Dear family and friends of Gigi,

I don’t know where to begin or how to express the texture of Gigi’s relationship to DAWN. Although not a founding member, Gigi came to DAWN very soon after it was founded, probably in 1985 or 1986. It was Noeleen Heyzer (who was at the Asia Pacific Development Centre at the time) who invited Gigi to write on the Asian experience of the debt – food – fuel crisis for a series that DAWN was putting together at the time. The series was never published, but Gigi threw her formidable energy, political acumen, networks, and all of her humor into helping build DAWN.

Through these past thirty years – more than the age of some of Gigi’s kids – she was heart and soul with DAWN. I think she saw DAWN as the kind of feminist organization that she considered essential to changing the directions of this fierce and globalized world we live in. All through the early and quite confused years of the 1980s as we experimented with organizational structures…..through the 1990s and the UN conferences that demanded engagement and action with little space for the luxury of organizational experimentation…..and then on into the fierce and hard world of backlashes against feminism that we are currently in, Gigi was with DAWN.

This wasn’t by any means honey and roses all the way. The world outside was a hard place for feminists from the South. We struggled to maintain our integrity and our independence from both South and North governments and institutions, seeing the dangers in both. We tried to keep our vision fresh, our advocacy honest, even as we learned to be diplomatic and wily when needed, but to also repeatedly speak truth to power. Gigi’s political instincts, her activist background and experiences from the Marcos years gave us much to learn from and to chew on. We struggled and argued with each other as well, constantly, about strategy and tactics, and politics and vision.

A great and marvelous trait was that, for Gigi, the fight was about the goal and the vision of a fair and just world for all, never her own personal advancement. Perhaps DAWN’s resilience over many years has been because we have been fortunate to have people like Gigi and others who were selfless in the truest sense. In the last years, as DAWN took more and more of her time because of the huge demands on us to engage in regional and global processes, Gigi had to put her Phd on the back burner. She couldn’t ever finish it. If there is something I really regret, it is that.

I remember vividly how hard Gigi pushed to have the DAWN book on Remaking Social Contracts finished. The book had been delayed for multiple reasons, and I had writer’s block and time was slipping. It was only the shock of her illness that pushed me over the hump – I knew we had to finish the book for Gigi. And I am so glad that we did, and that it has in it her eloquent Foreword with her faith in a new generation of younger feminists.

I don’t want to make it seem that DAWN is all work and no play! How could it be with Gigi within it? And so on the way over these years, as we moved from the age of telegrams and faxes to the world of the internet, we swam and ate good food, and admired sunsets, and visited ancient temples, and talked and agreed and disagreed….and cried sometimes, but also laughed a lot. In the last years, when we held many meetings in the Philippines, Gigi took us to wonderful places like Boracay. We learned to love each other’s children who wove in and out of DAWN meetings….And to love each other….

We grew with and through each other’s lives and loves…And through our collective passion for the causes that gave meaning to Gigi’s life…
You’ve given so much of yourself to DAWN, Gigi, that you are in our warp and weft….you can’t really leave us….now or ever….

Gita Sen
On behalf of DAWN

25 July 2015