February 12, 2010 I can’t sleep. This must be the effect of reading the news at the Philippine Daily Inquirer about the capture of 43 community health workers including doctors and nurses. I could choose to keep quiet, but I can’t. I am one of the few community nurses given an opportunity to study and be reoriented to hospital nursing in a first world country, gratis. It was a privilege that opened a scar, a deep painful one. I have seen poverty in the Philippines at its worst. As a community nurse, I learned to balance myself along rice paddies barefoot, otherwise, my shoes would be left in the mud. I learned the ways of a small fisherman who barely had three kilos of catch for a day because the big shipping vessels are scraping off tons of fish in the sea. I have lived the life of a poor farmer who only eats rice once a day and eats camote or gabi for the other meals. I have seen children die of Pneumonia because their families cannot afford antibiotics. I have lived a life of poverty with my patients. But, with a sudden twist of fate, I was brought to Auckland, New Zealand to study, for free. My months of exposure to a first world health care system was mired in melancholy. My lecturers would often see me teary eyed after performing my daily nursing care. I was crying not because of homesickness, I was crying for my poor Filipino patients back home. I told my lecturers, “If only my people would have half the wonders of your health care system, then my infant patients would not have died at an early age, my elderly patients need not suffer from pain, my postpartum patients and their babies, would not have suffered from undernutrition.” In the hospital where I studied, food is free, medications are free, most of the services are free. To top it all, nurses and health workers alike are regularly reminded to treat their clients with respect, to communicate care in each client encounter and to make all clients feel safe in a hospital environment. The idea behind this is that, if a client feels safe, the client will come back for treatment when they get sick. If he/she comes back for a cure, that’s one less burden of a sick person in the society. If all sick people would come back, then that’s a whole lot of people becoming well and productive again. If a lot of people stays healthy, then, that will sum up to a productive society. Reading the news today made me angry. While we, health workers are taught to recognize, understand and respect the diversity in worldviews of our patients, can’t we not ask the same from other people? The torture and interrogation of the 43 health workers by the AFP are an atrocious crime, not only against them, but also against the people they serve. The AFP is disrupting the health care provided to our impoverished communities by the few remaining health workers who chose to stay and live a life of sacrifice. Putting 43 skilled health workers in prison is like killing more than 43 sick patients whose lives they could have saved had they been free to treat people. That is an understatement, of course, because we know very well that in public health nursing alone, one nurse sees more than a hundred patients everyday.

This is a call to all concerned health workers. Let us unite and fight for the rights of our colleagues. By fighting for their rights, we are also protecting the rights of our patients. And to those community health workers, nurses and doctors who chose who stay and serve our countrymen, I salute all of you. Monina Hernandez Gesmundo Auckland, New Zealand