BIENVENIDO GARCIA
If there was someone who would be considered as the son-of-the-bitch guy whom we worked with among community development pioneers, Mr. Ben Garcia would be that person. Understandably so because aside from being the Deputy of Atty. Ramon P. Binamira for the Green Revolution program, Mr. Garcia handled the Admin and Finance functions for all three national programs (Project Compassion, Green Revolution, and Environmental Center of the Philippines).
It was a situation not unlike that in the corporate setting where production and marketing sections would often be at odds with those who handled administrative and finance services. While production and marketing would be about spending money, the latter was responsible for keeping tab of funds and making sure that each centavo could be accounted for and spent well to produce project outputs.
Each program in the integrated set-up that we had must produce a budget and these were analyzed at each start of the fiscal year. The department heads and team leaders would have to depend their submissions to a one-man committee, Mr. Ben Garcia. All the field teams were kept on a tight budget and they had to submit a report of expenses monthly before the next release would be given. It was Mr. Garcia who instituted the famous rule, "No Report; No Salary."
Fieldworkers and community organizers are normally not so good in keeping close watch of their expenses because of the nature of their job. They have to go to remote places where no receipts are given for purchases. In a rural setting, most especially if you are in the Philippines or Asia, you are expected to bring something to the head of the village or to the community if you are going there for a visit.
This meant setting aside money by the field teams and each member had to contribute to a kitty to take care of these cost items. Unfortunately, you could not charge such expenses officially; hence, you ended up most of the time arguing with Mr. Ben Garcia, who played the role of son-of-a-bitch guy to take care of scarce resources to support the requirements of the various teams spread out in a number of municipalities and barangays in several provinces. Of course, the field teams quite often ended up paying for such expenses. The admin and finance rules were not flexible enough to support field teams working in villages far from the poblacion.
Someetimes arguments became so heated up between the team leaders and Mr. Ben Garcia that there would be ugly scenes of near fisticuffs between them to settle matters. RPB was often called to settle such differences. The admin and finance function is normally a staff position to support team leaders, who occupy line positions.
The temptation is strong in organizations for those who exercise this supposed staff function to lord it over everybody else because normally the admin and finance officer and the top honcho were the only ones exercising decisions about financial matters. Hence, there was a built-in mechanism for hostilities between the admin and finance function exercised by Mr. Garcia and the line managers, the team leaders.
I think this situation was designed by RPB himself who would not like Mr. Garcia to cultivate good relations between the Admin and Finance department and the field teams so as to create what he regarded as healthy adversarial relationship between the two which could result in more transparent accounting of funds.
On paper, it was good, but in practice it did not quite support field operations which was geared to the dynamic process of dealing with local communities and local governance units at a phase which could not be accurately determined as to the timing and kind of expenses for activities undertaken in remote villages. For instance, if you need to buy materials for your demonstration of crafts in training classes which a community could not provide, it would be impossible to produce quotes from at least three suppliers given the kind of task environment where a field team had to operate. In these places, you have to walk 20 to 30 kms in rugged terrain to find an agent for a hardware store.
It was also hard to justify contributions made by the team to barangay fiestas, the wedding of volunteers, the baptism of a child especially if you were chosen by the parents to be the sponsors, and so on. This could easily run to something like one-third of one's measly salary.
When entries in daily logbooks and during assessment meetings got more strident and angrier each month, management had to act. The younger group from the Crazy Co. proposed the creation of an Operations Review Committee, which would summarize problems encountered each month not only about administrative matters but also other concerns, such as the constraints met in dealing with Mayors and other politicians, etc. The proposal was approved by RPB upon expression of support, from UNICEF which after all provided the bulk of funding and, hence, it had a stake in these discussions.
Of all the donors we dealt with, UNICEF had the most number of national staff which facilitated easier discussions using "back channel" methods that Filipinos are familiar with. The donor agency suggested that program officers assigned to our programs bring along the UNICEF admin and finance staff and observe first-hand what was happening.
