By Nazario Rodriguez Jr.
Horizon news staff

Scholarships should be awarded to students whose fields of studies could provide the skills and expertise that Palau would need today and in the years ahead.

High school students throughout Palau, who are in their senior years, are taking their final semester of studies in their schools and most, if not all, are already thinking about their future careers and the fields of studies that they would pursue in college to realize their dreams. To help our young people in selecting careers that would be useful and profitable for themselves and for the country, our national planners and the National Scholarship Board should also be active at this time preparing a list or a summary of skills that our public agencies and the private sector would need in the years immediately ahead.
Grant monies for scholarships should be directly tied to specific fields of studies identified by our national planners and the Scholarship Board. These awards should have direct bearings to the country’s needs. It should not be left for the discretion of recipients, as seem to be the current practice, to decide how and what they should spend their grant monies on. It is very important that our national planners and the Scholarship Board should identify the areas of priority for awarding scholarships for the coming school year.
We do not know what areas would be identified by these two bodies, but we have looked around and we have seen certain areas that would merit priority consideration for awarding scholarships in the next school year. In the medical field we have great needs for medical doctors, dentists, pharmacologists, medical technicians, laboratory technicians, nurses, and sanitary engineers. In education, we need elementary and secondary school teachers as well as trained vocational instructors. We have too many foreigners recruited from abroad teaching at Palau High School today; it is time that our own people should teach in all the classrooms at Palau High School.
We already have many good Palauan lawyers practicing in the country and we certainly have more than enough highly visible politicians to keep us occupied with public dramas for the next several decades. But we may need more trained construction engineers, land surveyors, electronic technicians, and we most certainly would need trained computer technicians in the months and the years immediately ahead.
John Mangefel is gone, but he left us a prayer
Writing about the deaths of Senator Johnny Reklai and former FSM President Tosiwo Nakayama for an earlier column some weeks ago, we recalled that a wise Palauan old man once said that big tragedies usually come to us in pairs so that we would mourn them at one time instead of going through many successive periods of sadness. After Tosh and Johnny, we also lost another Micronesian giant, John Mangefel of Yap. Those of us who enjoyed his eloquent and oftentimes witty pronouncements, still remember an observation he once made (Mangefel’s version of the Lord’s Prayer) about Micronesia and its relationship with the United States. Printed below is the prayer Mangefel delivered, tongue-in-cheek, in the Congress of Micronesia memorializing that relationship.
Mangefel’s Prayer
Our patrons, who are in Washington D.C.,
Hallowed be thy votes,
Thy Committees come
To inspect Micronesia while others hold hearings in California.
Give us this day our annual budget,
And forgive us our overruns,
As we forgive those who overcharge us
And lead us not into extravagance, but deliver us from reckless spending.
Amen.