FG's right-hand girl

To a great extent a project’s success depends on its public relations officer’s drive, dreams, vision — and, most of all, belief in the project. The First Gentleman’s Foundation’s many projects have largely been successful due to the efforts of Juris Umali Soliman, president of the foundation. Her job calls for implementing her boss’s ideas and keeping the projects going. If she is successful, it’s because she has complete faith and admiration for her boss, First Gentleman Mike Arroyo.

Juris’s overall responsibility covers managing the day-to-day activities of First Gentleman Mike Arroyo, ensuring that immediate assistance is given to clients who walk into his office in Makati (far and away from Malacañang) or write by mail; conceptualizing and implementing outreach programs for the poor in support of the President’s agenda until 2010; sitting in as a member of FG’s legal team handling even libel cases, and assisting various offices of the government on-need basis. She smiles and says, “I enjoy my job.”

Juris’s preparation for her job includes working as country protocol officer and public affairs officer and assistant vice president at Citibank, N.A. (Philippines) and corporate communications director at CEMEX Philippines (a cement manufacturing company). After leaving the corporate world and a long vacation abroad, she came home and joined the FG in 2003 as executive consultant, then became undersecretary and chief of staff to the FG in 2004 (up to the present), her job including “ensuring the good image of the President and the government through the First Gentleman’s various community projects.”

Like a workhorse she is, running FG’s projects like they were her babies. The most well-known of these, due to her media efforts, is the Bagong Doktor Para sa Bayan, a scholarship project opened in 2006 to poor but deserving medical students in the fourth and fifth year of their medical course in three state universities. The first batch of 20 scholars is now serving in poor barrios; the 82 others are in school.

Other FG projects that she helps oversee from the FG’s office in Makati are the Bagong Espesyalistang Doktor Para sa Bayan, which gives financial support for sub-specialty fellows; the Bagong Puso Galing sa Puso, which sponsors heart surgeries for indigents in cooperation with the Philippine General Hospital; the “Bagong Bato, Bagong Buhay” kidney transplants on indigent patients; helping finance through the FG Foundation, the Department of Health’s Doctors to the Barrios program by providing huge cash incentives to outstanding doctors practicing in rural areas; “Bagong Ngiti sa Dating Ngebu” (toothy smiles for once harelips), which provides dentures to toothless indigents among vendors and soldiers, taxi drivers and media men in Metro Manila, Ifugao, Pampanga, Bohol, Cebu, Isabela, Palawan, Basilan and Zamboanga. To date about 10,000 people in different areas in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao benefited from the project; the “Bagong Mata Para sa may Katarata” medical missions which pay for cataract operations of indigents.

 The FG has given assistance to OFWs, specifically the freeing of 23 Filipino seamen incarcerated for almost three years for crimes they never committed, by giving them free airplane fares to Manila, $200 for them to buy “pasalubongs for their families,” and capital seed money for income-generating activities.

Free legal assistance is given to indigent cases at Malacañang legal clinic every Saturday. Juris says an untold First Gentleman’s story as a lawyer, was that he defended a case pro bono, but was gifted with two eggplants by the accused in a burglary case.

The foundation persuaded businessmen to donate a total of P160 million to support the training of Filipino athletes for the 23rd Southeast Asian games in 2005. The Philippine delegation won 112 gold medals, the first-ever in the sports history of the country. 

Juris admits that critics and media have not been kind to FG; like they only see faults, never good things, in what he is doing. (The same thing can be said of people who see only the bad in the President.) Some of the Malacañang press corps, she says, attend functions like the launching of the new doctors to the barrios program, “but they don’t write anything about the program, they want to see what they can criticize about the First Gentleman.” While she respects journalists’ right to free expression, she says, “They should also practice responsible journalism.”

But never mind. Juris plods on, and works deep into the night in her office, making sure the young doctors in the barrios eat enough nutritious food, that they have medicines for patients, and that they write the FG about the experiences.

One thing going for the FG-Soliman tandem, Juris says, is that “we believe in the same things.” They have the same motto: “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.” (All for the glory of God.)

She recalls how, after her boss’s heart surgery, he thought of celebrating his 60th birthday by starting the Bagong Doktor Para sa Bayan project “so he can help others (the doctors) help others.” That, Juris says, is one way the FG can thank God for his “new life.”

He has mellowed, says Juris, dropping as he has libel cases he filed against newsmen, who have refused to withdraw their class suit against him.

Juris, the protector, adds, “We can change the world not through the media, but by helping those in need.”

A graduate of St. Scholastica’s College (majoring in math), Juris looks younger than her age (she will turn 57 on June 29). She is morena, a smart dresser, and full of enthusiasm and energy. What many don’t know, she says, she was once a battered wife. After 20 years of marriage, she packed her bags and left her husband, raised her now two grown-up daughters by herself, took and passed all sorts of courses (in insurance, electronic data processing, civil service exams). Even today, she goes to the RVM Healing Center in Caloocan to spend Saturdays attending to, and praying, with patients.

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