MANDAUE CITY—Lawyer Gloria Estenzo-Ramos has become a staunch environment advocate because of her mother, Socorro.
Ramos remembered that even as her mother juggled her responsibilities as a teacher, wife to a judge and mother of nine children, Mama Coring managed to keep a garden in their residence in Barangay Guadalupe, Cebu City.
“She was the original activist. She speaks what she thinks but she is very supportive of what we do,” said Ramos, codirector of Philippine Earth Justice Center (PEJC), a Cebu-based nongovernment organization.
She said her mother already had a “recycling attitude” before “Reduce, reuse, recycle” spread as an environmental campaign.
“She would always have something to do with small things, such as Toilet Ducks and wrappers. She was the first environmentalist among us,” Ramos said.
She recalled that her father, the late Numeriano Estenzo, who was a judge in Ormoc City in Leyte was not always home. So her older brother, Baldomero, was her mother’s sidekick in raising the younger ones.
Mama Coring belonged to the Cortes clan and was a close relative of the Ouanos.
Both are political families in Mandaue and have produced mayors and councilors, like former Mayor Thadeo Ouano and incumbent Mayor Jonas Cortes.
“But my mother was not interested in politics. Growing up, I saw how passionate she was in her teaching vocation,” Ramos said.
As a principal, Mama Coring would go to schools in remote villages to meet teachers and check the school’s performance.
Between visits, she would find time to nurture her plants in her garden and to talk to her children.
With a hands-on mother who never failed to remind her children of their inherent social responsibility, Ramos said she and her siblings had “a very happy childhood.”
As with any family, they also experienced trying times, but Ramos said it was always Mama Coring who brought them back together.
Mama Coring suffered a stroke, which triggered multiple aneurysms in her brain.
She was admitted to the hospital on April 29 and died on May 2, only five days after she celebrated a meaningful 96th birthday attended by her children and grandchildren.
On hindsight, Ramos said it was the examples of her Mama Coring that fueled her passion to fight for environmental protection and conservation.
Ramos and PEJC colleagues are known as “the group who sues individuals and institutions that destroy nature and environment.”
Ramos said she would continue to espouse the values her mother had taught her.
While she grew up wanting to be a lawyer like her father, Ramos is also an educator like her mother. She teaches law subjects at University of Cebu.
She has become what she is through Mama Coring’s examples.