Violence against children is a dark stain on our common humanity. It takes various forms that, for cultural, social, and economic reasons, are not always or fully recognized. Because the problem is often suppressed and unreported, a silent scourge that is not “seen,” it does not get the attention it demands. Child protection laws and safety nets are weak or non-existent; there is a lack of trained medical professionals and social workers; and dedicated health facilities and services are absent or inadequate.

In the Philippines, pediatrician BERNADETTE J. MADRID has devoted her career to ensuring that the problem is “seen” and fully addressed. Born to a family of professionals in Iloilo, Philippines, she studied medicine and pediatrics at the University of the Philippines Manila (UP Manila) and did a post-residency fellowship in ambulatory pediatrics at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. The center’s Child Abuse Program opened her eyes to a problem that she and fellow Filipino doctors did not quite discern, though this was very much a part of daily reality in her home country, with its conditions of poverty, child labor, trafficking, and violence.

Upon her return to the Philippines, she tried to establish a Child Abuse Program in the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) in Manila, the country’s premier public hospital, but the program was short-lived for lack of support. MADRID returned to Iloilo, started a private practice, and seemed headed for a quiet, provincial career until she was called back to Manila in 1996 to head an emergency unit for abused children in PGH, at the insistence of UP Manila and American child protection crusader David Bradley and the Advisory Board Foundation (now CityBridge Foundation). In 1997, MADRID assumed as head of the PGH Child Protection Unit (PGH-CPU), the first such facility in the country.  She would in the next twenty-five years pursue an active, multifaceted career that would put her at the helm of what has been praised as “the best medical system for abused children in Southeast Asia.”

A one-stop health facility, PGH-CPU provides a coordinated program of medical, legal, social, and mental health services for abused children and their families. As of 2021, it has served 27,639 children. It became the axis of a national network of child protection units when the Child Protection Network Foundation, Inc. (CPN), a partnership of civil society, academe, and government, was established in 2002. As CPN executive director, MADRID has designed programs and engaged with family courts, schools, hospitals, local government units, community organizations, and policymakers in advancing the cause of child protection.

In partnership with UP Manila, PGH-CPU, CPN, Department of Health, local government units, and the private sector, the Network of Women and Child Protection Units (WCPUs) was formed. The network now consists of 123 WCPUs in sixty-one provinces and ten cities, which have served 119,965 children and adolescents and 30,912 women. The network has a total staff of 237 physicians, 199 social workers, and eighty-five police officers. As head of CPN, MADRID oversees and coordinates the network’s five areas of work: medical and psychosocial care, child safety and legal protection, a national program for training in child protection, a national network of WCPUs, and research for a national database on child abuse. It is multidisciplinary work that calls for MADRID to be all at once a doctor, educator, researcher, social leader, organizer, and advocate. She has pursued it with humility and strength grounded in faith. She says: “I feel that I was prepared to do this work. I was given the talent to do this and it has developed as I worked. That’s why I’m happy. It has become, for me, work that is God’s work.”

In electing BERNADETTE J. MADRID to receive the 2022 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes her unassuming and steadfast commitment to a noble and demanding advocacy; her leadership in running a multisectoral, multidisciplinary effort in child protection that is admired in Asia; and her competence and compassion in devoting herself to seeing that every abused child lives in a healing, safe, and nurturing society.

I am overwhelmed with gratitude to have been selected to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award.  Thank you all so much for being here to share this momentous occasion with me. I am so honored to have my work recognized by Asia’s most prestigious award!

I was asking “Why me?”  I found more reasons as to why I am undeserving of this Award.  It is like the violin player receiving recognition on behalf of the whole orchestra…I am just one violin player.  The other members of the orchestra are here tonight and I share this Award with each one of them.  It is a recognition of our work.  Please stand up and take a bow.

Women and Children Protection Units in every province is the core work of the Child Protection Network Foundation. This year, The Philippine General Hospital Child Protection Unit is celebrating its 25th anniversary.  In the last 25 years, I have learned that there are no quick fixes, that we cannot do this alone, that we need the system to work and that we need ordinary people to do their job with purpose, compassion, and skill.

Unfortunately, I also found out that ending violence against children will not happen on its own.  We need to fight for it. It needs planning, commitment, resources, persistence, and leadership.  With it comes accountability.

There is no other cause where everyone in the country has a responsibility – starting with parents, schools, and communities. Universal parenting programs, safe schools, access to justice seem like common sense but they are not.

