Snippets of OBGYN Life

22/08/2025

“will we wake up, or keep sleeping while the water rises?”

[PERSONAL REFLECTION]

■ The Rude Awakening: When Numbers Have Names and Corruption Has Addresses

I’ve been writing about Philippine politics long enough to think I had built a healthy cynicism toward corruption.

The routine is familiar: officials skimming off the top, padded contracts, the usual suspects pointing fingers at one another when election season rolls around.

But Senator Ping Lacson’s privilege speech yesterday wasn’t another tired exposé.

It was a dissection of a system so entrenched, so clinically organized in its theft, that I caught myself staring into my morning coffee wondering if I had underestimated how far this the corruption and thievery reaches.

■ The Math That Makes Your Blood Boil

1.9 trillion pesos in flood control funds over 15 years.

Namnamin mo: one point nine TRILLION pesos.

That’s not spare change.
That’s not discretionary pork.

That’s nation-building money.

Enough to transform the Philippines into a flood-ready country.

Yet in many parts of the Philippines, streets still turn into rivers when typhoons hit.

Families still evacuate to the same centers.

Year after year, people lose the same belongings in the same floods.

Now I know why.

Lacson’s “pie-sharing” map reads like a corruption manual.

A P100 million project, after standard deductions, should leave P82 million for actual construction. But the slices go elsewhere:

▪︎ DPWH officials: 8–10%

▪︎ Bids and Awards Committee: 5–6%

▪︎ COA personnel: 0.5–1%

▪︎ Local politicians’ “parking fee”: 5–6%

▪︎ The congressman who “funded” it: 20–25%

Only 40% reaches the ground.

Sixty percent of flood control funds—money meant to protect lives—is siphoned off with cold precision and carnival-level brazenness.

■ When Corruption Gets an Organizational Chart

What shook me most wasn’t the size of the theft. It was its efficiency.

They operate with codes.
With percentages.
With carved-up territories like syndicates staking corners.

Except their turf is provinces, and their product is public safety.

The “distinct projects” Lacson flagged—budget entries with identical amounts in different places—aren’t clerical quirks. They’re territorial claims. Coded numbers that mark ownership of public funds.

In Bulacan, 28 separate projects were all pegged at exactly P72 million. Not P71.8 million. Not P72.3 million. Clean, round P72 million. Looting by calculator.

■ The Ghost Projects That Haunt Real Families

The most chilling number is zero.

Ghost projects marked “completed” while communities drown.

Take Sitio D**e, Barangay Apitong. P192.99 million supposedly spent on flood control.

Documents marked it done in 2024.

Residents confirmed: nothing was built.

Nearly P200 million disappeared into thin air.

Imagine families sandbagging their homes, hauling belongings to higher ground, not knowing that on paper, millions were spent to keep them safe.

Money that exists only in a corrupt official’s bank account.

■ The Regional Reality: When Your Backyard Is the Crime Scene

Living in Central Luzon makes this sting even harder. When Lacson named Bulacan the “most notorious” province for anomalies, he wasn’t speaking of far-off scandals. He was talking about our backyard.

The Pampanga case in Arayat twisted my gut.

The Candating riverbank project began with P20 million in 2018. By 2023, it was P91.6 million.

By 2024, it ballooned to P183 million—an 815% jump.

The same contractor, Eddmari Construction, still gets contracts despite being blacklisted elsewhere.

The river still floods.
Homes still drown.
The contractor gets paid.

■ Congressional Theater, Taxpayer Tragedy

Perhaps the most infuriating part is the political theater.

Politicians plaster their names and faces on banners, presenting projects as personal gifts to the public.

But it’s not their money. It’s ours.

Taxes from groceries, from government fees, from every peso we pay into the system.

Money meant for protection, repurposed for self-promotion.

In Oriental Mindoro, P10 billion—55% of its entire flood control budget—came through congressional insertions.

A good governance marketing funded by theft.

■ The Human Arithmetic of Corruption

Each slice of the pie has human cost:

▪︎ Children wading through flooded classrooms instead of learning

▪︎ Families losing everything, over and over

▪︎ Small businesses destroyed by rising waters

▪︎ Communities stuck in survival mode instead of moving forward

A brand of sloppy governance executed with professional precision, leaving consequences measured in Filipino suffering.

■ A President’s Rage, A Senator’s Courage

I’ll give this: Marcos’s “Mahiya naman kayo!” during the SONA cut deeper than scripted lines. That anger was real.

The “Sumbong sa Pangulo” site isn’t mere gimmickry—it’s an admission that our bureaucracies are too corrupted to handle complaints.

And Lacson? This wasn’t showboating.

He came armed with investigations, drone footage, insider accounts. This was detective work disguised as a Senate speech, laying out evidence like an indictment.

And for this, I thank Marcos for kickstarting the inquiry, and Lacson, for the incisive investigation and presentation.

■ The Wake-Up Call We Can’t Ignore

Here’s the truth I can’t shake: corruption isn’t just present.

It’s systematic—a vice politicians turned into an income-generating industry.

