Dear and beloved friends being the last speaker in this type of plenary I was reassured by the organizers that the order of speakers was not done according to height. Because if that were the case your last speaker would have been my favorite person Dr. Shalala because she is slightly shorter than I am. You see I try I know. By the way she was first introduced to me as Dr. Shalala I didn't believe there was such a name so I answered that my name was Tralala. When I was invited to speak about three months ago by UNICEF I was told that I would have twenty minutes so what I did was I prepared slides, facts and jokes. And I was supposed to, are you ready there? No he's not ready, never mind, I'll just here advance. Can you see the slide there. There it is, very nice on the top. No I don't need you. We do it in the third world this way.
But four days ago before I came I was told it was not twenty minutes, it was just going to be fifteen minutes so I removed the slides. When I arrived yesterday I was told that I didn't have fifteen minutes I only had ten minutes so I removed the facts.
Now that you have been warned there will be nothing to say except the jokes. I just wanted to wake you up a little bit. When I was invited I was wondering why I would be invited in the light of the battery of very, very prominent people. Later I realized that the reason must have been the same when I was being recruited by President Fidel Viramos to be the minister of health in my country. I said to him, Mr. President, all I know is the village, all I know is the field and the President looked at me and said, that is why I want you. It is I think in that spirit that I was invited. To give a perspective of the field just to balance the many good things we have heard this morning and what I would like to present to you and share with you are my actual experiences for the past three years in attempting to implement, to actualize all these beautiful dreams that Jim Grant had which will be exemplified in what we now call the mid decade goals.
In the interest of time, rather than describing to you every program I thought I would use with you what I actually did with my team, with my staff in trying to implement the immunization program in my country that we started three years ago. Very quickly I realized that it needed three things as I learned from Jim Grant. One it needed communication, two it needed motivation, three it needed mobilization and therefore I would like to describe to you the three major groups that I deliberately worked with in order to implement the programs. One was the media. I asked my friends if I had only 20% of the resources, if I only had 20% of the time to what I should devote my time and I was advised that for the purposes I needed I should go to the media so I devoted plenty of time with the media starting from the print because in my country what appears or what is said on the radio is generally from the print and yet print is only about 30% of our media. Our radio is about 92% and our television is about 50% so I devoted a lot of time but we did our homework. I went to every province and met with all the media men and we gave them what I called the media booklet and in that booklet we decided we would have sixty days. Almost like a count down so that every broadcaster would have something to say about immunization every day. When I gave it to the media of course they were objecting and they were saying why should we get this. You see first of all we always complain that the media is not helping but the problem is that we are not giving them the information so I decided we would put it there in a very systematic way, in an orderly way, sixty days count down, media exposure that they can use including the jokes that they needed to say every day. When I was giving it to them they said, why should I use this and I said, use it so you will sound intelligent. Of course not all of them succeeded but at least we tried. I appeared in all of the television shows including the comedy and sitcom where the message would be plugging in immunization at a very important armament area for the health of the child and so on along the line. We were able to get commentaries on immunization three times a day in all of the radio stations across the country and not only that and on the day of the immunization it was handled as though it were an event that would occur so that everybody would be aware of it so we had three commentaries every hour and this was held in what is now known world wide because it is also done in other places as the national immunization day. But for this purpose we did it in only one day following the fiesta concert in my country where it was fun, we had bands playing, we had people being mobilized, there was food contributed and this is how we were able to obtain almost one hundred percent immunization in my country and this is what would be the media dimension.
Two was the contribution of the local government, what would be the provinces, the municipalities, the governors, the mayors. I met all of them. Why? I believed I couldn't do it alone. It had to be with these people and it had to be their programs not mine. I met with them and the first son of the governor said why should we do this and I told him simple, good immunization is good health, good health is good politics. If you do immunization you governors will be re-elected as senators you know, and they liked that so they did it. Even the mayors were asking, how do we project to the people that this is ours. I said simple, you mayors during the immunization day go to every village and contribute the snacks and if you give the food for the day the program is yours. Don't tell them I gave you the vaccine, because anyway the vaccine came from Canada and they don't know where Canada is. Then all the governors came into the picture and everybody wanted to be re-elected so we had fun.
Three we involved all the departments of the government. Why? For far too long we saw each other as an enemy, as a rival and I said during the cabinet meeting, I said Mr. President, members of the cabinet, I need you, I can't do it alone and so we devised what was known as cease-fire for children, which was not referring just to the military. It meant stopping what you were doing and helping in the immunization. I said, Department of Education, I want all your schools to be immunization centers, I want all your teachers to stop teaching and help immunize. I want the soldiers to stop shooting bullets and begin shooting vaccines and down the line. I said, if you help me by 1995 (had I known you would applaud to that I would have said it earlier) and so there it was and I even told the president, I said, Mr. President, if you help me by 1995 we will abolish polio in our country and by the Year 2000 we will abolish our control of all of the other diseases and my president is a very careful man so he called me afterwards and said suppose that in the year 2000 we are not able to do what you are saying. I said, don't worry Mr. President, your term of office ends in 1998, by that time you are no longer the president, so we went on our way.
Fourth I mobilized all of the private corporations and all of that. We had over 150 major corporations and agencies helping us, including countries like Canada where medicines, vaccines and polio vaccines, needles and syringes were donated. I won't mention the others because this is Canada anyway. With this we were able to mobilize it and this was the four that helped enable us to do what we did and today we have had it institutionalized so that every year, twice a year, we have what is known as national immunization day that has enabled us to immunize one third of the whole population through what we call the NID but we also made it very local. We did not call it immunization. What we called it was Alease Disease because when you say immunization there is no exact translation in our dialect. We did not say immunization centers, we said Papac (?) centers meaning drop centers of course later when the child is not looking we inject the child. We entice them by saying it's only Papac, it is wah long wa wry, no ouch and when they say ouch later I say I didn't tell you to say that you know and there it was so we had fun.
This is what the Philippine program that included also micro nutrient, eye program and the rest of the whole thing and we are trying to integrate all of them so that for example for the Vitamin A I used it for a motivation for them to bring their children. I tell them that if you bring your child we will also give him or her Vitamin A. So they said, you mean if we bring them for immunization we get that and I said yes. And we also got a donation of the picture of the most famous actress in the Philippines by the name of Sharon Conetta and we had about 5,000,000 of those pictures and we sort of got into trouble because there were ten million parents bringing their children so if you only have five million you are in trouble and my workers said no we would rather not because we would get into trouble with those who do not get it. I said it is a matter of how you present it, I told them. Don't say we will give them pictures, just like that, I said tell them that for the first five million parents we will give pictures so that all of those that don't get it they can always say they came late.
Finally, we don't have all the answers, we just have a few, but it is never adequate when you say it verbally. Please come and visit with us, we will share with you our experiences, our successes, our failures. We don't know all the answers, we have a few, there are no solutions, only situations. Finally in the tradition of Jim Grant, what made me persist was that I was a field worker who was not interested in ten reasons in why it cannot be done. I was only interested in two reasons why it can be done and we did it and as a tribute to my friend and mentor Jim Grant I came here as a gift of personal presence, a great man that I admire whose life I try to emulate, whose achievements I try to guide my life with and that is the reason why I am here, as a modest tribute to a great man that all of us honor. Thank you very much.