When we meet with leaders, they say protecting children is a nice issue and we will get there after we have solved this crisis or that crisis.  But violence against children is a crisis!  Children are fast becoming an endangered species and with them goes our humanity.  We can prevent violence against children and most importantly we know how.  We are stewards of this world and particularly of the children.  We are stewards of their soul.

The Ramon Magsaysay Award has made me realize how much people care and that I am not alone.

Can we count on you?

If we can, please stand up.  Place your hands on your chest and repeat after me

“Ako Para sa Bata!”  I am for every child.

I am humbled and appreciative.

The United Nations has called marine plastic pollution “a slow-moving catastrophe” that threatens the economy, health, and well-being of nations. It is truly a global, transborder problem that should challenge all since plastic dumped in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, carried by ocean currents, can appear on the shores of Kenya or Tanzania in Africa.

In Indonesia, a young Frenchman, GARY BENCHEGHIB, is a remarkable and surprising warrior in the fight against marine plastic pollution. When he was nine years old, his parents chose to live in Bali and this has been his home ever since. Moved by a love for nature and adventure, he discovered early on that Bali was not entirely tourism’s picture-perfect paradise; over 30,000 tons of plastic refuse travel down Bali’s waterways annually. Indonesia is the largest contributor of marine plastic pollution in the world after China, accounting for more than 600,000 tons of plastic dumped into the world’s oceans every year. GARY was only fourteen-years-old when he and his sister Kelly, age sixteen, and brother Sam, twelve, started a weekly beach clean-up with friends. This effort turned into an organization called “Make a Change World,” that would produce inspiring, educational multi-media content on plastic pollution and environmental protection.

In Indonesia and the United States (where GARY took up filmmaking at the New York Film Academy), GARY and his team pursued what he calls “crazy ideas,” exploring the polluted waterways of New York City, circumnavigating the island of Bali in a repurposed traditional fishing boat, and documenting brother Sam in his run across the American continent with recycled plastic shoes. Raising public awareness of the environment, and realizing the important role of documentary filmmaking, particularly among the young, would lead him to produce more than a hundred videos on plastic pollution and environmental protection, posted on YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms, from short-form videos 00:01:30-00:02:09 in length to feature films that have been seen by millions.

In 2017, GARY and his team kayaked and filmed an expedition on the Citarum River in West Java, dramatizing the state of what was called “the world’s most polluted river.” The documentary, a dramatic series of nine videos, generated wide public interest and triggered a response from President Joko Widodo himself as the Indonesian government embarked on a seven-year Citarum River rehabilitation program.

This would inspire GARY as well to move from publicity to field implementation when he and his siblings established Sungai Watch in 2020. In the project, multiple types of locally fabricated, moveable trash barriers are chosen and deployed according to the river’s characteristics and location; the trash is collected daily and sorted by staff and local volunteers; and “audited” in a process in which each piece of plastic is identified according to type, brand, and producer (using methods like scanning barcodes). It is an all-around, data-driven effort that involves community-level education and participation, partnerships with other environmental organizations, and community and corporate sponsorships of individual trash barriers and other activities. Sungai Watch likewise runs Indonesia’s first trash hotline for citizens to report trash locations on a dedicated WhatsApp line. To date, Sungai Watch has set up 150 trash barriers in Bali and twenty trash barriers in Java and have collected over a million kilograms of organic and non-organic waste. The organization’s next goal is to install a thousand trash barriers across Indonesia’s most polluted rivers. Of his “crazy ideas,” GARY says: “The problem of plastic pollution is a huge one but if we have that dream, that conviction, and that passion, then things can happen.”

In electing GARY BENCHEGHIB to receive the 2022 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his inspiring fight against marine plastic pollution, an issue at once intensely local as well as global; his youthful energies in combining nature, adventure, video, and technology as weapons for social advocacy; and his creative, risk-taking passion that is truly a shining example for the youth and the world.

Maligayan pagbati sa Pilipinas na… walang plastik!

Now imagine if that was a saying. “Welcome to a Plastic Free Philippines!”

My short life’s journey has pretty much only revolved around plastics.

In fact so much so that when I was a young boy, I will always remember walking to school one day, when my mother told me, “If you don’t do your homework you’ll end up being a garbage man.”

Today I am deeply honored to be receiving the Ramon Magsaysay award for my work as a garbage man.

Sometimes, I wake up and it feels like a never-ending battle. We will be knee-deep in a river cleaning it up and feeling victorious, but the very next day with big rains, the river is filled with more trash than the previous day.

