TO TAKE A STAND

Unless social service begins to underpin our work, we cannot lift our country out of poverty.

solved never to have this happen to the family I would establish. This decision would affect my choice of life partner.

I was primed to go to Univer-sitaats Munster in German after graduation from sociology in 1968. But parental pressure landed me in the Asian Institute of Management working for a Masters in Business Management.

I worked in advertising and did not like its effects on me. I opted to work with the Harvard Advisory Group to figure out where I really wanted to go. At the age of 24 I had the opportunity to work with the Office of the President of the Republic as an associate director in charge of logistics. I grabbed the opportunity, partly because of the desire to serve a development agency but also because of vanity! How many 24-year- olds get to be associate director of a major government commission?

The five years I spent in government (1971-1976) had a very deep effect on me. I realized the POPCM cannot serve our people properly if, one, we did not know what was happening in the field; two, if we did not talk to our people and listened to their world view and aspirations; and three, if we were bound by world views and mental models developed in the industrialized west. We had to have a model native to the country.

This point of view got me in trouble with the gate keepers of the POPCOM Secretariat and members of the Commission itself — people who were eager to please the biggest donor so as to curry favor and more grants.

I had an ace up my sleeve. After a year-and-half no single official in POPCOM could claim to have been to as many municipalities — including island and mountain municipalities as I had and counting! The agencies we were working with openly stated that they wished to work with the logistics division because we understood their problems and we imposed no unrealistic quotas on them, quotas that forced them to cheat on reports.

I saw how badly served our poor municipalities were by the national bureaucracies — Rural Health Units with three walls instead of four, half a roof, equipment that didn’t work, and expired medicines. I saw health facilities including provincial hospitals only the desperate and the dying would gladly be checked into.

I saw government schools in similar conditions and teachers desperate to do well but defeated by unresponsive national offices ran by officials whose idea of rural inspection was to visit regional capitals and the better off provincial capitals where they summoned municipal officer to meetings to discuss mostly what national offices wanted accomplished. I decided to fight against this.

Dr. Conrado Lorenzo, POPCOM’s first executive director had the foresight to establish regional offices. But it was in the second executive director of POPCOM, himself a field man, the late Rafael Esmundo and the enlarged team he assembled, that I found a strong ally.

I had to leave POPCOM as I could no longer countenance the corruption of the Marcos government. I joined an Asian Institute of Management under Gabino A. Mendoza and Gaston Z. Ortigas that was ready to go into rural development.

It would be an uphill battle once more. We were working with business people who saw the business of business as making profits; with bureaucrats that wanted bureaucratic “integrity” — observing rules and regulations.

In the battlefield of the classroom I found new arena. In retirement, I am less inhibited by organizational considerations. I am convinced that unless social service begins to underpin our work, we cannot lift our country out of poverty. For so long as we stay selfish the poor will stay dismally poor.

If we are truly a Christian nation, we can do no less than follow the Maker.