BENCHWARMER
Ramon S.
Dacawi
BAGUIO CITY -- Three weeks after she appealed
for help in battling cancer, Remedios Walleng, a 34-year old mother of two
toddlers, appealed again. This time, it was to be able to thank, through the
Baguio media, all those who had responded to her call for support towards her
medical deliverance.
While her appeal for
help found print, her expression of gratitude did not, prompting her to appeal
anew. She said it was equally important for her to be able to thank her benefactors,
all of whom she never met until they called and asked to meet her so they could
extend assistance.
Remedios is fighting
Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph nodes for which she was diagnosed the
other Christmas. She had had three chemotherapy sessions under a six-cycle
treatment plan but eventually suffered a relapse for failure to follow the
schedule due to fund lack.
She was to have her
third treatment session last Monday under a longer, 12-session protocol at the
Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center. The fresh chemo round is being made
possible by Samaritans who pooled P22,000 in response to her plea last
Christmas.
As much as she needed
support, she needed to express her family’s gratitude to them. Her gratitude is
on behalf of Jereka, her five-month old daughter she had taken time to
breast-feed while she was knocking on offices in search of Samaritans last
December.It’sforJeremy, her two-year old son. It’s for JeremiasPiaoan, her 42
–year old husband who, as taxi driver, is the family’s sole breadwinner.
She needed to thank
Nicanor and Jocelyn Taule-Sison Sr. and Elmer and Carmen Taule-Coma-ad. The
two couples contributed a total of P12,000 they coursed through Engr.
Taule of the La Trinidad Water District.
To that, the secretary
of Engr. Taule added P2,000, Remedios said.
A certain “Sir Manuel”
aboard a Mitsubishi Montero vehicle also met the patient in front of the UCCP
Church in Baguio and handed P10,000.
Remedios, a native of
Alilem, Ilocos Sur, worked as a domestic help in Malaysia until her three-year
contract expired in 1998. Her family now rents in a boarding house at FA-301,
Km. 4, Balili, La Trinidad, Benguet.
Others who would like
to prop up this young mother’s chances against the big C may ring her cellphone
number (09487802466).
Remedios is not alone
in her persistence to be able to say thank you. Years back, the great
Cbarles Kuralt, the reporter of CBS who recorded the extraordinary deeds of
ordinary people, featured a Russian dentist and war veteran who sought
him out when he was in Moscow for an assignment,
“Hardly a day goes by
that I don’t think of Nikita Zakaravich Aseyev,” Kuralt later wrote in “A Life
on the Road”, a chronicle of the feature stories he did on ordinary people with
extraordinary deeds, sensitivity and sense of community.
Dr. Aseyev could not
forget a debt of gratitude. He wanted to thank the American prisoners of war
who smuggled food to him and his Russian prisoners in a German camp during the
second world war.
“You have to help me,”
Aseyev told Kuralt after the be-medaled veteran barged into the reporters’
hotel being secured by the KGB, the Soviet Union secret police. “You are
my hope. Everybody lives in hope, you know, and I am no different. For more
than forty years, I have waited for this chance, and now it has come.”
He gave Kuralt a list
of the American prisoners who had helped the Russian detainees. Dr.
Aseyev recalled the names aloud and Kuralt taped his voice.
“Listen to these names
back there in America,” Kuralt later said in his television report. “If your
name is on this list, an old soldier is saying thank you,” he added and played
the tape.
Among those who were
watching the news that evening were William Jarema, a retired New York City
police detective, and Dr. Sidney Brockman, retired from the San Antonio, Texas,
Health Department.
Both remembered their
life in prison with Dr. Aseyev. Both wept. “These are tears of joy,” Jarema
later said. “We were like brothers. I thought he was dead.” Dr. Brockman
recalled: “We were all very close to Dr. Aseyev. We all had tremendous respect
for the man, because we knew the Russian prisoners were having things mighty
rough.
Personally, the eyes
still well each time I remember Elena Solis’ selfless gesture five Christmases
past. She was a laundrywoman who had been knocking on doors to tell people
Manellaine, her then 21-year old daughter, needed help.
Manellaine, she said,
was afflicted with lupus nephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys caused by a
disease of the immune system. The girl needed to undergo chemotherapy every
quarter of the year, and the costs per cycle were beyond her family’s means.
Once they read of the
girl’s medical plight, Samaritans responded spontaneously One generous soul
traced Elena and contributed while she was doing laundry inside a church
compound along Bokawkan Rd. Others followed suit, allowing Manellaine to
complete her treatment protocol.
Sometime that
yuletide, Elena dropped by our cubicle to share the good news. Manellaine’s
doctors said she had been cured, free of the illness. Her mother came to ask
that her gratitude be published.
There’s another
thing,, she added in Filipino. “Gusto ko sanang ibigay n’yo ito sa sino mang maysakit
at nangangailangan ng tulong (I wish you can give this to whoever is sick and is
in need of help),” she said.
She handed me two P500
bills.
I was stunned. The
amount could have gone a long way to settling her family’s monthly house rental
at Pucay St., at the back of the Philippine Baptist Theological Seminary at
Guisad.
I suppressed the urge
to hand back the two P500 bills, then asked her where the amount came from.
She explained her
husband, Manuel, who worked as a security guard, had received his Christmas
bonus of P6,000. The couple had decided that part of it be given to somebody in
need, out of gratitude for the kindness of strangers who helped Manellaine pull
through her medical ordeal.
So be it, I answered.
Later, I handed the amount to a patient grateful to know there are people out
there whose own suffering never blinds them to the pain of others.
Up close and personal,
I have my own list of benefactors. Both local and expatriates, they had helped
me pull through a plumbing of the heart termed angioplasty in January, 2012.
They include my doctors who, that month insisted I have a heart and that it was
not working well. These professionals are still checking on me pro bono.
(e-mail: mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments.)
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