Louie Blake Saile Sarmiento, author

THE REVIVAL OF ODD FELLOWS PHILIPPINES 12 YEARS AGO BEGAN AS A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT By Louie Blake S. Sarmiento, M.A., J.D.                     Believe it or not, the revival of Odd Fellows Philippines began as a psycho-social experiment. The aim was “ to help change the negative public image of fraternities in the country .” From the 1970’s up to the early 2000’s, fraternities and sororities in the country have earned a bad or tainted public reputation as a result of several deaths due to hazing, frat-related violence such as “frat-wars”, drug abuse and alcoholism, machismo and date or gang-rapes, etc. There already came a point when there is but a very thin difference between fraternities and gangs. Moreover, women and other genders were usually rejected from the membership. This heightened sense of masculinity, if not corrected, may be a training ground for other forms of gender-related discrimination and violence in the househ...

HISTORY OF ODD FELLOWS IN THE PHILIPPINES By Louie Blake S. Sarmiento Master of Arts in Industrial/Organizational Psychology; Juris Doctor The origin of Odd Fellowship is already lost in the shadows of antiquity but fragmentary records do prove that there were Odd Fellows Lodges in England on or before the year 1730. The North American branch, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF), was officially established on April 26, 1819 in Maryland, USA, by Thomas Wildey and four other English Odd Fellows. From there, the fraternity first reached the Philippine Islands long ago before the country even gained its independence. Many world conflicts, wars, and unfortunate events occurred along the course of time. A number of the early records were destroyed and only a few survived in the hands of several lodges and collectors today.   Early History According to Major O.W. Coursey, author of the  History and Geography of the Philippine Islands , the awakening of the Filipinos...