The document I keep most carefully is my university degree certificate. I'm a twenty-seven-year-old civil engineer from a village near Davao, in the Philippines, and I was the first person in my family to finish university.
I got it at my graduation ceremony about five years ago. Actually, at the ceremony they handed us an empty folder, which was a bit disappointing. The real certificate was collected a few weeks later from the registrar's office, after I'd paid my last library fines. I remember holding it on the jeepney home very carefully, with both hands, as though it might blow away.
It's printed on thick cream paper, with the university's crest in gold at the top, my full name in large letters, and the signatures of the president and the dean. I keep it in a hard plastic document holder, inside a waterproof folder, in a locked drawer at my parents' house. We get typhoons and flooding where we live, so my mother insisted on the waterproof part. I've also scanned it and saved copies online, just in case.
It's important to me for a practical reason, because employers ask for it whenever I apply for jobs, and I'll need it if I ever want to work abroad. But its real value is emotional. My parents are farmers, and they sold two of their pigs every year to help pay my fees. Some semesters I didn't know if I'd be able to continue. That piece of paper represents their sacrifice as much as my work. When I gave them a framed copy, my father hung it in the living room, and he points it out to every visitor.