In Sindh Province, Pakistan, poor people suffer disproportionately from kidney and urinary system diseases. Stones are a common scourge, and every year three thousand men, women, and children face end-stage renal (kidney) failure. For these people, early death is certain without dialysis or an organ transplant. Yet specialized treatments like these are rare and generally exorbitant in Pakistan; the cost of dialysis alone is four times the average annual per capita income. As a government doctor, SYED ADIBUL HASAN RIZVI believes it is wrong for such life-saving measures to be so hopelessly out of reach. At his state-of-the-art institute in Karachi, he provides them free of charge.

Indian-born RIZVI studied medicine at Dow Medical College in Karachi and for nine years honed his surgical skills in Great Britain, specializing in urology. Spurning the temptation to remain abroad, in 1971 he returned home to establish his specialty at Civil Hospital in Karachi. This public hospital possessed no instruments for treating renal patients at the time, not even an operating table. Allotted an eight-bed unit in the Burns Ward, RIZVI set to work.

Beginning with urology surgery, RIZVI expanded his clinic’s services year by year, patiently adding dialysis treatment, ultrasound testing, and other high-tech facilities. In 1985, he performed Civil Hospital’s first kidney transplant operations. Constantly outstripping the meager funds available, RIZVI motivated private donors to supplement government allocations. His clinic blossomed into a separate department, and in 1992, became an autonomous institute within Civil Hospital: the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation, or SIUT.

RIZVI’s institute today is an oasis of cleanliness, efficiency, and excellence. With the latest equipment and a dedicated staff of more than four hundred doctors, nurses, and technicians, it provides services once unheard of in a public hospital in Pakistan to over one hundred thousand patients a year, for everything from kidney stones to end-stage renal failure. In 1997, the institute administered thirty-five thousand dialysis sessions; ninety-seven individuals received new kidneys. The cost of all this runs to more than four million dollars a year. But RIZVI believes that everyone, rich or poor, has a right to good health care. At his institute patients pay nothing.

At SIUT today, Dr. RIZVI and his staff train young doctors in urology and engage in research shared with hospitals, medical schools, and research centers throughout the world. The institute is a model for others in Pakistan and beyond. And soon, on a site donated by the government of Sindh, a new five-story SIUT kidney center will house one of the most modern medical centers in South Asia. Seventy percent of the institute’s expenses are now met through donations. Contributors include Pakistani philanthropists and generous companies like the Dewan Group. But prominent among them are hundreds of grateful patients and many thousands of Pakistani Muslims who dedicate a part of their annual zakat alms to support SIUT.

Bespectacled and with a shock of white hair, 58-year-old RIZVI is “the conscience of Karachi,” says an admirer. In a city torn by ethnic strife, his institute is a haven of tolerance. When talking about SIUT’s work and needs, RIZVI draws attention not to himself but to his staff and beloved patients, the vast majority of whom represent the rural folk of Sindh. Reflecting on the kidney transplant that saved his life, one of them says, “One can’t imagine what a blessing this place is for a country like ours.”

In electing SYED ADIBUL HASAN RIZVI to receive the 1998 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his transcending the limits of a public service hospital to make kidney dialysis, renal transplants, and other life-saving medical services available free to thousands of Pakistani citizens.

I am very happy to be here with you today to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award. I feel honored, humbled and deeply moved that you should give this prestigious award to an ordinary doctor from Pakistan.

I believe that this prize is a recognition of the power of teamwork, community effort and the true grit and determination of people. It is the recognition of the fact that in spite of crushing poverty, illiteracy and other problems chaining us down, the evolution of the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation from an 8-bed ward to a state-of-the-art Institution is because man craves and demands his basic right to good health.

This evolution has not been easy. SlUT had its teething problems and running it has been, and still is, a tireless daily struggle. This is because we at the SIUT, while seeing our own expansion, remember that everything around us is expanding at the same time. You cannot afford to indulge even for the shortest period of time in testing your own oars. You must continually drive the vast machine forward at its utmost speed. To lose the momentum is not merely a personal loss but also a loss for my team.

