
In 2021, he and a few childhood friends from Rizal founded Basa Batuta—a youth-led literacy initiative named after the simple tools of learning: reading (basa) and little child (batuta).
They started small: collecting donated books, designing simple modules, carrying storybooks up dirt trails to remote schools where the alphabet was still unfamiliar. They held reading camps and storytelling sessions in barrios where electricity flickered and roads vanished in the rain.
They integrated financial literacy, values education, and even basic hygiene lessons into their sessions—because in the margins, education had to mean everything.
Today, Basa Batuta has grown to more than 30 active volunteers, reaching children in isolated parts of southern Palawan—Sitio Calupisan, Barangay Ransang, and beyond.
Most of the volunteers are young, many of them the first in their families to finish college. They fund their trips through online donations, bake sales, and sheer determination.
They are not celebrities. There are no government grants. But there is, as Glenmar puts it, “a radical hope”—that in a country ranked among the lowest in international reading assessments, literacy can still be revolutionary.
“I’ve met kids who walk two hours to get to a reading session,” he says. “Kids who read their first book at age 10. Kids who teach their younger siblings after the session ends. It reminds you: the hunger is there. It always has been.”
He tells these stories not as a hero, but as someone carrying the weight of unfinished work.
At Bilyonaryo Quiz B, Glenmar isn’t just competing for a title. He is representing a future he’s still building—one book, one child, one quiet corner of Palawan at a time.
And when I asked him about what comes next, about becoming a math teacher, about expanding Basa Batuta to every far-flung sitio in the province, about someday seeing a library in every barangay, he doesn’t sound like someone who hopes it might happen.
He sounds like someone who knows it will.
“Dapat alam mo kung para kanino ka bumabangon,” he repeats, more quietly this time. You must know for whom you rise.
For Glenmar, the answer is simple: For the children no one else is reading to. For the girl with no school bag. For the boy spelling his name for the first time. For the country they will inherit, and the better world he still believes we can build.
Via Hanna Zapanta / Palawan Daily News
