Ladrones Islands August 2, 2006

I'M glad the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) has finally listened to reason and agreed to suspend the oath-taking of nurses who "passed" the last nursing board exams. The various schools of nursing, not least the University of Santo Tomas (UST), which has been at the forefront of the protest, have been calling for the results of the exams to be voided and for the candidates to take them all over again.

What happened, for the benefit of those who did not follow the story, was that a good portion of the exam questions was leaked to a good portion of the examinees. How good a portion of the questions and of the examinees the PRC and the officials of the various nursing schools have some idea, but they do not know for sure. Initially, to try to solve the problem, the PRC hired a statistician to gauge the extent of the harm done by theleaked answers and to propose a way to circumvent it. Acting on his findings and recommendations, the PRC ruled to invalidate 25 questions in Test III (Medical Surgical Nursing) and the entire last category, Test V (Psychiatric Nursing). Those who passed the exam, minus those parts, were to be given their licenses as nurses this Aug. 22.

The leak came from R.A. Gapuz Review Center, which admitted that it gave its reviewers a document containing many of the questions in the exams. Ray Gapuz, founder of the center and a UST graduate (to the chagrin of UST officials), would explain later that it was an honest mistake. The questions were faxed to them by a source, and they distributed them to their students thinking they were review material. It was their policy toexchange review materials with contacts.

In a letter to the PRC, Susan Maravilla, Thelma Abelardo and Rene Tadle, UST assistant dean, treasurer of the UST Nursing Alumni Association, and president of UST Faculty Association of the College of Nursing, respectively, refuted the PRC's position. At the very least, they said, how did the PRC determine that only 25 questions in Test III and all the ones in Test V were leaked? At the very most, they said, even if that were so, why pass candidates whom you had no way of knowing were competent in surgical and psychiatric nursing?

The laws of the country call on the State "to ensure that the medical profession is not infiltrated by incompetents to whom patients may unwarily entrust their lives and health." The UST officials added that they were aware of the cost in time, money and energy taking the exam would be for the innocent, but they were also aware of the even morehumongous cost in reputation, credibility and employability of those who would pass under these terms. The cloud of doubt cast on their competence by these flawed exams would hound them forever.

I agree with the UST officials' position completely. I myself can understand the dismay of those who honestly and diligently prepared for the exams. At the very least, I can understand the added expense it will mean for them in these dire times. More so as those who take up nursing often come from families of modest means who dream of being able to pluck out self and kin from this pass someday. But the UST officials are right: The cost of their not taking the exams again is far steeper. Not just for themselves but for the nation as well. It won't just damage their reputations -- hospital patients might wish to inquire if they were being nursed by someone from Batch 2006 -- it will damage the reputation of the whole profession. Even New York, a city that is not likely to set muchstore by psychiatric nursing as its residents are well past being cured in that respect, may decide to recruit elsewhere.

I understand that some of the examinees have expressed their willingness to go through the exams again for that very reason. I heartily applaud them. The bitterness of the frustrated is better directed at the R.A. Gapuz Review Center whose "lapse in judgment" excuse is inexcusable. The more credible explanation for its lack of scrupulousness in scrutinizing the document passed on to it was its desire to increase enrollment byshowing the world it had a great batting average in producing successful examinees. The frustrated should have their reckoning with the review center.

But more than that, I agree with the UST officials' position because of one urgent and compelling thing. Which is that it's time we stopped cheating in this country. Which is that it's time we punished the guilty even if we cannot altogether reward the innocent. Which is that it's time we stopped becoming an out-and-out Ladrones Island, a den of thieves and malefactors, a snake pit of liars and cheaters.

Richly ironically, Prospero Pichay, who should be the last person to want to draw attention to cheating, has demanded that an inquiry be made immediately about the exams. He thundered: "We have been banking on our medical practitioners to be one of our greatest assets in competing in the global market, but the issue now casts doubt on their very competency."

But my dear Prospero, don't we have the same thing in the very heart of government? Have you bothered to ask yourself why cheating and lying riot more plentifully and violently these days than the inmates of the national penitentiary? You want to investigate, investigate the conduct of the last elections, not the nursing exams. The possibility of incompetent nurses can only affect our health and reputation, the reality of an illegitimate President affects our life and our children's future. To paraphrase you:We have been banking on democracy as our greatest asset in being taken seriously by the community of nations, but the issue of a usurper now casts doubt on our very existence.

Happily, the PRC has ruled to suspend acknowledging the results of the last nursing exams. Now, if only we can do that to the last elections.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=12950

Happiness August 1, 2006

I remember again the economist who did a study of a Third World village with a view to determining the factors that improved quality of life, or the perception of it. I do not now recall the name of the economist or the village he studied, but I recall that he visited the village periodically to see how things had changed.