In some of the project sites, UNICEF Representative Wah Wong went to visit project sites in some hilly barangays in Teresa, Rizal. At one point, the Deputy Resident Representative, Wilfred D'Silva, appointed himself as the interim UNICEF program officer responsible for our integrated program and would join us in field missions, sleep in our team house, accompany the team in coastal and upland villages and sometimes he would be the one to explain how immunization happens with the long journey it takes for the vaccines to reach the fridge at the home economics building of a school or a barangay clinic.
We guess only a veteran UNICEF fieldworker could make a heart-rending narrative of what could be a boring story on how vaccines could reach a barangay, across swollen rivers and forbidding mountain terrain, through a long "bridge of helping hands." Indeed this was the familiar teleserye UNICEF style!
To the credit of Mr. Garcia, who had been used to lord it all over the place in his zealousness to implement admin and finance rules, he was flexible enough to accept the changes made by the ORC and endorsed by UNICEF program officers. It also helped that Mr. Garcia was also a Vietnam veteran along with most members of the old guys in the integrated program and so decorum was maintained in all the intense clash of opinions in full view of the donor.
In later years, Mr. Garcia would be eventually praised by the Crazy Co. as instrumental in protecting savings from our fund drives, the interest of which we used for admin expenses. As for UNICEF Deputy Resident Representative, he was bestowed the highest award that the organization could give. He was awarded the Fieldworker of the Year Award - with the plaque paid for by contributions from each member of the Crazy Co. to the delight of Mr. Garcia.
Mr. Garcia, wherever you are, we survived those difficult years in late 70s and 80s with your vigilance over what you always would term as the "lifeblood of the organization," its finances. But, of course, fieldworkers, living or dead, would always rise up to say such lifeblood could not be divorced from the body that has to be nourished and sustained not only for its own sake but for a purpose higher than its own mortal existence.
And so the saga in this built-in conflict between those who spend the money and those who want to save it continues.
If there was someone who would be considered as the son-of-the-bitch guy whom we worked with among community development pioneers, Mr. Ben Garcia would be that person. Understandably so because aside from being the Deputy of Atty. Ramon P. Binamira for the Green Revolution program, Mr. Garcia handled the Admin and Finance functions for all three national programs (Project Compassion, Green Revolution, and Environmental Center of the Philippines).
It was a situation not unlike that in the corporate setting where production and marketing sections would often be at odds with those who handled administrative and finance services. While production and marketing would be about spending money, the latter was responsible for keeping tab of funds and making sure that each centavo could be accounted for and spent well to produce project outputs.
Each program in the integrated set-up that we had must produce a budget and these were analyzed at each start of the fiscal year. The department heads and team leaders would have to depend their submissions to a one-man committee, Mr. Ben Garcia. All the field teams were kept on a tight budget and they had to submit a report of expenses monthly before the next release would be given. It was Mr. Garcia who instituted the famous rule, "No Report; No Salary."
Fieldworkers and community organizers are normally not so good in keeping close watch of their expenses because of the nature of their job. They have to go to remote places where no receipts are given for purchases. In a rural setting, most especially if you are in the Philippines or Asia, you are expected to bring something to the head of the village or to the community if you are going there for a visit.
This meant setting aside money by the field teams and each member had to contribute to a kitty to take care of these cost items. Unfortunately, you could not charge such expenses officially; hence, you ended up most of the time arguing with Mr. Ben Garcia, who played the role of son-of-a-bitch guy to take care of scarce resources to support the requirements of the various teams spread out in a number of municipalities and barangays in several provinces. Of course, the field teams quite often ended up paying for such expenses. The admin and finance rules were not flexible enough to support field teams working in villages far from the poblacion.
Someetimes arguments became so heated up between the team leaders and Mr. Ben Garcia that there would be ugly scenes of near fisticuffs between them to settle matters. RPB was often called to settle such differences. The admin and finance function is normally a staff position to support team leaders, who occupy line positions.