A new study reveals that there is no surface on earth without signs of plastic pollution. This means that every island in the Philippines, in Indonesia, under some shell, under some rock has plastic pollution.

Every single minute, a garbage truck full of plastic pollution enters our ocean from rivers globally.

In the next decade, we are set to triple global plastic production. Is this really the legacy that we want to leave behind?

It calls for collective action, we need a radical shift in how we think and how we use plastics. And it starts directly in our rivers, where we can still stop this disaster from destroying our planet and our health.

We need to focus on scalable solutions and implement them quickly. In 2 short years of running Sungai Watch, we have seen the potential for change by harnessing the power of community. In 2 short years of running Sungai Watch, we have already had to move some of our barriers because no more plastics are polluting those rivers due to growing public awareness about plastic pollution. It feels as if those rivers have officially “graduated” from our programs.

But we are destructing our planet, quicker than we can fix it. And now, we need to let our planet rest.

We have cleaned up some of the worst disaster relief areas. And when we fully restore these areas and let nature do its work. We have seen mangroves regrow. We have seen fish come back.

But cleaning up plastics is only half of the battle. Processing the trash and turning it into valuable products is a whole other game. So that is what we are doing. We are collecting, sorting, processing, treating, and recycling the trash that we collect.

What if we could sweep all the plastic out there and use it for good? Turn garbage into an economical incentive to fund back our cleanup programs.

Our next goal is to install 1,000 barriers throughout the world’s most polluted rivers but we can’t do this alone. There is a lot of work ahead of us and this is just the beginning, but I hope that everyone here today will join me in some small way on this lifelong journey against plastic pollution.

The little boy inside of me would have never dreamed once to become a garbage man doing everything in my power to make sure that we can win this plastic war. What a celebration it is to be here in the Philippines tonight!

Stories of otherwise ordinary individuals who, moved by the spirit of pure generosity, can transform the lives of so many, make us feel good and hopeful about the world.

This is the story of fifty-eight-year-old Japanese ophthalmologist TADASHI HATTORI.  Born in Osaka in 1964, he graduated from Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine in 1993 and then went to work in hospitals in Japan. Asked why he wanted to be a doctor, he said that he had resolved to become one when he was fifteen, after seeing his cancer-stricken father so rudely treated when he was admitted to the hospital. He wanted to become a doctor sensitive to the feelings of patients and their families. In 2002, he visited Hanoi for the first time at the invitation of a Vietnamese doctor and found that in a country where cataract blindness was prevalent, there was a dire lack of eye specialists and up-to-date treatment facilities, such that it was common for people in rural areas to go blind because they did not have access to needed care or could not afford the cost. He was deeply moved. And what started out as a visit became a life mission. When he returned to Japan, he used his savings to buy medical equipment to donate and went back to Hanoi. This set him off on a life of shuttling between Japan and Vietnam almost every month, spending a total of 180 days in Vietnam—giving free eye treatments; training Vietnamese doctors; donating equipment and supplies to hospitals—and then the rest of the year in Japan, working in hospitals to raise an income for his family and mission.

Explaining his passion to help, he says: “Whether people can see or not decisively affects their lives. Even just healing one eye may make it possible for someone to attend a school or go back to work. It can give relief to family members who have been looking after an affected person. I can’t turn my back on people who are on the verge of losing their sight just because they lack the money to pay for treatment. My starting point as a doctor is to help people.” Perhaps remembering his father, Hattori says, “A doctor should have not only the skills but also the heart. That’s why my motto is, ‘Treat your patients as your parents’.”

To date, HATTORI and his team of Vietnamese doctors have treated more than 20,000 patients. Driven, HATTORI would perform forty to fifty cataract operations or six to eight vitrectomies per day. He has trained more than thirty Vietnamese doctors who can now perform sophisticated eye operations, and he has donated or facilitated the donation of medical equipment to local hospitals. Cognizant that the need is greatest in the rural areas, he has led medical missions with a team of Vietnamese doctors, giving free treatments and performing surgeries for thousands of people.

To support and upscale his work, HATTORI founded the Asia-Pacific Prevention of Blindness Association (APBA) in 2005, with him as executive director, to enlist participation in training doctors, helping hospitals, and conducting free treatment and surgeries. In 2014, with investors and medical colleagues, he founded the Japan International Eye Hospital in Hanoi, one at par with Japan’s top ophthalmic hospitals, to serve paying patients as a way of building a sustainable fund for free outreach programs.

