Kanlungan Honors Unsung Health Care Heroes
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Kanlungan gives homage to the Filipina legacy as healer. (Original painting by Iris Boncales-Strauss)
Rare, if ever, is the salutation given to a sector likewise sworn to serve the public by saving lives and also identifiable by their regulation garments. They, too, confront formidable adversaries, this current one unseen but malevolent beyond doubt.
Since 2020, health care professionals have been deployed to a battlefield without borders. The dreaded coronavirus has sickened millions around the world and, at press time, has killed over 452,000 in less than a year in the United States alone, surpassing the toll on its citizens in any war fought by Americans.
Many of the health care professionals who have died did so in the line of duty, at patients' bedsides. For forging ahead into harm's way, they receive nothing but an unofficial number before fading into oblivion, a sad statistic of Covid-19. No Medal of Honor, no flag, no wall to remember their sacrifice.
Jollene Levid and her team would not stand for what some might call an oversight and what others might see as cold-hearted apathy.
United Teachers Los Angeles organizer Jollene Levid wants health care workers of PH ancestry recognized for their sacrifice.
Honor and Comfort
Last spring, the Los Angeles-based union organizer decided to end the indifference to the mounting deaths of front-liners of Filipino descent worldwide, who have perished confronting the pandemic.
She and her team launched "Kanlungan," a website dedicated to those who lost their lives, ironically, while helping others survive the illness. Filipino for "shelter" or "refuge," Kanlungan also comforts the loved ones of the departed.
Levid herself is among the grieving multitude. In March, Covid-19 claimed her "Tita" Nilda Ronquillo and her "Tita" Rosary Castro-Olega, both registered nurses and among the first to die from illness caused by the coronavirus. Though unrelated by blood, they gained the title of respect from Levid as bosom friends of her mother, Nora Levid, also an RN.
Aurora borealis awes Nilda Ronquillo in one of her many trips before March 2020.
Her aunts "passed away without being named for weeks," Levid aired her sentiments last summer in an interview with Leila Fadel of NPR.
"As the days went on, we noticed that a lot of the health care workers (of Filipinx descent were dying)...We were unable to identify them. And so (a group of us) got together. And we started basically documenting everything we could find."
Ninotchka Rosca
Grace Regullano
Cheryl Zarate (left) and Iris Boncales-Strauss
Cherisse Yanit Nadal
AF3IRM leaders Ninotchka Rosca, Grace Regullano, Cheryl Zarate, Iris Boncales-Strauss, Cherisse Yanit Nadal and Charlene Sayo (above left with Iris Boncales-Strauss), make up the Kanlungan team with Jollene Levid and Cy.
Kanlungan.net emerged as a "data wall and digital memorial to the transnational people of Philippine ancestry who make up a huge sector of the global health care system," the site describes itself. "This is to remember them as human beings, not simply as a labor percentage, a disease statistic, or an immigration number."
The choice of platform is intentional: "Since the Internet is forever, we hope that Kanlungan will keep reminding the world of the skills, dedication, and self-sacrifice demanded of health care workers (so} humanity may be healed."
The home page presents a mystical image of a female cupping Earth in her hands, illustrating the tradition of Philippine women as healers long before the arrival of the conquistadors.
"To heal was to be attuned with the primal creative force of the universe; it was sacred calling," the introduction digs down to the root of the influx of Filipino health care workers around the world.
The project educates. A section focuses on the push and pull of PH nurses as far back as 1898, when the "United States officially began their military occupation" of the archipelago.
For context, a world map shows where Covid-19 has claimed health care workers of Philippine ancestry. As of February 12, the site charts 170 fatalities in the United States, 54 in the United Kingdom, 43 in the Philippines, 4 each in the United Arab Emirates and Canada, 2 in Saudi Arabia, and 1 each in the Bahamas, Kuwait and Guam.
They are more than data on a dashboard.
Full of Life
The fallen workers come alive in Kanlungan’s Tribute section. Some burst in the widest smiles, others observe professional restraint. There are studio shots; party snaps; poses in PPE on the job, perhaps between breaks. Some are dashing in tuxes, others dazzling in satin tops. They may be with a loved one, on a trip abroad. Hopeful. Full of life.
Chances are the site visitor will find a familiar name, if not a face. Viewing each of the 201 (to date) pictures prompts a silent prayer, for peace and of thanks.
Checking the site for the first time touched 20-year nurse practitioner Heather Zahiri from San Francisco, who has five RN cousins and several technologists and doctors in the family. She found Kanlungan a "testimony to the resilience, strong work ethic and commitment of Filipinos around the globe in service of the health and wellbeing of the collective."
While lauding health care workers, Kanlungan also calls out Philippine authorities, challenging labor policies of the government.
"Healing remains a duty and a commitment for millions of medical workers from the Philippines and of Philippine ancestry flung to just about every continent of the world under the labor export policy of the Philippine government, often to work in unsafe and discriminatory conditions as well as being grossly underpaid," the team assigns accountability. "How neglectful of its own irreplaceable medical skills the Philippines can be is seen in the medical workforce's 16% share of Covid-19 infection within its own territory when the contagion broke out."
