This testimony was given at a conference for pastors in 2021, by Leopoldo Uba.
My wife and I belong to the 30,000 couples blessing and we are one of the Cheonbo Couples in the Philippines. We are presently residing here in Puerto Princesa City, Palawan, Philippines. My wife Chiyomi Takaira (who is Japanese) passed away in 2019, six months before the proclamation of Foundation Day. I am the FFWPU and UPF director in the Mimaropa Region in the Western Philippines.
I will share with you the best practices that we had in fulfilling our Heavenly Tribal Messiah mission, especially at this time when True Mother asked us to focus on the education of our 43 couples and make them our core members to support True Parents vision to establish the Heavenly Unified Korea in the era of the Heavenly Parent’s Holy Community.
Even before my wife and I started our Heavenly Tribal Messiah mission, it was already our desire and dream to give True Parents’ portrait to every household here in Palawan. Thanks to True Parent’s Heavenly tribal messiah providence, we were able to give the portrait of True Parents to the 430 couples in our tribe, the “Uba and Takaira” tribe. And in the span of five years, we were able to bless around 30,000 couples in the whole of Palawan.
To advance the providence in our mission area, we are now educating 43 couples from our 430 couples not only to become core members but to act as a leaders to our 430 couples. We educate our 43 couples by teaching them the tradition of our True Parents and with the Divine Principle and reading together the speeches of True Parents through hoondokhae. At this time we are offering a 12-minute prayer condition mentioning the names of our 43 couples; in addition we do 21 minutes reading True Mother’s memoir.
In my heart, my prayer and determination are not only to educate my 43 couples but to establish a model tribe, model town, and a model province of Palawan and hoping to contribute to Cheon Il Guk in the Philippines. Here in Palawan, we are raising up a model barangay [a small district] named Salvacion, in the town of Roxas. We claim it as model barangay because all the village leaders have already received the blessing and 90 percent of its families are already blessed couples—and we are conducting regular home group gathering. The organizations of UPF, FFWPU, WFWP and IAYSP are already functioning legally in this barangay through a memorandum of agreement with the barangay officials. Although Barangay Salvacion is the smallest barangay in the 31 barangay of the Roxas Municipality it became very interested with the UPF activities and finally in 2018 the mayor, husband and wife, attended the Blessing together with the vice mayor and some municipal appointees. The mayor himself also organized one Blessing event with more than 100 participants.
When we started our HTM blessing events we determined to bless three sectors in society: first the educators, second the religious leaders and third the local government leaders. Because we required them to attend as husband and wife, we were able to conduct the Holy Wine Ceremony, Blessing Ceremony, Indemnity Stick Ceremony and we explained the value of the 40-day purification period and later the Three-day Ceremony. Through the lectures from our national Heavenly Tribal Messiah HQ we could guide our couples during the 40-day purification period, educating them the important role of the husband and wife in the family, the value of the Blessing and other family values.
From the 30,000 couples who received the blessing in Palawan, more than 300 couples are educators, 50 couples from local government leaders and 40 from religious leaders. They mostly completed the Three-day Ceremony. To deepen their learning experience, we conducted lecturer’s training for the educators. And the educators learned how to give lectures on the five principles of peace, and they gave presentations at some of our Blessing events. We also involve them with PWPA activities alongside other educators in our province, and we invite them to attend Rallies of Hope and other virtual conferences for academics.
In 2019, the first local IAPD chapter was launched in Palawan for the religious leaders, and since then we were guiding and inspiring our religious leaders from different Christian groups to become mobilizers in the community through home group gatherings. We teach them how to teach the Divine Principle and it’s a breakthrough because these Christian pastors are now giving their messages to their congregations using the words of our True Parents and the content of the Divine Principle. We now have a total of nine couples who are Christian pastors and barangay volunteers working together with our Cheonbo couple. For our local government leaders, we established a MOA between the municipal mayors and UPF Palawan and we agree to promote the education of the family and society achieving the spirit of the principles of Interdependence, Mutual Prosperity and Universal Values.
True Mother told us to go beyond our own tribe. In Palawan we work as a team we don’t just take care of our own 43 and 430 couples but we work together to help each other. Through our religious leaders and some village volunteers together with our Cheonbo couples, we reach out to the 43 couples of each of our 60 heavenly tribal messiahs in Palawan. Some of the amazing internal results we have is in the home group hoondokhae in the community. Through family education we could establish stronger relationships between parents and children in the family, where the children could open up to their parents, creating a healthier atmosphere in the family.
We also started to organize IAYSP though the HTM youth in our tribes. We have organized youth camps and given lectures on purity before marriage and how the young people can develop their filial piety and how to become patriot in their nation by involving them in community services such as tree planting. Now we have three youth lecturers in Palawan, we also empower the women through the “mother’s heart network” of the WFWP Philippines.
Last 2019 we organized a local Asian Leadership Conference and almost 200 participants from the academic sphere, religious leaders and local government leaders attended.
In 2020 I invited couples from my 43 couples to attend the Foundation Day in Korea. Our goal and firmer determination are to establish 3 Municipalities by strengthening our ties with the mayor of Rizal Palawan, who already received the Blessing and the mayor of Bataraza Palawan, who together with his wife already requested us to conduct Blessings in his town. Also, our determination and goal is to bring educators, local government leaders and religious leaders to work together to help inspire families and young people centering on the True Parents’ teaching of living for the sake of others.
We hope that these humble efforts can contribute to the advancement a heavenly unified Korea and the firm establishment of a heavenly unified world in the era of the Heavenly Parent’s Holy Community, as True Mother desires to see.
