025 Meeting Fe Hidalgo (1)
It was ManCom day at the Central Office of the Department of Education, so everyone was there. It was also going to be a long busy day. Browsing through the thick set of handouts, one thing caught my eye—a seemingly innocuous item that could turn into a problem, for the department and for my boss, then Secretary Butch Abad.
Admittedly, I wasn’t sure myself. And I didn’t want to go to the boss with sirens blaring for a non-issue. I did bring it up with a couple of people in our communications team. They agreed with me but gave me an unsure look that didn’t give me much assurance on whether or not I was right. Just the same, in the middle of the ManCom, I found the opportunity to talk to Abad about the problem. He told me to talk to the person involved (and he got back to presiding the meeting of all top officials of the department).
So I did. I called the top guy up and told him about the problem with the department issuance he wrote. His reply was for us to cross the bridge when we got there. So that was a dead end. And I eventually let the issue go, for the time being, since I was getting busy by then with preparations for the opening of the new school year (It was the maiden year of the project I cooked up to better manage the start of the school year, Oplan Balik Eskwela).
It was actually on that fateful day—the first day of the new school year—that the issue came to my mind again.
After a long, hard day filled with school visits and field inspections, monitoring complaints at the Balik Eskwela command center and addressing media queries and interviews for Abad, I found myself sitting idly at the entrance of the Central Office’s Bulwagan ng Karunungan that we had turned into our command center, which was already wrapping up operations for that long day (We were all waiting for everyone who’d be joining us for dinner at a nearby restaurant, courtesy of Abad, to celebrate a triumphant school opening day).
Lo and behold, I saw Fe Hidalgo walking across the empty hall, toward my direction. She wanted to take a glimpse of what was happening inside.
Now, at this point, we were never formally introduced to each other. Yes, she probably saw me—Abad’s new guy—and of course, I knew her then as the old lady assigned to be undersecretary for programs and projects.
I said hello, of course, as a courtesy, since we were the only ones there. Then it dawned upon me to ask about the problem I had with that department issuance, which I had half-forgotten, until then.
So I asked her if she could kindly look at the issuance, which I had brought out for her to see, in particular, a specific paragraph somewhere in the second page.
She took the paper. She read the paragraph. She jerked her head a bit, then she gave me a worried look as she said, “Is he still here? Can I talk to him?”
And it was at that moment that I knew my hunch was right—we had a big problem in our hands.
Hidalgo knew that Abad was to leave the next day for an official trip abroad, so it had to be addressed that night—at the secretary’s level. So I escorted her up to Abad’s office. She went in, issuance in hand, while I waited outside with a couple of other people. They were eager to go to dinner. I was eager to know what was transpiring inside.
(To be continued)