Florchita Bautista: Leaping into the Unknown

By Erie Maestro
Photo credits: JR Guerrero and Augusto Ng
Vancouver-Canada
November 16, 2014



Vancouver, B.C. -- The Art Gallery of the  Britannia Branch Library last November 4^th was packed with people who came to hear Florchita “Chit” Bautista talk about her journey to find meaning and personal redemption.

Florchita shared her stories, parts of which she read from her personal narrative entitled Leaping into the Unknown.  As a child during the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines during the Second World War, she had lived through her father’s arrest, detention, torture and death at the hands of the Japanese soldiers and had carried anger and resentment all throughout her life.  In an ironic twist of fate, many years later, then as a religious sister, she was put in charge of a group of Japanese sisters who came to the Philippines to witness first hand the poverty and the effects of Japanese sex tourism.  To Florchita’s shock, one of the young Japanese sisters turned out to be the niece of the notorious General Yamashita, known as the Tiger of Malaya. The conversation between the two sisters whose connections to the war could have brought them apart was the start of Florchita’s redemption and healing.

It was Florchita’s animated storytelling that created an audience that was truly engaged; one could hear the audible sighs and gasps from the audience as she told the story. And she had them laughing and celebrating with her when she told them the story of how a couple in the Cordillera had asked her to teach them when the woman was most fertile (reverse of the rhythm method of family planning) and how it was a success – a baby girl was born and was named Florchita!

Florchita Bautista, now a seniors advocate in Vancouver, spent her younger years in the Philippines under the Marcos dictatorship as a progressive religious nun living the “preferential option for the poor”, particularly for the workers, the urban poor and the indigenous people in the Cordillera. She left the Philippines, as a lay person, in the late 1980s, to come to Canada where she spent her time organizing live-in caregivers in Toronto. In 2001, when she moved to Vancouver, she continued organizing caregivers and temporary foreign workers. She now works tirelessly with the Filipino seniors in Vancouver, particularly in empowerment and capacity building.
Florchita who radiates positive energy was asked how and where she found this capacity to forgive and she answered, “Well, I think it was because God gave me the grace and the courage to forgive.  I, alone, would not have been able to do that myself. “

Leaping into the Unknown has gone into its second printing because of the renewed interest in her book. Prof. Leonora Angeles, who had read the book when it first came out in 2007, said that hearing Florchita talk about her book and reading excerpts from it made the book so alive.  One of the audience left with two copies of her book and told me that she was inspired by Florchita’s book and was giving them as gifts to her friends.
An elderly woman, an immigrant herself from Italy, immediately struck a bond with Florchita because while Florchita’s experiences were particular and personal to herself, the themes Florchita  shared in her program were universal. Raul Gatica, a poet and an organizer from Mexico, was happy to hear Chit because “I like her. She tells good stories.”
Anita Nieveras Aguirre, a published poet and member of the World Poetry Vancouver, read her own poem on Reconciliation and performed an interpretive dance between the readings.

The program was organized with the partnership of the Vancouver Public Library’s Britannia Branch and the Canada Philippines Solidarity for Human Rights.
Anyone interested in contacting Florchita for her book can email her at