The Truth about the Calgary Nurse

The Propaganda

The following websites have posted about the mysterious nurse from Canada.

1. When In Manila
2. Ako Si Pilosopong Tasyo 
3. Pinoy Trending News
4. CoolBuster
5. JamesParmis.Net
6. TahoNews 
7. Danified
8. Trending News Portal

This “Calgary Nurse” compared the leadership styles of Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte and former DILG secretary Mar Roxas in the aftermath of typhoon Yolanda. She claims to have personally witnessed the event.

In the post’s compelling narrative, the writer relates the following:

Mar Roxas [just] stayed in his tent and just give[s] orders.

He just sit[s] there, eat[s] his delicious meal, go[es] out and act[s] helpful whenever there is media and camera.

I like that old guy [referring to Mayor Duterte], he’s really something. x x x

All of this emanated from a Facebook post of a Duterte fanpage on Facebook (March 13). It was subsequently republished by a person named Jesame Mendosa (March 14) and has since been shared thousands of times. It has now probably reached millions in the realm of social media.

It must be stressed that this story is full of lies.

We say lies because we can show proof that this was written to deceive rather than to inform.

We can start with the most obvious lie.

The Picture

The author of the Facebook post claimed to be a staff nurse working in Calgary, Canada.

The real photo however belongs to a nurse working in Minot, North Dakota. The screenshot below demonstrates the vileness of Mayor Duterte’s propaganda machine.

Photo from the Dickinson Press Website

We apologize for dragging an innocent bystander to this political battleground. She probably has no inkling that her edited photo is being maliciously used. And the picture was edited, mind you. You can see this by comparing the color of the doors, the lighting and the uniform.

This site was made precisely to fight the trolls with truth. The trolls do not care if they hurt someone, if they destroy lives, so long as they are able to lie effectively. Obviously, as supporters of Mar we choose to act differently. So to Ms. Quinit, if you are reading this, we apologize for posting your photo without your permission. The need for it is urgent.

Mar’s “Tent”

If you think that the picture is all that’s lacking and that the “nurse’s story” still really is true, then allow us to convince you otherwise.

Some of our volunteers were present during and after the storm. Some of them went to look for the Secretary fearing that he was injured or worse. In the morning of Nov. 9, 2013, they found his staff in the headquarters of the PNP. Apparently, right after the storm made landfall, he was already directing the efforts of the national gov’t.

Mar had no tent of his own. He had no room. In fact, his room in the hotel where he staying in was washed away by the storm. If he did not decide to wake up 2 hours before the intended meeting time of the national disaster task force, this would be a very different narrative.

The “tent” belonged to the PNP. It was really just a piece of cloth that the policemen attached to the front entrance of the building for a little bit of shade. And this was the headquarters of the national gov’t relief operations. It was big enough to accommodate one large table and little else.

The funny part is that he was rarely in the tent.

He was surveying the damage, coordinating the national gov’t relief efforts, getting updates from municipal mayors who were in dire need, clearing major roads to enable the bringing in of relief goods, leading teams in body retrieval, and (this last bit will shock you), he was also trying to look for food.

Food, not for himself, but to feed maybe 70 people managing the disaster from PNP headquarters.

Mar’s “Delicious Food”

What the “Calgary nurse” forgot to mention, in her little fairytale of praise for Mayor Duterte, was that there was no food, how much more food that was “delicious.”

Why was food a problem?

Looting had taken place as early as day zero. There was no food being sold anywhere. One of our volunteers described the situation like this:

Two days after the storm, I saw one policeman open up a pack of Skyflakes in the middle of the afternoon. He was chewing it slowly. Some of his fellow policemen saw this and approached him. He ended up dividing one pack of Skyflakes for six men. There was a person wildly chanting “ibuprofen” in the the background. People didn’t care about money. Money wasn’t important. Food was. Food and medicine.

The goods in the city proper’s groceries were no longer edible since the storm surge covered almost two floors. Canned goods were probably the only things that could be salvaged from the sudden flooding. These were being looted wherever you went.

What Mar did, aside from executing his other responsibilities with limited resources, was dispatch a remote team to look for restaurants which still had food stores. He told the team to buy the remaining goods (cooked, uncooked), regardless of how much this would cost, to be paid for from his own pocket. He’s fond of saying “an army marches on its stomach” and he applied these words in the post-apocalyptic world that was downtown Tacloban.

Despite the challenge of looking for food in a place and time where food was more valuable than gold, the dispatched team would eventually find different outlets which still had reserves to sell and/or the willingness to part with the same.  And you can verify this story with the owners of the following local establishments:

1. Giuseppe’s
2. Dream Cafe & Bakery
3. Village Chefs

The owners of Dream Cafe and Village Chefs, knowing that they were contributing to the national government’s relief efforts, gave their food away for free. When the team insisted that they accept a receipt so that Mar could reimburse the cost when things normalized, the owners refused.

So what Mar ate in headquarters during the first few days in the storm’s aftermath was the same food that was served to every single person there. There was no “delicious food”. There was just food. Not just for himself but for everyone working.

Conclusion

There is an orchestrated attempt to destroy Mar’s reputation online by means foul and false. To the millions who have been fooled, we hope that you can stand with us and correct the story with the truth.

Dare to be better than the trolls and their black propaganda this 2016.

To quote the man, “Ibalik natin ang Pilipinas sa Disenteng Pilipino.”

Update:

Our story here just got shared by the Facebook page Roxas-Robredo 2016!

We read some of the comments in the shared post and some of them are really good.

1. Pete Ilagan writes his own personal account of the gov’t coming right away.
2. Christoper Franco writes about his own analysis of Canadian relief efforts.