Ladies and Gentlemen, today I have come to Manila as beneficiary of a trust. I say I come as a trustee for I am aware that this prize is much more than a personal honor. I am standing here mainly as a representative of my team doctors, nurses, paramedics. The community at large has supported us generously in coin and in kind. Journalists have always supported our cause and guided us. Last but not the least I represent the patients; both the fortunate ones and the unfortunate ones. Fortunate are those who are living; unfortunate were those who are dead and died simply because of want. I dedicate my cash prize to the SIUT fund in the memory of such patients.

This award has propelled me and my colleagues at the SIUT to consolidate and expand our work being mindful of future generations. Let it never be said by them that indifference, cynicism and selfishness made us fail to live up to the ideal of humanism which the Magsaysay Award encapsulates.

I accept the award with total gratitude to the Foundation and to the people of the Philippines.

YING RUOCHENG’s childhood home near the Forbidden City in Beijing stood next door to the city’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, a fitting location since the family was both Manchu and Christian. It was also an intellectual family. YING’s reform-minded grandfather founded Beijing’s Catholic Furen University; his father, who was English-educated and went by the name of Ignatius, later lectured there. YING Ruocheng himself was born in 1929. China’s struggle with Japan and its great civil war framed his entire youth. By the time he completed a degree in Western Literature at Qinghua University in 1950, communism had triumphed. YING was hopeful. At the time, he wrote years later, “China was full of dreams.”

Theater was his love. In 1952, he and other young artists founded the Beijing People’s Art Theater to transform drama in light of the country’s bright hopes. In heady years of experimentation, YING mastered his craft in Chinese and Western plays. The Cultural Revolution caught the People’s Art Theater in a dangerous power struggle. YING was jailed for three years and then sent to the countryside to plant rice with other artists and intellectuals. His re-education lasted ten years. When the mayhem subsided, he returned to the People’s Art Theater and reestablished his career.

A period of remarkable productivity followed. YING appeared in play after play and explored anew the East-West dialogue that had engaged him since his youth. He translated into Mandarin Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” and other Western works. As a visiting professor at the University of Missouri, he staged Chinese plays for American audiences, including his own translation of Ba Jin’s modern classic, “The Family.” He also appeared as Kublai Khan in an English-language television series. Then, in 1983, a seminal event: the production in Beijing of YING RUOCHENG’s acclaimed translation of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” with YING playing the lead role and Miller himself directing. The play’s flawed hero and moral ambiguities stood in sharp contrast to the morality tales typical of China’s official theater at the time. Yet YING knew that the story of a family in crisis would speak to Chinese audiences. Moreover, a play about the failure of the American Dream also spoke to the dreams of his own generation in China. These, he said, had disintegrated in the Cultural Revolution.

Between 1986 and 1990, YING served as vice minister of culture. His office embraced three thousand government-supported arts troupes. Striking a blow against bureaucratization, YING reduced or ended many government subsidies and initiated other reforms to promote independence and artistic freedom. The effect was bracing. Standing on their own, theater companies were free to make money or go bankrupt. Although YING made enemies in the post, China is now reaping the rewards of his bold reforms.

YING’s ability to work in both the Chinese and Western mediums has made him something of a cultural ambassador. And of course he is famous now, having appeared prominently in films such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” and “The Little Buddha” and in other English-language movies and television programs.

Today, as chair and president of the China Arts Festival Foundation, the tall, urbane YING carries on his work nurturing China’s theater arts and exposing Chinese audiences to plays and performances from abroad. There are still a lot of stereotypes to break down, he says. Yet the key to a successful inter-cultural exchange is simple. It is treating the work of others “with respect, with understanding, and with commitment.”

In electing YING RUOCHENG to receive the 1998 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his enhancing China’s cultural dialogue with the world-at-large and with its own rich heritage through a brilliant and persevering life in the theater.

On this auspicious occasion I wish to thank the trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for choosing me as one of the recipients of this prestigious honor. It is especially gratifying for me and my colleagues as the award is a tangible justification for our efforts at enhancing creative communication among the peoples of the world. In such a context I would like to consider the award not just as my personal accomplishment but a token of esteem for all my colleagues and co-workers who made this possible.

