Medical Mission of Mercy Wings Way to the Philippines

Antibiotics, vaccines and a six-foot-high eye surgery microscope were among 17,000 pounds of supplies being jetted across the Pacific toward the Philippines on Thursday as part of an airlift organized by Southern California hospitals.

Another 5,000 pounds of donated goods and a 32-member delegation of physicians and administrators took off from Los Angeles International Airport at 10:30 p.m.

The supplies--primarily surplus goods from 16 member institutions of the Hospital Council of Southern California--will be distributed to medical centers in economically depressed provinces in the Philippines and to hospitals serving the poor of Manila, according to David Langness, a council official who is directing the project.

Delegation members will assess health needs and set up a “sister hospital network” for continued aid--especially the future transfer of used equipment and surplus supplies from some of the 225 Southern California hospitals that belong to the council, he said.

“Their role is not going to be hands-on medicine, which is nice symbolically but can only be a drop in the bucket,” Langness said. “We didn’t want a project that would go there for a week, do a few immunizations and leave. We wanted it to have long-term effects.”

The delegation and supplies are to arrive in Manila on Saturday, after a stopover in Taiwan. Philippine officials will meet the plane, and the delegation is to be received by Philippine President Corazon Aquino on Tuesday.

Another four tons of goods that would not fit in free space provided by China Airlines are being shipped by sea.

The project--dubbed Hospital Emergency Lift, Philippines, or Project HELP--is a response to general appeals made by Aquino during a visit to the United States last year and to urging by local Filipino residents, Langness said. An estimated 200,000 Filipinos live in the Los Angeles area. “We were touched by the plight of the Filipinos, and I think the whole world has been galvanized by Cory Aquino,” he said.

Returned to Homeland

Andrea Aquino Luna, the niece of Aquino’s martyred husband Benigno S. Aquino Jr., is among those in the Los Angeles area who helped encourage the project.

Luna said she was part of a group of Filipinos who returned to their homeland last summer “to see what we could do to help.”

Among the areas they saw was the island of Negros, one of the most poverty-stricken parts of the country, which members of the hospital delegation will also visit.

“It is so devastated, in the sense that a lot of the people have no jobs, because they are dependent on the sugar industry,” said Luna, a dietitian who also is part of the hospital council delegation. “When the sugar industry collapsed, so did the livelihood of the people.

“There are a lot of problems in the Philippines with the left, and many of them hate Americans. I think this is a sign of good will, of friendship, and maybe a good experience for the doctors to get educated about the Third World and especially the Philippines.”

Government Hospital

In Manila, a major beneficiary will be the government-run Philippine General Hospital, Langness said. That is the destination of the eye surgery microscope, donated by a physician in Texas who read about the project in a Filipino-American newspaper, he said.

The hospital is “comparable to County-USC here,” he said. “It serves a lot of indigent patients, because it’s a teaching hospital.”

Langness said two Philippine organizations--NAM-SERVE, associated with the U.S.-based Ninoy Aquino Movement, and the Abot-Palad Foundation, composed primarily of the wives of Philippine cabinet ministers--will help supervise distribution of the supplies to ensure that none are diverted to the black market.

Benigno Aquino was murdered in 1983 at Manila airport upon his arrival on a China Airlines flight after three years of exile in the United States. Outrage over the killing--which a fact-finding board determined was at the hands of members of the military--helped lay the groundwork for Corazon Aquino’s 1986 ouster of President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Airline’s Position

Langness said he was told by a top China Airlines official that the memory of that incident played a role in the company’s decision to aid the hospital project.

But Vick Rowe, Los Angeles sales manager for the airline, said its help “has nothing to do with Mr. Aquino.”

The company simply wanted to help Corazon Aquino help the children of the Philippines, he said.

“We are kind of neighbors,” he said. “To help the children is a very normal action.”