Anonymous donor delivers P20,000 for kidney patient

By Ramon Dacawi

BAGUIO CITY -- An anonymous soul appeared at Angelus last Monday at the hemodialysis center of the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center, deposited  P20,000 for patient Grace Dupingay-Bango and  then left after declining to give his name to nurses impressed by his kindness.   

Grace, a 32-year old whose kidneys totally malfunctioned due to diabetes, arrived later, unsure of how to pay the P2,200  fee for the four-hour blood-cleansing session. She appeared anyway, and was told by nurse Carmen Bomatnong someone she could only described as “adult/male”  delivered the windfall.

Whoever the donor is, his gesture fits a qualifier from novelist Richard Paul Evans, author of the best-selling “The Christmas Box” trilogy: “The greatest acts are done without audience, plaque or ceremony.”

The sum will be good for nine dialysis sessions, or until Oct. 12 following Grace’s three-times-a-week schedule ( Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, all on the 8 p.m.- 12 midnight shift). Her treatment the other Saturday was shouldered by another Samaritan, a woman who also appeared at the dialysis center and introduced herself to Grace as Jane.

“Inyeg na ditoy BGH ket nagsabat kami (She brought the needed amount here at the BGH and we met),” Grace said.

Before the two donors came, Grace had only two more sessions she could charge to Philhealth, the government health insurance agency.

Worried, she asked that her story be written and published, for Samaritans out there to know and respond to her appeal for help.  

The youngest of three children of a marginal farmer-couple in Lagawe, Ifugao, Grace married Isagani Bango, a province mate. After their wedding, the couple came to Baguio where Isagani, now also 32, found work with a pocket-mining labor crew based in Antamok, Itogon, Benguet.

She tried to give him children. Two years ago, she gave birth to a baby boy. Last September, she had a baby girl. Both infants were born prematurely, and both died seven days after birth. Grace was diagnosed for diabetes in 2003 and is now on insulin injection to control blood sugar level. The ailment, however, led to kidney failure, a devastating news she learned last Christmas.

Also last Tuesday evening, two other dialysis patients – Belinda allosa of Pinsao, Baguio City, and Ferdinand Dumol of La Trinidad, Benguet, made it to their treatment session at the BGHMC, thanks to a donation of P17,593.78 sent by karate students in southern Germany under former world champion Julian Chees. Arrival of the fund also enabled kidney patient Sharon Dalida to have her dialysis session last Sept. 20. 

Before this remittance, the German students  pooled and sent P88,000 for four other gravely ill patients in the Cordillera, among them two toddlers stricken with hydrocephalus that had left their young parents emotionally and financially drained.

The amounts were raised by adherents of Shoshin (A Beginner’s Mind), one of the biggest martial arts school in southern Germany founded by former world champion Julian Chees and affiliated with the Japan Karate Association.

Renate Doth, secretary of Shoshin Kinderhilfe Foundation, established in 2004 as the humanitarian arm of the karate school, made the cash transfers after the members’ regular monitoring of news dispatches on the plight of indigent patients in the Cordillera. 

The first tranche amounting to P43,500 was split into P12,000 to support Louise Dane Maggongey Martinez, a five-m onth old girl who has been in and out of hospitals for hydrocephaly, and P41,500 for the second chemotherapy session of Barbara Fagcayang, a 43-year old fighting breast cancer.

The second tranche of P44,500 was equally divided to boost the chances of two-year old hydrocephalus patient Dhea Rose Kitongan and for the maintenance medication of  a farmer who was hospitalized due to a stroke.

“Please tell those Samaritans in Germany that what they sent is pure relief,” said Roger Kitongan, Dhea Rose’s father requested when he received the P22,250 fund support early evening the other Saturday.

“My  daughter has been suffering since birth,”  Roger said. “She has been fighting since then. I guess no parent , or anyone who knows,  can give up on a baby with such determination to live.”

For the traditional martial arts students in Germany, the continuing out-reach program allows them to live out a basic tenet of karate laid out by Gichin Funakoshi, the Okinawan master and recognized by many as thefounder of the shotokan : “Karate ne sentenashi” (Karate has no offense).

Shoshin began reaching out to the Cordillera in Christmas, 2004 when Chees, the first ever non-German by birth to have been drafted into the German national karate team, traveled to Banaue, Ifugao and delivered P70,000 to two mothers who each lost a daughter when their common house was buried by a landslide at the height of a typhoon.

As of last year, Shoshin had extended over P2 million support to needy patients in the Cordillera region.

Over in La Trinidad, Benguet,  businessman-sportsman  Gilbert Tanding  also recently established a  fund to also enable him to extend assistance to indigent patients.

Tanding so far extended P12,000 used for  hemodialysis treatment session each  for kidney patients Jocelyn Singson, a kagawad of barangay Bahong and 19-year old DharrenGawili of barangay Balili, both in La  Trinidad, Benguet, and Belinda Allosa of Pinsao, Baguio City, medicines for two other patients,  aside from P2,000 cash support to kidney patient Ruben Tomayan and P1,000 worth of medicines for Ruben Lalan, a former jeepney driver plying the Baguio-Acupan (Itogon) route who suffered a heart attack early this year.