China, in her long and continuous history, has always been self-contained and used to consider herself the center of the world. As a result, she had a reputation of inscrutability. Attempts to open her up by force in the past have failed, leaving regrettable casualties and bad feelings. One of the most important factors in present day international relations is the end of isolation for nearly one-quarter of mankind. China’s doors are now open. The significance of such an epochal event is that her doors were not opened by force, but by a consensus of the Chinese people themselves who have summed up their historical experiences and come to the conclusion that China should open her doors to the rest of the world. Because this is a consensus, arrived at by the highest leaders of the country as well as the man in the street, there is no going back. To reform the system and open up the country have become the basic policies of the PRC. China not only opens her doors, but her arms as well.

It is with such a background in mind that I am here to receive this honor. My greatest wish is it may help consolidate the friendship between China and the Philippines.

Any great public tragedy embraces within it a million small and private ones. NUON PHALY encountered this truth in a refugee camp to which she and ten thousand others fled to escape the horrors at home in Cambodia. Among the private tragedies she found there were those of women in whose minds the nightmares of war lived on and on. NUON didn’t really know how to help these women crippled by depression and sadness. But putting aside her own needs, she began to try.

NUON PHALY was just eleven when Cambodia gained its independence from France at the end of 1953. During the brief era of peace that followed, she attended high school, started a family, and learned to take shorthand in French and Khmer. By 1972 she was a senior secretary at the Ministry of Finance. When the Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh in April 1975, NUON was among the multitudes of Cambodians forced brutally into the countryside. She survived the killing fields but, in 1984, fled with her family to a refugee camp on the Thai border, the way-station, she hoped, to a new and better life abroad.

NUON remembers the camp as a huge repository of misery and casual violence. Failing to qualify for asylum in another country, she joined a research project to document the experiences of her fellow camp members under the Khmer Rouge. This led her to meet many women who were traumatized by memories of war, torture, and family separation. Widows suffered horribly. Since no one seemed to be addressing this particular need, she began to do so herself.

In 1985, NUON and her husband opened their small house in the camp as a center for refugees suffering from depression. With the support of the Catholic Office for Emergency Refugee Relief and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, her modest center grew quickly to accommodate thirty-five women, as well as sixteen children whose parents were lost or incapacitated by mental illness. In 1987, she named it the Khmer People’s Depression Relief Center, or KPDR.

Operating at first from her own compassionate instincts and with the assistance of traditional Khmer healers, NUON later studied Western mental health therapies in Thailand. At KPDR she combined these approaches in a unique counseling service. In time, most of the women in her care resumed normal lives outside the center. But the number of children increased. When NUON returned to Cambodia in 1993, she was accompanied by nine widows and ninety-one orphaned children.

NUON reestablished her center and, in 1995, occupied a two-hectare site outside Phnom Penh that today boasts several handsome classrooms, dormitories, and workrooms. The Future Light Orphanage, as she now calls it, is home to some 150 orphans and the center from which NUON provides livelihood training and mental health counseling to over a hundred war widows in neighboring villages, as well as education and medical and clothing assistance to hundreds of needy children. Nuon’s center is supported by the government and by the World Food Programme of the United Nations, and proceeds from the sale of handicrafts made by the children themselves. But it is still struggling.

Although often discouraged, the ever-smiling NUON perseveres with the daily assistance and fervent support of her husband, Hem Soeurn. A small pamphlet published by the center captures the essence of her labor of love. The Future Light Orphanage, it says, “is a place of hopes and dreams.” Children in blue and white uniforms “are seen learning English. Young women are sewing and reconstructing their lives.”

In electing NUON PHALY to receive the 1998 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes her selfless commitment to helping war-traumatized women and children rebuild their spirits and lives in the wake of Cambodia’s great national tragedy.

Thank you very much for electing me as the 1998 Magsaysay Awardee for Community Leadership.

