By Antonio Graceffo

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

Last of four parts: Read first, second, and third parts.

The next call came at about nine at night. It was a rekindle. There had been a huge fire earlier in the day in a Chinese factory, next to the Chinese school. The school had been evacuated, then the firefighters climbed up on the second-story roof of the school and cut holes in the walls of the second story of the factory to pump water in.

As always the people of Manila, or the people of Philippines, have luck, fortune, and corruption completely against them. In the case of fire, fore example, the Bureau of Fire Protection only has 60 fire trucks in all of Metro Manila. From that number only 10 to15 are working at any given moment. The rest are waiting for maintenance.

The volunteers have about 40 tanker trucks and if someone is saved, it is normally because of them. Fire hydrants are few and far between so tankers are the most important trucks, brining new water for the hose companies. Complicating matters is that most of the vehicles are donations or picked up second hand at the lowest price wherever in the world they happened to have been doing duty. Many come from America. Others come from Japan, China, or Korea. A few are European. Some are very old. As a result, none of them have compatible or interchangeable parts. So the pumping procedure is that they find one tanker that can connect to the hoses, and he stays put for the duration of the fire. Then all of the other trucks come and replenish the one that remains stationary.

In addition to the tankers, there was a single fire hydrant about five blocks away.

We arrived on scene just as a stand by. You have to have one company of EMTs standing by when you have firefighters in the field. Some of the men had been there since nine in the morning, and they were exhausted. The BFP, the government fire service, only showed up once, with a single truck, and left.

Rescue Nine led me into the fire. Always in the Philippines, you have to second guess and think about your own safety because those guys weren’t careful. I was pretty certain I shouldn’t be walking into a smoldering building with no protective gear. Walking down a long dark corridor, I could hear the firefighters walking around on the thin aluminum roof above me. Water trickled down, ice cold. We climbed the stairs and there was a company of firemen standing at the huge smoking holes they had cut in the walls. Their hoses were turned off while they waited for more water.

I crawled out on the roof to get a photo. That’s when I learned that the green bits of roof were aluminum, but the white ones were plastic. I almost fell through.

“Some of the firefighters have been there twelve hours,” said Rescue Nine.

There was thick black smoke billowing out, and I wondered if the men shouldn’t be wearing respirators or air tanks.

“We don’t have anything like that,” explained Rescue Nine.

Many of the men wore turnout coats, helmets, and boots, but that was it. Out in the streets, many were shirtless or just in shorts and a T-shirt. The preferred footwear was flip-flops.

The guys asked me again about drinking and sex with prostitutes. It makes me angry. They all smoke. They are already poor. Do they have to make things worse? Can’t they think of something else, like studying and working out or improving themselves? Instead they asked me about drinking and whores. I get e-mail from people all over the world who would give anything to hang out with me and ask about martial arts or linguistics because I have experience most people could never get. But these guys only want to ask me about drinking and whores.

While we were standing around watching the Chinese factory burn, one of the many presidents I was introduced to asked me, “Have you gone drinking with these guys yet?”

No, and I never will, because I don’t understand this type of behavior.

I was one of only three qualified EMTs in the group. No one had asked me, “Have you started giving classes to these guys yet?”

Sam’s dad was a really intelligent guy and I thought we would have some good conversations. He told me that he was coming to Thailand and would call me.

I said, please do. “I will show you things you have never seen and never could see without me.” I meant I could introduce him to the last muay thai monk and ride horses with the warriors on the Burma border, visit the tribes where I know people by name, and see the Khmer temple where I study with the monks.

He said, “Yes, and we won’t bring Sam.” Then he laughed. The implication was more prostitutes and drinking.

Is this all they could get out of life? I had trouble liking them. I had trouble not feeling superior. I was down to my last twenty pesos and I still felt like they were weak.

I had reached a point in which everything about the Philippines was wearing me out. I hated seeing the poverty. I hated traveling through dangerous or dirty squatter areas. I hated sitting on a car seat on the sidewalk waiting for a response. I didn’t even like talking to my workmates because they depressed me. They were unemployed. They smoked and drank. They had kids by who knew how many women and appeared to have no desire to do more than what they were doing, which was simply sitting around on the car seats talking and smoking. When a charitable thought came to my mind, I realized they were stuck, and there was nothing they could do. And I always had to remind myself that no matter how much I disliked the life, I could leave. They would have to stay forever.

That though depressed me even more. So once again, I hated everything I was exposed to.

I finally made the call to Taiwan. “Pierre, my old friend, Ranger needs extraction. Get me out of here.” A few days later, I was on a plane to Taiwan, where I would be teaching English to children.