Seven for Samar

These seven women, the youngest barely in her twenties, braved rough seas and dirt roads, and threats to their own life and limb when they ventured into the remotest barangays of Samar to tend to the sick and the wounded in the aftermath of typhoon Yolanda.

They were a loosely organized group formed through social media and an NGO (under former Health Secretary Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan), which included five medical doctors, one nurse and one dentist. They all had flourishing practices in Metro Manila, but they put their lives and their practices on hold for a few days for a purpose they believed was greater than themselves.

Jette Po-Major, the lone dentist in the group, said they decided on Samar because not enough attention was being given to some areas in the typhoon-ravaged province, which also suffers from a communist insurgency.

A friend from the private sector, Gary Ramirez, raised money to be able to buy airplane tickets for Tacloban for the intrepid seven.

“Dr. Galvez Tan was asking for volunteers to go to Samar because no one was really giving much attention to the coastal areas there. And word was coming in that there was a lot of damage and there weren’t any medical groups going there. He sent the first reconnaissance team to Guiuan in Eastern Samar. After that, a week after, he sent the seven of us to Tacloban in Leyte, then Catbalogan in Samar, where we would spend the night during our four-day mission. During the day, we went to towns along Samar and Eastern Samar like Basey, Lawaan, Balangiga and the last city, Giporlos,” Jette, who is married to a Hungarian national and has three lovely children, recounts.

“We were one of the first teams to arrive to each of the destinations we went to. I think what happens with a lot of the medical teams that go there is that they go to the town proper but they never go to the inner barangays, which sorely lacked attention. And that’s what we have been doing. We were seven women, no security, but we were going to the inner parts of the mountains just to reach out to the barangays. And that’s when we found out that a lot of them never had any medical help ever since childhood, since birth,” Jette recalls, pain in her eyes.

“And to reach the town proper, sometimes, you have to travel more than 15 kilometers on foot. So a lot of them haven’t seen doctors in their lives, they haven’t seen a nurse. So a lot of the cases that we saw were chronic cases and long-standing illnesses,” she continues.

“It was an eye-opener!” she exclaims, even if she was no stranger to medical mercy missions. Samar was simply different, heart-rending. “We’ve all been to medical missions, all seven of us, but none of us had the sheer number of patients that we had in Samar. There was a town, Balangiga, where we had to entertain more than 650 patients in a span of three to four hours. That’s a lot for a medical mission. I’m a dentist so I do mostly manual work and I was not going below 20 patients in a span of three to four hours. In the past, I would be doing it in half a day. I had to bring dental instruments and make the patients sit down in whatever chair was available.”

Balangiga rings a bell (no pun intended) because it was from this town that the now famous bells where taken as war booty by the American army during the turn of the 20th century. It was also the site of one of the most controversial massacres in Philippine colonial history, in which all males over the age of 10 were ordered killed.

Jette’s heart also goes out to the town of Giporlos, a town of over a thousand that was left with just 200 residents. The rest either fled or perished after Yolanda. Jette, through the recently formed “Sagip Samar” group, is trying to raise funds for building fishing boats for the people of Giporlos.

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After she returned from Samar, Jette was a different person. Her husband supported the transformation.

“This is an experience that I will never forget. The sights, the stories were right off one’s deepest nightmares and yet they were all cold, harsh realities. But if you ask me if I would do this all over again, without batting an eyelash, I would say yes. I came back changed. I would do this all over again not only because my profession calls me to do so but because this is the most human thing to do.”

Amid the devastation that broke her heart, she saw rainbows and silver linings, too.

What’s the best thing about the Filipinos that she experienced in Samar?

“I think the discipline. When push comes to shove, they can be pretty disciplined. One time, it was raining, then it was incredibly hot and then it was raining again,  but the people were not moving from their places on the line. They were all in one orderly line and they were around 600 plus.

“And then you could see people stepping up, a lot of volunteers. The volunteers that I’ve met are the people that I wouldn’t expect to do these things and yet they did. They went beyond their comfort zones and they did volunteer without publicity. A lot of people stepped up this time.”

Jette believes that what the seven of them did was no big deal.

“That’s the oath we swore to,” she points out sincerely. “But my hats are off to people like Marc Soong of the Land Rover Club and Gary who’ve gone out of their way after Yolanda because they wanted to help. For the seven of us, it was the call of duty, which we were sworn to. I think they deserve more praises than me.”

Jette and her group plan to return to Samar in January.

“Yes. I do get tired too, both emotionally and physically,” she admits. “But you just cannot afford to stop when you know that ‘time is of the essence’ in everything that you do that involves life. We have the luxury of stopping because we do not have to wake up to the same nightmare every day. We have the luxury to take a pause and breathe.”

Sadly, many of Yolanda’s victims can’t pause, or they will die.

“Many people thought we were crazy to do it,” Jette says of her Samar sojourn. “Seven women, no men, going to the inner parts of Samar with no security or protection. Maybe we were crazy or even naive. But we survived nevertheless. Instead of guns or threats, we were surrounded by heartfelt smiles of gratitude and warm gestures of welcome. Those are the memories of Samar I would like to keep. They will be with me forever.”

And that, to me, is the spirit of Christmas. Giving of oneself so others may experience their own Christmas, and see the face of God in you. (You may e-mail me at joanneraeramirez@yahoo.com.)