I feel particularly privileged, not because it is such a prestigious award, but mainly because it has been established in honor of your great President the late Ramon Magsaysay, who rendered such distinguished service to the people of the Philippines when they needed it most.

It is a great honor for me to receive this prestigious and honored award. I consider my efforts to be too small for this award; still it is very encouraging to see my work recognized by the Foundation. It is an indication that Cambodia’s women and its unfortunate, war-ravaged masses are not forgotten by the international community and still have friends who have sympathy for them and their cause. Especially, the plight of the victims of the regime of the Khmer Rouge and their killing fields from 1975 to 1979 during which 2 to 3 million innocent people and children died from starvation, execution, and diseases without medical care and, services, and tens of thousands of women were left widowed and suffering from depression, while having to take care of many small children without support; and children who were rendered homeless and were orphaned.

It is the obsession of my life to serve the underprivileged of humanity, especially women and children, and to extend to them the recognition and the rights they deserve.

I accept this award on behalf of Cambodian women and children who have been the most oppressed and forgotten people of the Cambodian community. I have only done what I consider to be essential for the unfortunate people of Cambodia. My attempts are too small to heal the wounds inflicted on millions of my fellow countrymen and women and children; I shall always need the support of others, especially the sisterhood of women and that of the children, for the continuation of my work.

I thank all those who have promoted my nomination for this award, all those who have been supportive of my work, the kind donors and generous individuals who have made my work possible, and all the people of the Philippines for their warm hospitality.

Once again I thank you all for the honor you have done me, a humble Executive Director of the Future Light Orphanage. I accept it on behalf of the women of Cambodia.

I re-dedicate the years left of my life to the service of the underprivileged, the dispossessed particularly the most vulnerable of them in our society, women and girls, to their health and development in the sacred memory of your great PRESIDENT RAMON MAGSAYSAY.

The most powerful symbols are simple ones. As news of the popular Philippine movement to unseat the dictator Marcos swept through the global village in early 1986, one image outshone the others: a brave woman in a yellow dress. CORY AQUINO. Up till now her image lingers brightly as a symbol of nonviolent democratic aspiration the world over.

But symbols are simple only on the surface. CORY AQUINO herself was not the architect of the movement she led, nor did she lead it by choice, this had been her husband’s ambition. By experience, she was not a leader at all. Nor was the movement altogether coherent or unified. It was fragmented by personal rivalries and contradictory visions for the post-Marcos future. But when AQUINO agreed reluctantly to stand for president, she brought to the struggle not only her celebrity as widow of the tyrant’s most famous victim but also her integrity and her Christian faith and hope. This gave the movement a powerful moral center that galvanized the dictator’s opponents and shamed his supporters. Along the boulevard of EDSA, People Power won the day. And CORY AQUINO became president.

She then did as she had promised. Step by step, she dismantled the machinery of dictatorship and constructed the machinery of democracy: a free press and a new constitution, then elections. With each step, she limited her own powers and broadened those of others. She expanded popular participation in government and brought nongovernmental organizations into the national political dialogue. She sought earnestly to reduce poverty and improve public health, education, housing, and the environment. And she did her best to reconcile her government with its armed opponents in the countryside. In the process, she also stood down seven attempts to overthrow her embattled democracy by renegade power-grabbers from within her own military.

CORY AQUINO could not possibly fulfill all the expectations she had awakened. No one knew this better than she. But as reality took its toll on the hopes of EDSA, she carried on buoyantly nevertheless. And consider, in the end, what she did manage to accomplish.

She united the democratic opposition to dictatorship in the Philippines and led it to victory.

She restored her country’s democratic institutions and its good name in the community of nations.

She governed with integrity and the devout intention to do always what was best for the country and its people.

And, when her term was over, she stepped down in favor of an elected successor.

No Asian leader of our time can claim as much.

Today, as a private citizen, AQUINO is less concerned with People Power than she is with empowering people, by promoting better-managed, business-wise cooperative societies, for example. Ordinary people should possess the “organized means of effecting major changes in their lives,” she says. This will enlarge civil society in the Philippines and, with it, democracy as well.