The temptation is strong in organizations for those who exercise this supposed staff function to lord it over everybody else because normally the admin and finance officer and the top honcho were the only ones exercising decisions about financial matters. Hence, there was a built-in mechanism for hostilities between the admin and finance function exercised by Mr. Garcia and the line managers, the team leaders.
I think this situation was designed by RPB himself who would not like Mr. Garcia to cultivate good relations between the Admin and Finance department and the field teams so as to create what he regarded as healthy adversarial relationship between the two which could result in more transparent accounting of funds.
On paper, it was good, but in practice it did not quite support field operations which was geared to the dynamic process of dealing with local communities and local governance units at a phase which could not be accurately determined as to the timing and kind of expenses for activities undertaken in remote villages. For instance, if you need to buy materials for your demonstration of crafts in training classes which a community could not provide, it would be impossible to produce quotes from at least three suppliers given the kind of task environment where a field team had to operate. In these places, you have to walk 20 to 30 kms in rugged terrain to find an agent for a hardware store.
It was also hard to justify contributions made by the team to barangay fiestas, the wedding of volunteers, the baptism of a child especially if you were chosen by the parents to be the sponsors, and so on. This could easily run to something like one-third of one's measly salary.
When entries in daily logbooks and during assessment meetings got more strident and angrier each month, management had to act. The younger group from the Crazy Co. proposed the creation of an Operations Review Committee, which would summarize problems encountered each month not only about administrative matters but also other concerns, such as the constraints met in dealing with Mayors and other politicians, etc. The proposal was approved by RPB upon expression of support, from UNICEF which after all provided the bulk of funding and, hence, it had a stake in these discussions.
Of all the donors we dealt with, UNICEF had the most number of national staff which facilitated easier discussions using "back channel" methods that Filipinos are familiar with. The donor agency suggested that program officers assigned to our programs bring along the UNICEF admin and finance staff and observe first-hand what was happening.
In some of the project sites, UNICEF Representative Wah Wong went to visit project sites in some hilly barangays in Teresa, Rizal. At one point, the Deputy Resident Representative, Wilfred D'Silva, appointed himself as the interim UNICEF program officer responsible for our integrated program and would join us in field missions, sleep in our team house, accompany the team in coastal and upland villages and sometimes he would be the one to explain how immunization happens with the long journey it takes for the vaccines to reach the fridge at the home economics building of a school or a barangay clinic.
We guess only a veteran UNICEF fieldworker could make a heart-rending narrative of what could be a boring story on how vaccines could reach a barangay, across swollen rivers and forbidding mountain terrain, through a long "bridge of helping hands." Indeed this was the familiar teleserye UNICEF style!
To the credit of Mr. Garcia, who had been used to lord it all over the place in his zealousness to implement admin and finance rules, he was flexible enough to accept the changes made by the ORC and endorsed by UNICEF program officers. It also helped that Mr. Garcia was also a Vietnam veteran along with most members of the old guys in the integrated program and so decorum was maintained in all the intense clash of opinions in full view of the donor.
In later years, Mr. Garcia would be eventually praised by the Crazy Co. as instrumental in protecting savings from our fund drives, the interest of which we used for admin expenses. As for UNICEF Deputy Resident Representative, he was bestowed the highest award that the organization could give. He was awarded the Fieldworker of the Year Award - with the plaque paid for by contributions from each member of the Crazy Co. to the delight of Mr. Garcia.
Mr. Garcia, wherever you are, we survived those difficult years in late 70s and 80s with your vigilance over what you always would term as the "lifeblood of the organization," its finances. But, of course, fieldworkers, living or dead, would always rise up to say such lifeblood could not be divorced from the body that has to be nourished and sustained not only for its own sake but for a purpose higher than its own mortal existence.
And so the saga in this built-in conflict between those who spend the money and those who want to save it continues.
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