A doctor's life: Jobless

About six months before I was terminated from work at MVC I made multiple copies of my CV and applied personally for a job at companies and agencies including the Department of Health. The response was very promising, because there were a lot of vacancies. Fifteen doctors were needed at one agency, two doctors in a fruit export company, and some district hospitals had vacancies. What baffled me as the weeks dragged on into months, was that in spite of the need there was not a single reply to my letters and I was starting to wonder where in the world did I fall short in my credentials and application. As I stepped out of the campus of MVC for the last time, I was jobless, and the realization hit me on the face like a blast of icy wind, and yet this was the sweet air of freedom from bondage to a set of unbiblical doctrines of an 18th century prophetess.

My wife was jobless too. The taunts and stares in her office as the Human Relations Director were too stressful for her and she resigned about a year before I was terminated. We took stock of our situation and intensified my efforts in job-hunting. Then from out of nowhere an invitation to be a doctor to the mountain tribes came. It was a non-paying job offered by the Tribal Missions Foundation Inc. with headquarters in Mintal Tugbok. I jumped at the opportunity not realizing that this would be the first among the many trips that God would take me out to the wilderness to unlearn my old law-based beliefs and plant me firmly in His grace, and I saw afterwards that it was necessary just like Moses' sojourn in the land of Median. 

This trip would take me with a team to the shallow waters high up in the mountains of Bukidnon, where the grand Davao river is born, and hurl me down the white-water rapids on a flimsy bamboo raft with medicines and provisions to visit underserved villages along the banks that were the hotbed of revolt and dissension, which bred the New People's Army (NPA).

We spent three days on the rafts, slept in villages at night and ate along the banks of the river. It was my first time to stay in a village with the NPA cadres and it was not easy to trust them like it was not easy for them to trust me right away, but in a while I was relaxed and busy administering to their medical needs. On another occasion I was invited to join a group of missionary interns for a weeklong trip to the Marilog mountains where we lived with the matigsalug and learned their ways. Another trip to the villages of the Maranao tribes in Matanog, Barira and Balabagan - all in the province of Lanao del Sur, where I got the chance to sleep in a mosque with the MILF rebels culminated my exposure to the "least of these brethren" that Jesus alluded to in his sermon in Matthew 25. These trips stripped off all my intellectual pride and taught me about humility and patience as God's servant to the poorest of the poor.

As if that was not enough, we moved to Thailand and God sent me to Ralf who heads an NGO that administers to the mountain tribes and the sea gypsies, where my exposure to a different people with a different language increased greatly my knowledge about God's kingdom. Before the move to Thailand I was employed to teach for one summer at Davao Doctors College the subject Microbiology for nurses. This was a very refreshing break from the wilderness exposure for me.

In God's own wisdom and timing, my joblessness came to an abrupt end with an offer at a position that got me back on my feet financially and opened my eyes to another aspect of the medical world that was the opposite of God's kingdom. I realized there and then that God not only made me jobless to learn about His kingdom, but also did it to give me a firm foundation to be able to weather the lures that this world would dangle before my eyes.

The world of cosmetic surgery, sex change and vanity will come next.