And what of AQUINO’s legacy elsewhere? The years after 1986 witnessed one democratic outburst after another, in Korea, Burma, China, Czechoslovakia, South Africa, Poland, Chile, Thailand, and, lately, Indonesia. CORY AQUINO did not have a direct hand in any of these events. But in these many places and others, we know that those who yearned and worked peacefully for freedom consciously emulated her and the movement she led. Her example inspired their hopes. “Each national experience of winning freedom is unique,” says AQUINO. Even so, the friends of democracy everywhere should stand together. To them, she says happily, “I offer my country’s story.”

In electing CORAZON COJUANGCO AQUINO to receive the 1998 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes her giving radiant moral force to the nonviolent movement for democracy in the Philippines and in the world.

It is never too late to advance the cause of democracy by honoring its struggles and celebrating its victories. For somewhere in the world, there are always women and men who see what their jailers cannot, through the bars of their prison: in the distant triumphs of democracy, the hope of freedom.

There is never a wrong time to honor courage, conviction and right, because these qualities are always in short supply yet ever in infinite demand, wherever freedom is sought and democracy is threatened.

Every tribute advances these causes, encourages these qualities, and brings so much closer their victory and vindication.

I accept this award on behalf of those great individuals who first glimpsed the potential of peace at a time when the conventional wisdom prescribed force for the attainment of justice, and war for the achievement of freedom.

I accept this award on behalf of that man, who having read about this vision of the power of peace, dared to put it into practice in the age of extremes in which he lived, and in the face of the annihilation he read in the eyes of his escorts.

I accept this award on behalf of those people, who seeing with their own eyes, on the tarmac of Manila International Airport, how violence answers peace and force reacts to fortitude, yet dared to repeat the example of that man, first each person by himself, then all together in the millions.

I accept this award on behalf of those women and men today, who still dare to make the same fateful commitment to People Power, despite its uneven record of success. For every EDSA; Prague and Berlin, there has been an East Timor, a Rang Qon and a Tienanmen Square.

I accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award with humility in the light of history’s most earth-shaking yet peaceful events, Gandhi gathering a handful of salt, that unknown Chinese blocking a column of tanks with only a brief-case of office work in his hand, Nelson Mandela putting 27 years of imprisonment behind him to lead all South Africans, black and white, his jailers and their victims, to a greater country.

I accept this award on behalf of the man who perhaps most deserved it, because he idolized and served President Ramon Magsaysay and paid The Guy the ultimate tribute of imitation by giving life for his country.

I accept this award on behalf of the Filipino People who followed in Ninoy’s potentially fatal footsteps and proved what Ninoy always believed about them: THE FILIPINO IS WORTH DYING FOR.

I accept this award on behalf of the people of Burma who have had a longer and bloodier road to freedom than we traveled, but who plod on regardless.

I accept this award, finally, for my five children, Ballsy, Pinky, Noy-Noy, Viel and Kris, whose unquestioning support and uncomplaining sacrifices gave me the strength to complete what my husband began and my people continued: the victory of People Power for democracy.

I thank with all my heart Mrs. Luz Magsaysay and her family, the trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation and all the people who have been praying for me and with me. Maraming salamat po!

National economies grow unevenly. As Southeast Asia’s powerful centers surged ahead in recent decades, Bangkok prominently among them, they captured the lion’s share of capital and jobs and new opportunities. To rural areas the new wealth trickled down all too slowly, all the more so after the region’s long sustaining boom ended abruptly in 1997. Thai business leader SOPHON SUPHAPONG thinks that economic growth that neglects the countryside is unhealthy. As president of Bangchak Petroleum, he has been stimulating Thailand’s economy where he believes it matters most: at the roots.

Born in 1946, SOPHON spent part of his boyhood in Thailand’s rural southern provinces where his father served as governor. Despite its elevated status, the family was extremely frugal. This was necessary because SOPHON’s father refused to augment his meager government salary by accepting bribes and other illicit sources of income. “Honesty,” he taught his son, “is the highest honor of a man’s life.” Later, when for many years SOPHON’s father lay helpless in the hospital with a debilitating nerve disease, SOPHON asked himself, “After a man dies, what is left of his name?” This thought, he says, “established my way of life.”