HATTORI is a highly skilled practitioner, currently regarded as one of Japan’s leading surgeons in vitrectomy and phaco surgery. Even if he is called “the man with the golden hands” because of his expertise as a surgeon, he insists that it is still the heart that matters most. Hattori is the epitome of a professional that has demonstrated the highest form of individual social responsibility.

In electing TADASHI HATTORI to receive the 2022 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his simple humanity and extraordinary generosity as a person and a professional; his skill and compassion in restoring the gift of sight to tens of thousands of people not his own; and the inspiration he has given, by his shining example, that one person can make a difference in helping kindness flourish in the world.

I stand here today, honoured and humbled to be conferred the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award, the greatest honour.

I am by no means an elite doctor. I kept failing entrance exams. It took me four years to be accepted at a medical school, and seven more years to graduate. But the reason why I did not give up is because of a promise I made to myself when I was seventeen years old. That was when I overheard the medical staff speaking disrespectfully to my father who was fighting his last fight against cancer. I said to myself then that I will become a doctor who can empathize with the feelings of patients. That conviction stayed has stayed with me since.

I parted with what comfortable life I had in Japan for a new challenge in Vietnam twenty years ago because of that same conviction. There was a shocking prevalence of cataract blindness in the country.  What was more shocking was that patients typically would come to the hospital only when they are in a dire situation…when they have lost sight in both eyes.

I once met a six-year-old boy whose one eye was already light negative, the other with retinal detachment. He needed eye surgery urgently. But on the day of the surgery, he did not show up.  He could not afford the surgery.  How was this six-year-old going to live the rest of his life? Wasn’t there anything that I could have done? I have not been able to forgive myself since then for having let the boy go. That was when I decided that when patients cannot pay, I will simply tell them, “No worries, it will be alright. I will pay for you from my own pocket money, and so please have the surgery.”

Most of you may never have been conscious that you can see. Now, may I ask all of you here, to close both your eyes just for a moment?  How would you feel if you have to live in that darkness for the rest of your life, and that you will have to depend on your family to assist you all your life?  How would you feel, if you were that six-year-old boy?

Please open your eyes now.

It scares me too, to think of life without light.  But that is precisely the situation millions of people still find themselves in today.

When a child cannot read or write, unable to go to school because of blindness, it means the child is deprived of the opportunity to explore the full potential of life that God has given.  There are adults who cannot see, and live every day feeling helpless, useless and hopeless simply because they do not see the light ahead in life.  If there is anything that I can do as an ophthalmologist, it is to bring light to such people, so that they will turn their despair to hope and live a better life that they deserve to live.

As I said, I am in no way an elite doctor. I am just filled with joy when patients smile when they see light again. I find happiness in working with the doctors that I trained, and in providing free treatments for people across the region in Asia.

My wish is to be where there is a need, where there are people who want to see light, because I know that regaining vision is not only about being able to see, but about discovering hope in life.

Let there be light. God bless you all.

In times of great uncertainties, danger, and stress, mental health becomes an issue of public concern. Yet, the problem does not quite get the needed response in terms of public health programs, facilities, and services. In this context, the initiatives taken by private individuals and organizations are extremely important.

An inspiring example is that of fifty-four-year-old Cambodian psychiatrist SOTHEARA CHHIM. He was only seven-years-old when the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia in 1975 and forced the people of Phnom Penh and other cities to rural camps for a regimen of slave labor and reeducation. Children, like CHHIM, were separated from their parents to work in these camps. It took more than three years before CHHIM was reunited with his family when Phnom Penh was liberated in 1979.

Amid the psychological devastation wrought by a genocidal rule that claimed 1.7 million lives, CHHIM studied medicine at Phnom Penh’s University of Health Sciences and was among the first Cambodian psychiatrists to graduate after years of war. The challenge that faced CHHIM was forbidding. It is said that 40% of Cambodians suffer from mental health problems. Yet, even today, the resources needed to address the problem are direly lacking. Only 2% of health centers and 59% of referral hospitals offer mental health services to outpatients. There are only two psychiatric inpatient units with a total of fourteen beds to serve a country of about 15 million.

In 2002, CHHIM assumed a leading role in mental health as executive director of Cambodia’s Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO). (The organization started as a branch of Netherlands-based TPO International but became an independent organization in 2000.) TPO Cambodia is the largest non-government organization in the field of mental health care and psychosocial support in Cambodia. Based in Phnom Penh, it has more than forty medical professionals and staff and has satellite offices in four provinces. It is guided by these principles: it is community-based, psychosocial (takes mental health in the context of community and society), capability-building (empowers people to survive and thrive), and integrative.