He was surprised at one point to find that most of the villagers agreed that their quality of life had dramatically improved. He looked at their current economic indices and compared them with the ones he had taken the last time. He saw that virtually nothing had changed, and that indeed they were worse off in some respects. He did a little sleuthing and swiftly discovered the source of the villagers' newfound buoyancy: Many of them were now wearing shoes. That simple fact had a tremendous impact on the villagers' sense of well-being.

That is not entirely as surprising as it seems. There's a whole literature on shoes as a factor in self-esteem, and I half suspect Imelda Marcos' fetish with them has something to do with it. Our very own culture denigrates the unshod and equates them with the unlettered.

But this is not a column about shoes, this is a column about happiness. I remembered the above in fact in relation to the various items I read over the past week about the studies ranking countries according to "happiness." One came out in this newspaper last Saturday. It was done by a University of Leicester academic who also produced a World Map of Happiness. It ranked the Philippines 78th. The top five were Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and Bahamas.

This survey follows several other surveys along the same line with widely disparate results. A bigger survey done by the marketing company GfK NOP, which interviewed 30,000 people, proclaimed that the happiest nations on earth were Australia, United States, Egypt, India, Britain and Canada. The British think tank, New Economics Foundation, which produced its own "Happy Planet" index based on 178 countries earlier this month, had Vanuatu, a tiny South Pacific island (pop. 209,000), as the planet's most cheerful country. And it had the world's largest economies, Germany, Japan and the US, at 81st, 95th and 150th respectively.

The wide divergence in results must suggest how alternately gratifying and frustrating the prospect of measuring happiness is. Unlike the amount of goods in a basket, the amount of happiness in the heart doesn't lend itself to easy arithmetic. It's not an objective thing, it is a subjective one. As the story of the shoes above shows, people's sources of happiness vary wildly from place to place.

On a not entirely facetious note, "happiness," as I've learned recently, is the term used by showbiz writers for the "fee" that goes their way for attending press conferences -- the amount of "happiness" rising and falling according to the importance of the writer and the project being pitched. You attend a press conference daily, or several of them, which happily would also get you free meals along the way, you would be absolutely gleeful by the end of the day. It's enough to make you think about shifting careers, or subjects.

I can see an upside and downside to the attempts to introduce happiness as a measure of development. As their authors themselves argue, it's an effort to veer away from the traditional measures of GNP, GDP and per capita income, which tend to equate well-being with material abundance. And which encourages consumerist values. As the New Economics Foundation suggests, the happiness index is meant to compel governments to rethink more into better.

That point I can subscribe to. Particularly in this country where the greed of public officials, and of the elite in general who continue to preside over an order characterized by opulence on one hand and destitution on the other, runs riot. Indeed, where acquisitiveness, a continuing legacy of American rule, holds sway, people measured not by the number of books on their shelves but by the number of cars in their garages. Makes you wonder: How much is enough? How many cellular phones and mistresses can make you happy?

I've always thought the only thing that should be insatiable is the thirst for knowledge or the hunger for wisdom. But that's another story.

The downside of it, well, the happiness index can also encourage bovine smugness and lack of aspiration. The local phrase, "mababaw ang kaligayahan" (literally, "shallow happiness threshold," or more idiomatically, "easy to please") catches the spirit perfectly. Unfortunately, being easy to please isn't always a natural state, it can always be induced. You don't need to go far to see proof of it, you need see only what's happened to us. From an Asian country next only to Japan and dreaming of becoming another Japan, we've become a Southeast Asian country that's better off only than Burma and dreaming only of sending ex-doctors-turned-nurses abroad. Today, we snag a job abroad and we're deliriously happy. Indeed, today we snag a job at home and we're boundlessly ecstatic.

More importantly, many years ago during the pit of martial law, I heard one of Imelda's minions perorate on his boss' favorite prescription for happiness, which was the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. During the open forum someone asked perfectly seriously: "But what if your spouse was cheating on you, would it pay to know the truth, or would you be better off not knowing you were being cuckolded?" The speaker thought for a while and laughed. "Well," he said, "sometimes it really does not pay to know the truth. It can make you very, very unhappy."

