Last of two parts
FILIPINO caregiver Camille Jesalva saved herself and her 95-year-old employer from the Hamas terrorists, the group that controls Palestine, on Oct. 7, 2023. Their Kibbutz Nirim was near the Gaza border.
“I opened my wallet and told him to take everything I had, NIS1,500 ($370), just to save myself and Nitza,” Camille said. “I showed him the plane ticket and asked him just not to take that.” The terrorist then asked if there was more money in the house.
They quickly walked around the property, with the 31-year-old Camille, behind him. When he found nothing more, he took Camille’s smartphone and eventually left.
“It’s a miracle that I stayed alive,” she said. “I told my mother that I was going to die, and I asked her to send me a picture of my son because I felt that I wouldn’t get out of this alive.”
Camille vividly recalled that day. She had locked herself and her employer in the shelter. They spent several hours until help arrived. Having previously worked in Dubai, she understood that the people talking “very aggressively,” first outside the house and then inside, were talking in Arabic.
Suddenly, she found herself standing in front of the terrorists. “There were a lot of them, and I was sure they would kill us,” she recalled. “I stood up and said to one of them, ‘Hello sir.’ Then he asked me, ‘Where is the money?’”
“Nitza woke up and wanted to protest, and the terrorist started yelling at her,” she went on. “I was scared, I told her, ‘Nitza, please be quiet,’ and I looked at him. I saw that he was getting nervous, and I was even more worried. I told the terrorist, ‘Please, sir, she is already old and doesn’t understand anything. Please don’t do anything.’”
After the terrorists left, the two women remained, hugging each other, in the protected room. She smelled the burning of houses and heard the screaming of women and children outside. She just kept on hugging her old employer until the Israeli soldiers arrived.
Camille canceled her flight to the Philippines to remain with Hefetz. “I feel like I can’t leave her, like she’s my best friend,” she said. “She trusts me, and I trust her,” said Hefetz’s daughter, Yael Arieli, 74, who lives on Kibbutz Sha’ar Hagolan in the northern Jordan Valley. Camille had called her up that dreadful morning, “very stressed and scared.”
The body count
However, Mary Ann Velasquez de Vera of Batista, Pangasinan, was not so lucky. She died while trying to protect her old employer. She died from shrapnel caused by a bomb. She was guiding her old patient to a shelter when the blast came, throwing her against the wall and embedding shrapnel in her body and that of her employer.
The Department of Migrant Workers headed by Secretary Hans Leo Cacdac and the Philippine Embassy in Tel Aviv coordinated with Mary Ann’s husband, who also worked as a caregiver in Israel, to bring home her remains.
Also unlucky was Angelyn Aguirre, 32, who was killed by the Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on Oct. 7. She is survived by her husband, Nicolas, her parents William and Erlinda, seven siblings, and many nieces and nephews. Her remains were quickly repatriated back to the Philippines.
Angelyn got married in September 2022 and flew back to Israel just a few days later to resume her work. She cared for an elderly Israeli woman, Nira Ronen. She brought Nira to the bomb shelter, but the Hamas terrorists kicked open the door and sprayed them with bullets.
“In her last message, she told us that the gunmen had already arrived, and she was scared,” Wilma Bandong, Aguirre’s eldest sister, told a Philippine newspaper. “What happened to my sister was so painful.”
Another sister, Angenica, who also worked in Israel as a caregiver, told The Manila Times that Angelyn could have run to try and escape the attackers, “but she did not want to leave her employer.” She said Angelyn tried to close the door of the bomb shelter to prevent the gunmen from entering, “but they overpowered her.”
Mickey Barlev, who had employed Angelyn in the past to care for his late family member in Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, described her in a Facebook post as “the lovely Angie, an angel who came to the Holy Land to earn a living and support her family in the Philippines.” She also noted that Angelyn cared for her charges “with endless dedication.”
Nira Ronen’s daughter, Chen Stein, described Angelyn as “a sensitive, gentle and devoted young woman who instilled a profound sense of security in our old mother, which our mother dearly needed.”
Angelyn had been working as a caregiver in Israel for seven years and was planning on returning to the Philippines for good at the end of 2023. She was planning to have children and start her own family. She was described as “smart.” She even learned to speak Hebrew to communicate easily with her Israeli patient. It was heartbreaking to learn that she lived with her husband, Nicolas, for only one week after their wedding, and that they were planning to start a family by next year.
Her mother, Erlinda, tearfully told the Philippine News Agency that her daughter was sweet and caring: “She would always video call us. Sometimes, she would talk to us from morning till night time. We would just let her talk as long as our cameras are open.”
But those calls will no longer come from a country with a time difference of five hours from us, a country in conflict with its neighbors. I have talked to other caregivers and hotel workers in Israel, whom I’ve met in a Catholic Church, on the streets, the parks and the hotels. All of them had either finished college or had at least two years of college education.
They are happy with the equitable working conditions and the fact that their employers treat them with kindness. When I asked if they would like to come back to the Philippines, the common sentiment was: “Why would we return to a country where our politicians steal from us blind? As we speak now, Metro Manila and Central Luzon are deep in water because the flood control projects — which were already certified as finished — were not there. We’d rather endure the rockets here, since they now only come so rarely. But our politicians, they steal from us every day. We can’t endure anymore the lack of opportunities and the sheer poverty.”
Touché.
Danton Remoto’s books are available at Fully Booked, National Bookstore, Central Books, Shopee and Lazada; Kinokuniya in Asia; and Amazon globally.