TPO worked on the “Truth, Trauma, and the Victims of Torture” project at the time the Khmer Rouge Tribunal was investigating the Cambodian genocide (CHHIM took part as an expert witness). TPO conducted treatment and training in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in tandem with Documentation Center of Cambodia, the organization devoted to documenting the genocide. As a method of trauma assessment and treatment, TPO practiced “testimonial therapy,” a localized version of an internationally recognized treatment method developed for PTSD cases resulting from mass, organized violence. With the help of therapists, survivors put into writing their traumatic experiences. A formal testimony is produced, which is then presented by the survivor in a public ceremony presided over by a monk. It is a ritual with healing, spiritual effects. At this time, CHHIM also developed the Cambodian concept of baksbat (broken courage), a post-traumatic state of fear, passivity, and avoidance. Deemed more nuanced and appropriate to the Cambodian experience than “post-traumatic stress disorder,” it is now used by TPO for trauma assessment and treatment.

TPO-Cambodia’s activities include gender-based violence counseling for victims of rape, forced marriages, and other forms of violence against women; a hotline service that provided counselling and referrals during the Covid-19 pandemic; and Operation Unchain, which provided treatment to mentally-ill patients locked up or chained at home and educated families on how to better care for these patients. The TPO Clinic in Phnom Penh has served thousands of patients. It is not, however, the center of CHHIM’s work. CHHIM says: “When I work in the clinic, I see only individuals, one to one with a patient. When I’m in the community, I see the people, the whole family, and the community.” This is where the mental health worker should be.

In electing SOTHEARA CHHIM to receive the 2022 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his calm courage in surmounting deep trauma to become his people’s healer; his transformative work amidst great need and seemingly insurmountable difficulties, and for showing that daily devotion to the best of one’s profession can itself be a form of greatness.

I am still in disbelief to be here in Manila to receive Asia’s most prestigious prize, the Ramon Magsaysay Award.

This Award is very special to me on both a professional and personal level.  It is an acknowledgment of the work that my organization, Transcultural Psychosocial Organization-Cambodia, have done to alleviate the suffering of the Cambodian people from trauma and mental health problems over the past decades.

As Cambodia’s history has shaped my career path, please allow me to quickly share with you my own personal history.

I was born into a family of architects.  Since childhood, I have dreamt of becoming one and to build a skyscraper in Phnom Penh.  My dreams and plans were shattered when the Khmer Rouge regime reigned in Cambodia for three years, eight months and twenty days.  During this regime, the intellectuals in the country were brutally murdered with only 40 doctors surviving. We felt traumatized and demoralized. We Cambodians were all living in deep trauma and with baksbat, literally meaning “broken courage.”

Given our dire situation, my mother insisted that I study medicine and become a doctor.  There is a great need to help save people’s lives.  Thus, I stopped pursuing my own dream and decided to be an obedient son.

As a young doctor in remote areas, I saw the great need for psychosocial help.  I realized that this was perhaps my calling, to provide much-needed psychosocial care to my countrymen, especially those in the rural areas.

My organization, TPO-Cambodia, offers mental health services to hundreds of thousands of Cambodians.  Through our tireless efforts, the stigma on mental health has been reduced; and now more people seek mental health care.

This Award comes with a prize money.  I am donating all of this to TPO’s initiative, “Operation Unchain Project,” to continue to treat and unchain more patients who are in  need of help.  I will continue to implement this project until there are no more patients chained in the country.

I can stand before you today without hesitation to say that I have no regrets in following my mother’s advice.  She has always taught me to do the right thing.  After all, she named me “Sotheara” which means gentle, humble, kind, and compassionate.  I hope that I have lived up to this name.

Words cannot express my sincerest gratitude to be given the Ramon Magsaysay Award.

But please allow me to thank the Foundation for this great honor.

I would like to thank my wonderful TPO family, who have been working with me in this advocacy.  Forty-three of them are here today to celebrate with me.

I also wish to thank my Filipino professor, Dr. Cornelio Banaag, who taught me psychiatry in Phnom Penh 26 years ago.

And most importantly, I would like to thank my family, especially my beautiful, beloved wife Chantara, and my two children–Chan Charia and Chan Oussa–who are always by my side in my life. Without their support, I will not be able to do this work.

I wish everyone in Asia the five precepts of Buddha: Longevity, Beauty, Health, Strength, and Wisdom.