By Antonio Graceffo

The continuing saga of a Brooklyn monk come to Manila to study EMT. Stumbled onto this randomly? Read this article first.

Third of four parts. Read parts I and II.

My new crew in Tondo consisted of Rescue Nine, who was not married, 41, and had a face like a Drakes Coffee cake, with a Manuel Noriega complexion. That is to say, Rescue Nine was hard to look at. He was an EMT, graduate of the same program as me, and had no other job apart from volunteering on the ambulance.

Bob was the son of one of the officers, good-looking and 22 years old. He sometimes worked on TV as talent and sometimes worked as a driver for the TV execs. But, mostly, he was just a volunteer firefighter. He had two kids by one girl, but he wasn’t married to her. His older child was five years old, which means he became a father for the first time at 17.

“Why don’t you two get married?” I asked.

“We have too many plans,” Bob explained.

This was news to me, because none of these guys seemed to have plans of any kind. They just sat around, and sat, and sat. They had no interests, apart from drinking, karaoke, and whores. They didn’t read. They didn’t exercise. They just sat. I didn’t see how this plan would leave your schedule to full to marry the girl who bore your children.

“We are too young to get married,” explained Bob.

“But you have two kids. Do you see them?”

“My wife is a beauty consultant for a department stores. She and the kids live with her parents in the province. On Fridays if I don’t have many things to do, I go to visit them and bring money and food.”

Nice, I bet those kids will have a great future.

Ivan was also twenty-two and had five kids by different women. He was only doing volunteer firefighting and nothing else.

I wasn’t sure how any of these guys lived.

I also didn’t know what to make of these Tondo boys. They just sat around on their old car seats, on the sidewalk, like rednecks sitting on the porch. They seemed content to do it. There were a lot of them too, at least ten firefighters and a handful of EMTs. I was proud of them for helping the community, but it was strange to me to be so content with doing nothing all day.

A very small amount of money came in through my Paypal account, and I was able to return to duty. This time it took nearly an hour before a taxi was willing to stop in Recto and take me to Tondo.

After risking my life to get there, once I arrived, we sat, and we sat, and we sat, waiting for a call. There is a major problem of education and communication in the Philippines, so no one knows about the free EMS service. They also didn’t know how to call us—we
weren’t on the government’s notoriously unresponsive 117 emergency number. People had to first know of our existence and then call our direct line to get us. The guys explained to me that 60 percent of the calls we received were from friends and family of the crew, because they were the only people who knew about the service. Luckily, the neighborhood people knew us, so they called us for all sorts of services. Some poor people used us as doctors because they couldn’t afford a trip to the hospital. At least someone was using us. But this was a lot of hardware and talent to leave unused while people died.

Finally a call came in for a motor-vehicle accident. Ten of us piled into the ambulance and drove two blocks.

A sidecar taxi had pulled out in front of a kid on a motorcycle, and he lay it down trying to stop. The kid had banged up his knee and skinned himself, up a bit, but he was fine. Of course he wasn’t wearing a helmet, and the first thing he asked us for was a cigarette. He had five EMTs crawling all over him, rendering first aid. They cleaned his injuries with water from a spray bottle, then put Betadine on it and bandaged it. I don’t know how bandaging is done elsewhere, but they didn’t use gauze here. In fact when I tried to buy gauze they didn’t even sell it at the medical supply store.

The EMTs took a four-by-four bandage and just taped it directly on the victim’s skin. Ouch!

The bystanders were pretty excited to see a foreign EMT. I was naturally much bigger than my co-workers. I outweighed most of them by 40 kilos. Also, I wore a nice new uniform while they all wore shorts and flip-flops. Most people thought I was in charge and kept waiting for me to do something wonderful. I felt like saying, “I am not an EMT, but I play one on TV.”

A murmur went through the crowd as people wondered about me. A young girl turned to her father and said, “I have seen his photo on Friendster.com”

Once again I thought, if I could just sing, I think I could be a huge star in the Philippines.

While I had the power and admiration of the crowd, I walked up to the patient, puffed out my chest, and spoke in an authoritative voice, loudly enough that everyone could here.

“I am going to be working in this neighborhood now. If I see you riding without a helmet again, I will pull you off the bike and beat you senseless myself.”

Basically it was the “I am the new sheriff” speech from an old Gene Hackman movie, but I was hoping that maybe it would make an impression on someone, and they would all start wearing helmets.

This may sound completely awful, but on some level, I really wondered if the desperately poor of Manila’s slums really wanted to live. Maybe the smoking, drinking, and non-helmet or condom wearing was a form of slow suicide. It made me sad. But then again, I had only less than five dollars in my wallet.