A trillion-peso machine that floods us in poverty while enriching a circle of thieves.

The choice isn’t whether we can afford to fight corruption. The choice is whether we can survive letting it continue.

Every shrug, every “ganito na talaga,” is another vote for ghost projects. Another year of knee-deep water. Another betrayal.

■ More Than Flood Control—Soul Control

Lacson’s remark about “greed control” struck home; a start realization that what we face isn’t just a governance issue but a crisis in values.

When stealing P200 million for flood protection becomes routine, when siphoning life-saving infrastructure money becomes a business model, we aren’t just misgoverned.

We’re robbed of the very contract that binds government and citizen.

■ The Choice Is Still Ours

As I end this piece with cold coffee on my desk, I can’t escape the memory of past exposés.

Headlines screamed.
Politicians promised reforms.

Then floods came again.
Ghost projects grew.
The pie got sliced once more.

What feels different now is the precision of the evidence.

The exposure of a system, not just individuals.

And the real task for all of us?

The dismantling of an industry built on theft.

We must decide: do we keep tolerating systematic robbery of funds meant to save lives, or do we finally demand a government that protects the people it swore to serve?

The alarm has rung.
The evidence is there.
The choice, as always, belongs to us.

The only question left: will we wake up, or keep sleeping while the water rises?

To end, every morning, I ask myself what kind of country we are leaving for the next generation.

After Lacson’s speech, the answer is painfully clear: it depends on whether we wake from this nightmare of normalized corruption—or keep pressing snooze while the floods take us under.

Source: Ping Lacson

21/08/2025

“What can one man do if the Filipinos love their own slavery.”

A special return engagement (uploaded in its entirety; for fair use, non-profit, educational purposes and no copyright infringement intended) in memory of de...

19/08/2025

Will have Clinic today at FemCare Access Clinic

Will resume next Monday at MOM’s Utz BMC

18/08/2025

Maligayang Buwan ng Wika!

Salita sa araw na ito:
Alon sa Likido 😅
Sa Ingles: Fluid wave!

17/08/2025

🫶🏼

15/08/2025

Not a good news…

That’s why HIV test is a part of our baseline laboratory, for Pregnant women, kasi dun lang kadalasan nalalaman ang HIV status nila.

For those in a relationship, it’s ok to know each other’s HIV status (libre naman yun)

Plus point rin: Be LOYAL.

14/08/2025

🫡

■ The Mayor Who Makes All Corrupt Leaders Look Bad

Some politicians spend years perfecting the art of saying nothing.

Vico Sotto isn’t one of them.

This week, while others might have dodged questions or hidden behind press releases, the Pasig mayor went straight for the jugular.

After President Marcos Jr. revealed ₱100 billion worth of irregularities in flood control contracts, Vico named names—two of the top 15 contractors, both owned by the Discaya family, his former political rivals.

And he didn’t just drop a bomb and walk away.

He laid out what he calls the Six Stages of Corruption in government projects—starting from rigged bidding, to ghost projects, to SOPs that eat half the budget, all the way to turning stolen public funds into political capital.

It’s the kind of transparency that makes a lot of powerful people very uncomfortable.

This isn’t new for him.

The U.S. State Department once called him an International Anti-Corruption Champion.

The Senate honored him for removing kickbacks in Pasig’s contracts, setting up hotlines for complaints, and slashing contract prices to cut bribery.

Even as a councilor, he wrote Pasig’s own transparency ordinance—Metro Manila’s first localized FOI law.

And here’s the part that makes him different: he’s not just exposing corruption, he’s taking action.

He’s pushing legal cases to collect millions in unpaid taxes from these companies.

He’s promising to send every red flag directly to the President.

And his administration’s track record—billions saved, salaries raised, workers regularized—proves it’s not just talk.

When Malacañang itself tells all mayors to follow Vico Sotto’s example, that’s not flattery. That’s an admission: this one guy is making the rest look bad.

Leaders like him know the danger of speaking up. But they also know silence is the oxygen corruption breathes. And Vico refuses to give it air.

To every leader, from barangay captain to senator:

Stop making excuses. Stop pretending you don’t know what’s going on.

Start doing what’s right, even when it costs you.

Because in a country where corruption has been normalized, Vico Sotto is proof that integrity is still possible.

The only question left is—do you have the guts to follow his lead?

13/08/2025

Sa sobrang excitement ng ibang Mommies at Daddies,
Pagkahiga pa lang sa ultrasound bed—boom! cellphone agad, video agad. 📸
We super appreciate ‘yung marunong muna magtanong kung puwede mag-video. 💙
At reminder lang ha—yung UTZ picture na akala niyo mata ni Baby…
Tiyan po ‘yon, (kidneys to be exact) hindi eyeballs. 😂

07/08/2025

“Every beginning deserves gentle hands.”

A newborn receives loving care moments after birth at Births & Beyond birthing center. 💕

“Welcoming new life with care and compassion.”

A dedicated birth center staff gently tends to a newborn in their first moments of life.