A happy people can be a sign they are not materialistic. But it can also be a sign they do not know, or care, that they have a president they did not vote for.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=12741

Apologies July 31, 2006

FOR SAYING THE EVACUATION OF THE FILIPINO OFWs in Lebanon was a mess for lack of funds, the whole thing being left to chance, God, and the elements whichever proved more merciful, Philippine Ambassador to Lebanon Al Francis Bichara now finds himself in deep—well, let’s just say—debris. Malacañang is furious and has denied his assessment of things. The Owwa funds are intact, Marianito Roque said angrily, and even then were being used to bring the OFWs home. He demanded that Bichara be investigated for causing the furor that arose over the funds, the Senate now demanding to know where these are. Alarmed by how his assessment has been received by the people who have hired and can fire him, Bichara has apologized profoundly for his error. He could have saved himself the trouble: It won’t save him. I met Bichara casually ages ago in a talk in Legazpi. He was then the governor of Albay. His family name is a well-known one in Bicol, “Bichara” being the most famous and, if I’m not mistaken, longest standing movie house in Naga City. The name is almost synonymous with movie house. I didn’t know that the Bicharas have Arab blood, or even specifically Lebanese blood. I do recall that Al Francis Bichara didn’t look like the iconoclastic, defiant, Young-Turk type. He looked like the acquiescent, pliant, go-with-the-flow type. I didn’t even know he had even become ambassador to Lebanon. But certainly he doesn’t look the type to issue shrill notices to draw attention to himself. Which brings me to the difference between what he and his government are saying. Bichara is in Lebanon, he probably knows the language and the custom of the people, he can actually see and hear what he is reporting. What he can see is panic, what he can hear are screams, and what he knows is that he has no money to give the ever-growing refugees refuge. Hell, he can’t even give them food, he has to rely on the kindness of strangers and humanitarian agencies. (Roque would subsequently say that is because the money has not been coursed through him but through their own representative in Lebanon. Go figure.) Bichara’s assessment is backed up by the Filipino priest there, Fr. Agustin Advincula, who runs the Church of the Miraculous Medal in Beirut. Deluged by Filipinos who have managed to escape the bombing by the skin of their teeth, many of them penurious from having been abandoned by their employers at the first sign of danger, and not knowing where to turn to while the nationals of other countries were being plucked out of danger in ships by their governments, he issued a wounded cry that rose up to heaven itself: “Where have the OFW billions gone?” We don’t know if Malacañang has asked Archbishops Fernando Capalla and Ramon Arguelles to ask the CBCP to ask Advincula to shut up. We know Malacañang has asked Bichara to shut up and let them do the talking. We do know several other things as well. We know that the first advice the Department of Foreign Affairs gave the OFWs in Lebanon was to hitch a ride with passing vehicles as though they were in some village in the Visayas or Mindanao. We know that the second advice it gave to them was to pack up and go, as though they were loitering around waiting for their pay while the place was being turned to rubble. We know that the OFWs have no Medicare funds. Before the 2004 elections, GMA transferred the Medicare funds of the OFWs to PhilHealth, which then issued cards, not unlike her campaign posters, showing her cradling an infant. Subsequently, the DOLE stopped Owwa from reimbursing OFWs who had incurred medical expenses. Roque says he welcomes an inquiry into the Owwa funds. That’s what GMA said too about impeachment. By all means the Senate should take him on, if only to see where else whole portions of the funds have been diverted to. We know that GMA is willing to spend billions to reward her friends and allies. That was what the Sona was all about. It was about a division of spoils—or so GMA promised, if her own friends and allies could believe her. I did say that GMA did well to remind us at the beginning or her Sona about the plight of the OFWs in Lebanon, which is not unlike the plight of most of us today, only to tell us how she meant to use our money. The OFWs, their families and the migrant groups should make a poster showing the pictures of the people GMA expressly named in that Sona (a veritable rogues’ gallery!) with the caption, “Where have all the OFW billions gone?” I remember that only a few months ago, we had a very similar case. Acting Education Secretary Fe Hidalgo had the misfortune of telling us we lacked 6,832 classrooms. This made GMA furious. She said Hidalgo didn’t answer her question which was: How many classrooms exceeded the 1-100 teacher-student ratio. The assumption being that teachers doing double shift could cover 100 students adequately. Hidalgo subsequently apologized. The 6,832 classroom shortage, Hidalgo would explain later, was based on the “ideal” ratio of 1 teacher to 45 students. Which showed only how horrendous our concept of ideal now is. In countries like Korea, the current reality, never mind ideal, is a PC-to-student ratio in classrooms of 1 to 1. Hidalgo never became education secretary. Last year, GMA apologized to the nation for telling a lie. This year, at least two major government officials have apologized to her for telling the truth. Last year, GMA rewarded herself for her “lapse in judgment” by clinging to a position she did not win. This year, her officials are routinely punished for their temporary insanity in thinking they can keep their jobs by doing their jobs. Last year, GMA made lying a lofty virtue. This year, she has made honesty a crime. http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=12619