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(Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago)
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Miriam learned to take charge early in life. As a precocious child and the eldest of seven, she was running the household well before she was out of 

grade school. Her mother was a career woman who eschewed housework, so responsibility for the daily marketing, for supervising the family's 

untrained village maids, and for organizing her younger brothers and sisters to do their chores devolved upon her. 


She also saw to it that the Defensor brood arrived promptly and well-scrubbed for weekly catechism classes and Catholic mass. Discipline was her 
mother's watchword, and young Miriam came to accept her authoritarian, achievement-oriented environment as "the natural working of the 

universe".

 
The Defensor family enjoyed high status but little wealth. Her father, Benjamin Defensor, was a lawyer and trial judge; her mother, Dimpna Palma, was 

a locally prominent educator. They circulated socially among Iloilo's elite, but the family budget had to be managed carefully to make ends meet, 

and, until Miriam was nine years old, the family occupied a modest house with a nipa (palm frond) roof. Miriam's playmates were equally poor; 

together they fashioned homemade toys from sardine cans and bottle caps and played happily in the sand. "We enjoyed the luxury of filth", 

Miriam says looking back.

 
Miriam Defensor was enrolled in the kindergarten of Lincoln School, later called Lincoln College, the private school where her mother was dean. She 

quickly demonstrated her insistence on fair play. When her kindergarten teacher's niece teased her one day by repeatedly erasing her work from the 

blackboard, Miriam lost patience, grabbed the girl's hair, and wrestled her to the floor. "My teacher never forgave me", she says, explaining why 

she 

graduated only sixth in her kindergarten class - one of the few times in her school career when she was not first.

 
Miriam continued in Lincoln until her mother quarreled with the school president and resigned. At grade five, therefore, Miriam entered La Paz Public 

Elementary School. There she took her turn minding the canteen at recess time. Students who did so were permitted to select one food item in lieu of 

pay; this delighted Miriam, who had no money to buy school snacks. As her reward she always chose banana cake, "because for me," she says, "it was the 

height of luxury."

 
Defensor was a voracious reader and, unable to afford books of her own, became a frequent patron of the United States Information Service (USIS) 

library in downtown Iloilo. Her deepest childhood anxiety, she says, was that "the world's book supply would run out and I would, in my middle 

age, have nothing left to read."

 
She also excelled at writing and, in the fifth and sixth grades, was student editor of the elementary school newspaper. When she entered Iloilo 

National High in 1957, she immediately bested all others in the examination to be editor of its paper, The Ilonggo. She held this post for all four 

high school years. The literary pages were also filled with her work, and as a freshman she won a school-wide spelling contest.

 
Defensor's precocious talents made her an instant high school celebrity. This was probably a good thing, she thinks, since it permitted her to stand 

out without arousing the jealousy of her friends - "it habituated them to the things I would do later". The latter included graduating as 

valedictorian and receiving the "All-Around-Girl Award".

 
Her mother had long since instilled in Miriam a drive to fill every moment with worthy activity. This drive propelled her into a life of super-

achievement. But alongside her brilliance in school, and her diligent management of household and siblings, MIriam Defensor began to develop a deep 

spiritual life. This she did quite on her own, since neither parent was devout, and her father had virtually abandoned the Roman Catholic Church in 

anger over the high-handed behavior of some Spanish priests.

 
At Lincoln MIriam had been inspired by the serene voices and ethereal personalities of the teaching nuns. For a while she yearned to be one herself, 

but she remembers her father telling her, you wouldn't be serving God very much that way." She abandoned the idea but in high school began a lifelong 

habit of going to mass daily; she had, as she says, "the gift of faith."
 

In 1961, at age sixteen, Defensor entered the University of the Philippines, Iloilo campus (UP Visayas). Here she began to prepare for the study of 

law, since her father had advised her that she would never be able to support herself with literary pursuits. Political science the usual pre-law 

curriculum, was "embarrassingly easy".
 

She speeded through the four-year curriculum in three-and-a-half years so that she could devote her final semester to her love, literature.
 

As a college student, Defensor studied so efficiently that she had plenty of time left for other activities. From her freshman year onward she edited 

the college monthly magazine. She also competed in debating and, in summers, took outside courses in journalism and stenography. Having decided that 

she could write better stories than the ones she was reading, she proceeded to do so and began selling them to national magazines. In everything, she 

was brilliantly successful. She won award after award. For example in 1963 she won first prize in the university competitions in orator poetry, short 

stories, and essays. All the while she maintained excellent grades, so that when she graduated in 1965 she did so magna cum laude.
 
<h3>
Miriam at the University of the Philippines
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Early in her college career Defensor had undergone a prolonged, debilitating illness. From a stubborn case of amoebic dysentery, she slid into a 

serious bout of depression: "I felt that my physical energy were totally exhausted and that I had nothing left to give." Having been taught by her 

mother always to be doing something useful, she believed herself to be utterly worthless, and lay in bed for weeks on end and wept. She attributes her 

recovery to her maternal grandmother who patiently and lovingly nursed her back from the depression. By the time she recovered MIRIAM had missed all 

but one month of the school semester and was still so weak that she had to write holding her pencil with both hands. With gritty determination she 

took her final examinations - and earned the highest average in the college.
 

After university graduation Defensor went directly to the UP College of Law in Quezon City. In fact, she acknowledges, she studied law mainly "out of 

a sense of filial duty". At UP she found the law courses tedious, and she became scornful of the approach of most the professors, who simply "spoon-

fed" the students, pointing out necessary readings, probable issues, and correct responses.
 

 This was a boon for Defensor however. Her superior memory made the courses relatively easy. Still, she studied industriously. While others students 

read their law books once or twice, she read hers five times. Even so, she recalls, "it didn't take that much intellectual energy". Once again she 

found lots of time for other things.

June 15, 1945: Miriam Defensor Santiago was born in the city of Iloilo