SOPHON studied electrical engineering at Chulalongkorn University and then entered the petroleum industry. In 1980, he was appointed deputy governor of the Petroleum Authority of Thailand and assigned to manage a debt-laden oil refinery belonging to the government. At the time, it was losing three million baht a day. SOPHON reorganized the company and restored it to profitability. Renamed Bangchak Petroleum, it was soon one of Thailand’s leading oil providers. SOPHON was named president in 1985.

Eager to expand Bangchak’s distribution network and, at the same time, to enliven the rural economy, SOPHON began recruiting agricultural cooperatives to be owner-operators of his company’s service stations. To help them, he guaranteed loans for purchasing Bangchak franchises and sent his managers to teach neophyte dealers how to run the new businesses. Today, cooperative societies, women’s groups, and other community organizations throughout Thailand own and operate six hundred of Bangchak’s twelve hundred service stations. Many have also branched out into other Bangchak enterprises such as petroleum delivery, clothing manufacture, and service-station convenience stores called Lemon Green. Moreover, farm-fresh produce is now available at many Bangchak outlets. Over a million Thai households are now involved in these money-making enterprises. Bangchak Petroleum has also profited from SOPHON’s unconventional strategy. As one admirer puts it, “Bangchak’s national distribution network is the envy of its rivals.”

Under SOPHON’s direction, Bangchak also promotes conservation and environmental awareness in Thailand and is a leader in sponsoring public interest television programs. When the country’s new reform constitution was being formulated in 1997, SOPHON fostered public debate by using Bangchak’s network of service stations to distribute the draft constitution nation wide. As a private citizen, he is preoccupied with issues of poverty, child abuse, and his country’s democracy.

SOPHON shuns the social whirl of Bangkok in favor of his many causes and the quiet haven provided by his wife and two daughters. In the current economic crisis, he worries about ordinary Thais. As government-owned Bangchak faces privatization, SOPHON fervently asserts that the company’s new owners should be Thais, even better, rural Thais. “Economic power that lies in the hands of only five percent of society . . . is not healthy,” he says. A healthier economy for Thailand’s future will be based on “many small businesses” throughout the country, businesses much like Bangchak’s rural gas stations and mini-marts.

In electing SOPHON SUPHAPONG to receive the 1998 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service the board of trustees recognizes his stimulating Thailand’s rural economy by helping hundreds of rural cooperatives and community organizations own and operate their own businesses as affiliates of a major Thai oil company.

It is a great honor for me to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award. To receive the Award is also a source of pride to those who share my work in Public Service.

Also I would like to take this opportunity to join all the people of the Philippines to commemorate the birth anniversary of the late President Ramon Magsaysay, your great leader. His spirit will continue to be an inspiration to all of us.

The Ramon Magsaysay Award has been recognized by the world community. The Foundation’s commitment to public service and underprivileged peoples has proven to be a good example for the contemporary and the next generations.

It is my belief that to help people in need, particularly those underprivileged people and children in poor neighborhoods and rural areas, is everyone’s responsibility as human beings. To support the rural people by operating businesses together with them through their Community Organizations makes good sense for both humanitarian and business considerations. It is hoped that such cooperation will be beneficial to both business and rural communities. While business flourishes, rural communities also develop and prosper.

Business operations should not simply be “business for business’ sake”. The business community should also strive to promote the togetherness of family members, children and parents, husbands and wives, young and elderly people, and to provide opportunities for underprivileged people in rural areas to increase their income in a better environment. It should also work to advance social justice. Indeed, if all of us truly devoted ourselves to helping each other, it is certain that the underprivileged and weaker members of society, especially children, will be provided for. This is what we are striving for in creating a strong civil society.

I would like to express my gratitude and sincere thanks to those who have been supportive of my work and all the people of the Philippines, especially members of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for their warm hospitality.