BENCHWARMER

RAMON DACAWI
Suffering as catalyst

There’s this line from William Bloyd I often quote: “There are places in the heart which do not yet exist, into which suffering enters to give them existence.”

A parody is in order: “There are places in the heart of a Baguio boy or girl, or that of a Cordilleran, which have been there ever since, always triggered to action by suffering back home.”

Numerous patients saw that in Freddie de Guzman, the expatriate Baguio boy in Canada who, for three years now, has been reaching out to the sick here. Recently, he lost his job. While waiting for the labor case he filed to proceed, this suddenly unemployed architect sent P11,000 for four patients here and in Benguet.

“Ganoon pala si Freddie,” Philian Weygan, the Igorota traveler told me after she returned from the BIBAK Festival of Cordillera expatriates in Southern California. She’s not referring to his losing hair and gaining a forehead that extends to the back. She must have met Freddie there but only learned who he really is when she came back and brushed up on local news through back issues of the weeklies.

Patients who found hope because of Freddie saw that, too, in an Ibaloi woman raising her daughter in Kentucky. Simultaneously with Freddie, she began reconnecting through patients here three years back – while se was recuperating from the big C. They saw that in another woman who left a check for P50,000 last February, when she was about to have her check-up for cancer.

They saw it in a nurse based in Connecticut. Princess Lea, as she calls herself on the internet chat room, practically bankrolled a heart surgery two years ago, so Santy John Tuyan, now 12, could go back to school.

Ten-year old Mark Anthony Viray, would see it when he realizes that the guy who treated him to pizza and ordered a giant one for the kid to bring home, also footed the bill for his first chemotherapy the other week.

Mark Anthony is battling Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a rare form of cancer he’s too young to grapple with. The boy dreams of flying an airplane when he grows up. . It’s a dream his father Ernesto, an off-and-on taxi and family driver, must have to keep reminding the kid, to steel him up for five more chemo treatments sessions that would depend on other Samaritans.

Traditional karate master Julian Chees would have also picked the tab for the Mark Anthony’s second chemo - if only there were no other patients as seriously ill. Julian was swamped with medical prescriptions of patients in Maligcong, his native village, and the capital town of Bontoc, when he and his family arrived from Germany to visit his ailing mother.

As graceful, precise and decisive in his rendition of the shotokan (knife-hand) form of his martial art that earned him various international titles and a world championship in kata, Julian immediately saw why 27-year old Veronica Lee-Casuga needs to have a new lease on life.

Veronica, daughter of the late Sunshine Lunch waiter George Lee, married Joefrey Casuga, her high school classmate, last January 30. Last Christmas, the young couple learned Veronica’s implanted kidney, which her aunt donated in 2002, had failed.

Last week, Veronica was back at the St. Luke’s Medical Center in Quezon City where her first kidney transplant was done in 2002, thanks to the center’s board of trustees and then city Mayor Mauricio Domogan.

She and her brother Jimson, the would-be donor this time, were to start their work-up preparatory to the second implant. With them were their widowed mother Wella and Joefrey, who barely had a nap as he is on the night work shift at Moog Controls. Julian bankrolled their food, lodging and fuel costs. (In case others would like to take the cue from him, Veronica can be reached at cell phone number 09187073438.)

As I write, my buddy Peewee Agustin arrives, trying to cope with the fate of his 70-year old uncle Serino Andanan. The old man was wheeled into the Baguio General Hospital last Wednesday, comatose after a stroke. Peewee was told blood had clotted the brain.

I don’t know his uncle but I know Peewee. What he can’t whip out of his pocket, he makes up by transporting patients to and from Metro Manila. As he did for Veronica six years ago and last week. As he will when Veronica and Jimson return to St. Luke’s later this month.

Meanwhile, the shoe is on the other foot. It’s always easier to reach out to people you hardly know, Harder when the one in crisis is family who is aware you’ve been propping up strangers in need. In Peewee’s predicament, a stranger’s support came in handy. Early last week, banker Rolly de Guzman, the glorified teller of Rizal Commercial Banking Corp., called. He said there’s again this anonymous donor unaffected by donor fatigue who had somebody drop at his desk P5,000 with the same advice – to whoever needed it most and no mention of where it came from.

From the anonymous Samaritan’s fund – his latest support to sick people he or she only reads about in the papers. – I handed Peewee P3,000. He wouldn’t have it but I insisted, to extricate myself from the predicament he was in.

Last Wednesday, another banker handed me P1,500. “It’s for the sick boy who wants to fly an airplane,” he said. Now, I’m California dreaming. From the Bay Area, Conrad Marzan and Joel Aliping called up to say they’ll belt out folk and country on Sept. 12, with proceeds from the concert for patients here. ( e-mail: http://us.mc333.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=rdacawi@yahoo.com for comments).