Teenage first responders come to the rescue in distressed QC communities

Marie Joyce Ann Samus smiles whenever she recalls how she was able to help a man who had one drink too many extricate his arm that got stuck in a narrow canal while trying to recover his dentures.

The 15-year-old student of North Fairview High School knew that getting him out of that predicament was a challenge, even though she was already a trained junior rescuer.

Although she knew what to do, Samus said she hesitated about coming to his rescue.

“I asked  my father to tell the bystanders not to move him until the responders come because it would be too dangerous. After all, they may not listen to a kid like me,” she said.

Paramedics soon arrived on the scene and freed the man.

Samus is just one of 2,941 students who underwent a seminar for junior rescuers given to students of Quezon City’s public schools.

A project of the city government’s Department of Public Order and Safety (DPOS), the teenaged rescuers who were taught how to give first aid and respond to calamities such as earthquakes, fires and floods, were trained to be first responders to emergencies in their communities.

It’s better to be prepared than to be caught off-guard, like during the floods brought by Tropical Storm “Ondoy” in 2009, DPOS chief Elmo San Diego said.

“Our communities need a better disaster management program. They can become first responders instead of waiting  for rescue teams to come to them,” he said.

The idea of training junior responders and their counterparts among barangay watchmen came about in the aftermath of Ondoy, when floods submerged most of Metro Manila without warning.

DPOS rescuers were unable to respond to calls for help from Barangay San Vicente, only a few kilometers away from Quezon City Hall.

In late 2011, the city government pushed through with its plan to train students in basic first aid and disaster response skills.

“They are the first ones on the scene because they are residents of these communities themselves. They can also alert us to emergencies faster,” San Diego said.

So far, students from 13 public schools have attended the seminar, which includes training on first aid, standard responses during earthquakes, landslides, floods and fires and simple extraction of a victim from a difficult situation.

Junior rescuers who have completed the program will act as the DPOS’s “eyes and ears,” watching out for emergencies, as well as acting as first responders in time of disasters.

“What they know is very basic, but we hope that with the necessary knowledge,  they can be of better service to their communities,” San Diego added.

Noel Lansang, a special operations officer who supervised the training, said refresher courses are conducted every now and then to make sure that the students remember the skills they have learned.

He stressed, however, that the students are dissuaded from carrying out perilous water rescue operations during flashfloods and other similar situations.

“We don’t want them to do something as dangerous as that. We don’t want the junior responders to become victims themselves. We want them to be our partners,” Lansang said.

Such was the case of Samus, who alerted the DPOS to the emergency in her neighborhood in Fairview on Dec. 19, 2011.

The teenager was tending to her parents’s sari-sari (variety) store that evening when she saw a drunken man throw up, and in the process, accidentally spit out his dentures into a canal.

“The man tried to reach for his dentures but his arm got stuck, so he just laid there while people milled around him,” the high school student said, recalling that neighbors tried to lubricate the arm with soap but failed to set him free.

After she texted the DPOS, paramedics arrived five minutes later to pull out the victim, still drunk but with his dentures now firmly in his grip.

Maria Anna Morecho, Samus’s classmate, said learning how to do cardio-pulmonary resuscitation and carrying a victim the right way  comes in handy when the need arises.

Samus, for her part, expressed willingness not just to act the part of a rescuer, but to teach others how to be a  lifesaver as well.

“At a young age, we can be of service if a calamity arises. And we can share our knowledge with our classmates too,” she said.