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Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Mercado: My little heroes
By Ram Mercado
WHILE the national leadership had spread the red carpet and feted our medalists in the recent SEA (Southeast Asian) Games - the fanfare focused on the heroes of the day - I was personally exultant over my own "heroes," unknown people who gave meaning to human life.
I spent the New Year's Day not in meditating on resolutions and the future, but in contemplating the heroic deeds of three persons.
Thelma Bernal Rassan, 35, married to a policeman assigned in war-torn Jolo, survived a firefight between a PNP contingent (where her husband belonged) and MNLF rebels. Owing to the couple's poverty, she let the wound heal without removing embedded bullets in her body.
Finding work in Saudi Arabia to support the family and to save money for a surgery when her job contract would have been finished, her employer discovered her medical condition. She was sent back to the Philippines before she realized her immediate dream for some savings.
She went home dejected and against her wishes. Two bullets from an armalite rifle were found in her back after a recent medical check-up.
With only the hope of saving enough to help raise her family, she endured throbbing pains in her back during the cold nights in Saudi. She barely earned enough to recover the money her family and kin spent to send her abroad.
There are people, no matter how lowly their position of responsibility, who would give up their lives to prove equal to their calling and people's expectation.
Edmundo Morelos, chairman of Barangay Isla in Valenzuela City, was killed by his own grandchildren who attacked him for giving succor to a neighbor whom the murderers tried to extort money from.
A village resident sought the help of Morelos when his two grandsons tried to extort money from the woman.
Known as a chieftain who upheld the law equally and above everyone in his barrio, his own relatives included, the old Morelos went to the house of his kin to confront them.
The extortionists' mother promised the old man that she would take care of the complainant. Soon after he left her house, Morelos was waylaid by his grandchildren who appeared from a dark alley. The two punched and kicked the grandfather who died of heart failure while being rushed to the hospital.
In an era when parents protect, shelter and coddle family members and relatives who are involved in shenanigans, the village chairman showed what a little heroic act can do to place duty paramount over any other consideration.
Morelos's sense of responsibility shone with more glitter than if the culprits he went after were ordinary thugs, and not of his own blood and flesh. It was not what he has taken up (courage and duty) than what he gave up (a cover-up for grandsons to save them) that made him a hero.
In London, the media (AFP) reported that a British-based Filipino mother who found she had cancer after becoming pregnant "sacrificed her life for her unborn baby by refusing an abortion and chemotherapy."
A devout Catholic, Bernadette Mimura, refused a life-saving treatment because she knew that the process would kill the child.
"Bernadette said the most important thing was the birth of her baby and she would not to anything to harm him," the news report said.
"There was no way she would have it (abortion). She had to judge which life was more important and she just prayed there would be a cure for cancer," Rev. Fr. Alan Sherian reported.
The woman's body has yet to be sent back to the Philippines for burial. The priest is raising an amount for that purpose and to help her other three children from a first marriage.
The infant, now four years old, was born premature, but fit and healthy. The Catholic mother has affirmed traditional family values, which are now found "irrelevant" in modern life. It was a blow against abortion, a defense of human life, and a spectacular tribute to the primacy of the right to be born.
A Happy New Year to all (not necessarily a prosperous one)!
(January 4, 2006 issue)
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