Magsaysay Awardee: Serve the public

Public servants are employed to serve the public, not be served by the public.

This was the message to all public servants worldwide, be they elected or hired, of 2002 Magsaysay Awardee for Public Service Dr. Ruth Pfau.

Responding to reporters’ questions, German-born Pfau closed her eyes for a moment, sighed, then smiled. When she opened her eyes, she said this in a kind, delicate voice: "They (public servants) must remember that they are servants. Most of them don’t know that. They think that the public has to serve them and that this is the meaning of public service. Everybody should be reminded of the value of each individual, each human being."

Pfau arrived yesterday afternoon at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) from Karachi, Pakistan. She was accompanied by Philippine-educated Dr. Maresh Zin, director of the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Center (MALC) which Pfau helped establish in Pakistan.

Still sprightly at 73, Pfau has been at the forefront of the fight against leprosy in Pakistan since 1960. Through her efforts, leprosy cases in Pakistan have been controlled. To date, there are exactly 49,858 people afflicted with leprosy in Pakistan.

Pfau was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1929 and studied to become a medical doctor, but later became a nun with the Catholic order of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary. Seeing the atrocities of war and realizing that many countries, especially developing countries, needed help, Pfau decided to devote her life to public service.

In 1960, Pfau volunteered to work in Asia, particularly on the subcontinent of India. A stopover in Karachi, Pakistan, however, changed the course of her life forever.

At a Karachi slum, Pfau and other nuns saw many people afflicted with leprosy literally nibbling on their fingers and toes and ignored and left to die by the Pakistani government.

"I got so mad. I couldn’t have continued living without doing something," Pfau recalled. She quickly organized the ramshackle leprosy dispensary fellow members of her order had set up and named after its founder, Marie Adelaide, and established a properly run leprosy clinic.

Soon, the German Leprosy Relief Association and other German donors began to send regular funding to the leprosy clinic run by Pfau in the Karachi slums.

In two years’ time, Pfau moved the MALC to a proper hospital building and established a full-service leprosy treatment and rehabilitation center that treated its patients for free.

Volunteer specialists helped Pfau treat her charges, but Pfau built up her staff by training and employing former patients, who now diagnose and treat the disease that also ravaged them.

Not satisfied with just treating leprosy patients, Pfau took note of her patients’ home districts and identified Pakistan’s leprosy belt. This was the first step in creating a nationwide program of leprosy eradication.

Pfau recalled that when she first arrived in Pakistan, the government "flatly denied" the existence of leprosy, despite the obvious. "You just have to keep pushing, to keep lobbying, or you would soon be forgotten," Pfau said.

Years later, the efforts of Pfau and her colleagues have paid off. To date, there are 170 leprosy control centers in Pakistan.

By 1996, Pfau’s battle with leprosy had reduced the disease’s incidence enough for the World Health Organization to declare leprosy under control in Pakistan, one of the first countries to achieve this goal.

"Public service comes when you keep your eyes and your heart open," Pfau said. "It is the courage, really, to say yes to empathy." Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation chairwoman Carmencita Abella said Pfau was conferred the Magsaysay Award for "her life of work and the way she has approached her work reflects the greatness of spirit. Like most of the awardees, she saw a situation that was intolerable and she decided to do something about it, even when she was just very young then."

Other recipients of the Magsaysay Award, Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, are: Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr., for government service; Myanmar’s Dr. Cynthia Maung, founder and head of the Mae Tao Clinic on the border town of Mae Sot, Thailand, for community leadership; Bharat Koirala, founder and lifetime mentor of the Nepal Press Institute, for journalism, literature and creative communication; Korean Buddhist monk, Sukho Choi (Venerable Pomyun Snim), for peace and international understanding and Indian Sandeep Pandey of Asha for education, for emergent leadership.