Dr Jesucita Sodusta is an anthropologist
by training (PhD from UCLA), with a Bachelor of Science
degree major in biology (from the University of San
Carlos). She has lectured, conducted research, and
coordinated regional research bodies in various parts of
the world. Her main interests include research
methodology, covering methods in qualitative and
quantitative, pure and applied.
Health has always been her passion,
apart from charity work. She comes from a long line of
healers trained in conventional medicine, from her
mother’s sister to nephews and nieces and maternal and
paternal cousins, with a total of 22 medical
professionals.
Her paternal grandfather and great
grandfather were natural healers schooled in the
university of life. Active as herbal healers in their
local community, they lived to ripe old ages of over
100. Although Jesucita never got to see them, their
healing influence on her was evident when she wrote as a
hobby for her family and friends two monographs on
herbal remedies, one of which went into second edition
(printed in Scotland).
For Jesucita, writing about cancer and its degenerative
impact on life gives her a sense of depression, which she
would not want to picture on the faces of cancer victims
she loves. But she doesn’t feel it that way as a webmaster.
Because she’s not writing about cancer; she is writing
about life and its triumph over death. She finds it
gratifying to see fearless and courageous men and women
fight the disease and survive.
Biology gives her good grounding in
discovering life, treasuring it, and thanking the world
that supports it.
But it is her doctorate training in
anthropology that defines the soul of her relationship
with the world. When Jesucita sees someone from another
culture, demonstrating their uniqueness as individual,
she discovers a bit of herself. “How is it that we often
think of ourselves in terms of duality, of differences
when we are not any different from one another?"
“There’s the notion of ‘another-ness’ in everyone of us
forgetting we are born from one basic fabric of
humanity. You are not any different from me and others.
There’s the one-ness no matter where you are and what
you are.”
“My world view has changed; my
rooted-ness became social. The universe is united
through the language of love and charity. Yet this is
always thwarted by our evolutionary past. The needs to
dominate, accumulate, and possess pull us back down the
evolutionary ladder a bit. And as a part of humanity I
struggle to understand the hard climb by attempting to
move from biology to anthropology, from the world of
plants and animals to community of people.”
NO MATTER WHAT your religion, skin
color, education, location, position, gender, there’s
only one common denominator that vexed us all: health.
Health is the single most determining factor that
enables us to continue with our evolutionary ascent. If
poor health reduces your quality of life or cuts your
life short, you cannot make productive contributions to
humanity. And you can’t find your greater purpose in
life.
About Us is also about a team of
dedicated, determined, and capable editor, programmer,
and research assistants. Over these months, their quiet
but persistent determination to undertake this study,
despite Jesucita’s occasional misgivings that some
cancer survivors would deny them an interview – in
fact, the interviews appeal to the more sophisticated
and well-educated respondents – was the driving factor
behind the project’s success. This project is quite
fortunate to have the team’s invaluable support.