Laboratoryo, Konsulta at Serbisyo: A Birthday Month Well Spent
There is a kind of public service that has all the bells and whistles, all the lights, camera, action, and all the fanfare from start to finish. And there is also a kind of public service that is quiet and unassuming, yet most effective, especially at the grassroots.
The latter has been the character of the kind of public service of the First Lady, Marie Louise “Liza Araneta-Marcos, an ablest partner to the president, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., not just as his dedicated spouse but as his co-promoter of good governance and national development for the country.
The First Lady expresses this brand of public service through her “LAB for All” program and this past month, her own birthday month, had been busiest for it.
LAB for All, short for “Libreng Laboratoryo, Konsulta, at Gamot Para sa Lahat” has become, by far, the more consistent fixture of the Marcos administration’s people-centered agenda.
What began as a single caravan has grown into a rotating weekly circuit in Batangas, Bulacan, Tarlac, Laguna, Pampanga, Zambales and now, Baguio City.
In the nation’s summer capital, the First Lady herself personally led the caravan, directing free medical consultations and laboratory tests for the city’s senior citizens, acknowledged as the demographic that is least able to absorb the cost and inconvenience of routine medical checkups and are often the last to ask for help.
That the program keeps on returning to new provinces on a fixed weekly basis tells its own story. More often than not, government outreach programs tend to be launched once, then quietly retired. This one, however, becomes something akin to infrastructure, a standing appointment between Malacañang and the provinces.
The most telling test of any social program is not how it performs during calm, but how it performs during crisis. LAB for All aced that test with flying colors.
It proved its mettle in a crisis in the worst possible way, last month when the onslaught of Habagat and a succession of storms flooded large parts of Luzon and battered the Negros Island Region.
It was in that stretch that LAB for All was quietly redirected to relief work: relief assistance for senior citizens in Negros Occidental, alongside a meeting with sugar industry stakeholders ravaged with bad weather and a pest infestation.
The First Lady and LAB for All showed up where it mattered the most.
On Aug. 21, a day the President marked publicly and warmly as “Liza Day,” the work of LAB for All continued. This was a small, human tradition inside a very public marriage, and it was worth noting if only because the woman being celebrated spend the days around her own birthday doing the unglamorous work of program delivery rather than stepping back from it.
Through all these, the Makati Medical Center Foundation has been one of the caravan’s steadiest private partners since its earlier legs, fielding medical personnel and diagnostic capacity alongside the Department of Health at stop after stop.
The Metro Pacific Investments Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Metro Pacific Investments Corp., has likewise been present on the ground, together with other members of the MVP Group Tulong Kapatid CSR effort like the PLDT-Smart Foundation, One Meralco Foundation, Alagang Kapatid Foundation and Maynilad, to name a few.
This unified CSR alliance of foundations under the MVP Group of Companies, chaired by Manuel V. Pangilinan, responds eagerly and immediately everytime the Palace calls for hands on deck to respond to the emergency and disaster needs of our countrymen, women, and children.
This is the deeper value of LAB for All. Of bringing together the public and private sectors to partner in medical assistance and, now, in relief work.
I hope you had a meaningful birthday and birthday month, Madam First Lady, whom we all fondly call “FLAM.” Thank you for all that you do for the nation, quietly and unassumingly. Mabuhay ka! *
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