A reprint of the New York Times story by freelance journalist Aurora Almendral bolsters Kanlungan's assertion of the overrepresentation of Filipinos in health care: 1 in 5 nurses in California; 1 in 4 health care workers in New York/New Jersey; 34.4% of foreign-trained nurses just in the US.
"Nurses from the Philippines and other developing countries have long made up for shortages in wealthier Western nations. They now find themselves risking their lives on the front lines of a pandemic, thousands of miles from home," Almendral writes.
Levid reiterates her dismay over the statistics to Positively Filipino:
"We have consistently been appalled at the disproportionate deaths of Filipino health care workers in the US! Almost triple of what we can find in the Philippines itself! Also -- UK has more Filipino health care COVID deaths than the Philippines."
Transnational Action
"We" are the Kanlungan team composed of Ninotchka Rosca, Cheryl Zarate, Iris Boncales-Strauss, Cherisse Yanit Nadal, Grace Regullano, Charlene Sayo and Cy, who constructed the website. Together they are AF3IRM, self-identified as a grass-roots organization "engaged in "transnational feminist, anti-imperialist activism and dedicated to the fight against oppression in all its forms." It has chapters in Hawaii, Los Angeles, New York City, Puerto Rico, Chicago, San Diego, Las Vegas, Twin Cities, Seattle/Pacific Northwest, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Before 2010, the organization was known as GABNet, focused on women's issues in the Philippines.
Nora Bernabe Levid (second from left) and her fellow RNs from St. Paul's College Manila were devastated by the sudden passing of their classmate Nilda Ronquillo (right).
Then as now, the organization takes a militant stance for change, this time in the United States, "as imported or exploited labor or children/descendants of such; and as women of distinct ethnic and cultural minorities."
The all-volunteer group invested a few hundred dollars to launch the site, Levid tells PF. The wife of LA public school teacher Mark Ramos and mother of their five-year-old son “virtually” greets each morning and ends the day scouring sources. The ability to discern fact from falsehood is ingrained in the Los Angeles native, who attended Medical Magnet High School and UC Irvine for her undergrad then USC for her master's in Social Work.
She has MSW suffixed to her name, but Levid found her calling in union organizing after an internship with the UCLA Labor Center. She began full-time organizing in LA public hospitals for the doctors' union.
Having an RN for a mother and several kin in the same profession carved a career path for Levid, but not as expected.
"I was told at a young age to NOT follow in my mother's footsteps," she disclosed. She said her mother "told me nurses were overworked and undervalued, and encouraged me to do something that I really loved."
Commitment Over Fear
Last year, Levid’s mom, Nora Levid, worked in her hospital's outpatient clinic where pre-surgery patients were tested for Covid-19, Ground Zero for potential contagion in the facility. Like her colleagues, Nora's pledge to care for those committed to her care outweighed her fear of the virus. Every job comes with risks, but scant knowledge of the virus had eroded veteran health care workers’ confidence.
Nora fulfilled her oath until December when she retired after 40 years on the front lines.
The former Nora Bernabe earned her Nursing degree at St. Paul's College in Manila. She and five classmates were recruited by a nursing director from a hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, where they began their careers in 1977. Two years later they relocated to Southern California to be closer to relatives and sunshine.
The classmates remained close through their many milestones. One of them, Nilda Ronquillo, stayed single. She enjoyed travel and last year visited Australia. She returned to Los Angeles in March less than exhilarated but thought the discomfort would pass. It persisted and prodded her to contact a nephew in San Francisco, when she took a turn for the worst, said Levid. The nepheww called 911, but by then Nilda was beyond recovery. Covid-19 took her life on March 23.
Nora Levid was mourning her classmate's unexpected passing when she learned that Rosary Castro-Olega, another seasoned colleague, had tested positive for Covid-19 and required a ventilator. Levid could not envision the Los Angeles native motionless, attached to tubes. She said Castro-Olega was the life of the party, the one who would initiate the dancing and karaoke.
Ever smiling Rosary Castro-Olega was always the life of the party, friends concur.
Castro-Olega got her BS in Nursing at the University of San Francisco after graduating from Franklin High School in 1974. She had retired in 2017 but, according to Levid, was a workaholic who took part-time shifts, in-demand as hospitals overflowed with the ailing.
Rosary 's twin sister and fellow RN had flown in from Seattle to celebrate their birthday together. Rosary wasn't feeling quite herself but got tested only when a daughter had to be rushed to the emergency department for an accident. She tested positive. Her life ended on March 27, leaving a bereft husband and three daughters -- one a nurse and the two a set of twins.
Nora said she was amazed but not surprised, when she first heard of daughter Jollene's plan. After all it was Jollene who had initiated efforts to include Filipino as a foreign language class now offered at UC Irvine, she said.
"When she told me about Kanlungan, I was so proud that she could do this with her fulltime job while watching over her son at remote class. She just keeps going."
Thanks to her daughter and her team, Nora's beloved sisters in the profession are enshrined in perpetuity.
Kanlungan welcomes visitors to submit stories to recognize health care workers who have died in the pandemic or donate to help maintain the site.
All photos courtesy of Nora and Jollene Levid
Cherie Querol Moreno
San Francisco Bay Area-based Cherie M. Querol Moreno learned empathy, courage and responsibility from her journalist parents. The Positively Filipino and Inquirer.net correspondent is executive editor of Philippine News Today.
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