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10.
BEING A DIFFERENT KIND OF CV.
GLOBALLY YOURS, WILLIAM DAR
Today Danumán, tomorrow the world!? Today, the drylands.
It’s the water. There is pleasant irony in the fact that William
Dollente Dar comes from a village called Danumán West
in the lowlands of Santa Maria, Ilocos Sur, Philippines while
he was ensconced as the Chair of the Committee on
Science & Technology (CST) starting at the September 3-14 meeting of
the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), with 191 countries
having signed the Convention – a very high honor. Danumán indicates,
from danúm (water in Ilocano, his native tongue) a waterlogged or watery place while
desertification suggests all sand and hardly a drop of moisture. Extremes. Givens that he
learned to accept and work from there.
Where he is now, Dar is high and dry, safe above the water, although with a new, top-level responsibility. He is
quietly happy for this added window of service to peoples in Africa, Asia, Latin America. It shows in his face. He is
quite happy with his family, with lovely wife Beatriz Meria and his beautiful girls May, Celeste, Christine. The
only boy, William Jr, died young, but they have gotten over that. You overcome a tragedy before it overcomes you.
This happy story begins 1953 April 10, when a boy was born. Let us now trace his intellectual growth from grade
school to graduate studies, 1959 to 1980, on to achievements.
He finished his elementary education at the Santa Maria West Central School in his hometown. That means he
grew up in a semi-arid tropical site, a water-challenged zone. Much of the Ilocos Region is in need of soil moisture
to nourish the crops grown there: rice, tobacco, cotton, corn, onion.