‘I ‘D NEVER HEARD OF WALES’
20 years on, the Filipino nurses who came to town
TWENTY years ago many Filipino nurses came to West Wales to fill vacancies at hospitals in Carmarthenshire and further afield.
Over the years a strong Filipino community has rooted itself in the area and more than 80% of those nurses that came here have settled, started families and are happily part of society.
This month marks two decades since they arrived and made their mark on healthcare locally, none more so than over the past year in the face of the biggest health crisis in a century: the coronavirus pandemic.
There are about 200,000 Filipinos in the UK, and 18,500 of them are in the NHS, according to House of Commons library data from 2019.
Among them is intensive care charge nurse Jefferson De Vera, 47, who lives in Pemberton Park, Llanelli, with his wife Rowena and their three daughters Jenna, 17, Ella, 13, and Pauline, 10.
Jefferson has been on the frontline of the pandemic since the first Covid case at the town’s Prince Philip Hospital in March last year.
He said it had been the “most difficult year of his career” and was struck down with the virus himself. He isolated at home while he fought it.
But just how did young nurses find themselves moving more than halfway across the globe to work in a town, county and country that they hadn’t even heard of?
Jefferson’s story starts while at home in the Philippines on a month-long holiday in 2001 and he spotted a small advert in an alleyway in Manila.
He lived in Tarlac, a province located in the Central Luzon region of the Philippines.
Jefferson said: “I was working in intensive care at a big military hospital in Saudi Arabia and was on holiday back home when I saw a recruitment advert for nurses needed in the UK. It mentioned London and so I thought, ‘That’s where I want to go’.”
He resigned his post in Saudi Arabia and flew to Heathrow Airport where a bus filled with fellow Filipino medics set off for what he thought was a part of London.
Looking back now, Jefferson can laugh at what happened: “The bus journey was getting longer and longer and I asked where we were going and the reply was Carmarthenshire.
“So I asked, ‘What part of London is that?’ ‘It’s not in London,’ they said, ‘we are going to Wales’.
“I had never heard of Wales as in the Philippines growing up I just didn’t know, all I knew was England.” He added: “Four hours later we arrived in Llanelli and others also went on to Carmarthen to Glangwili Hospital.
“My daughters are all in education here, so at one time where I may have planned to return home to the Philippines, now I think Llanelli is my home, it’s home for my daughters and I have dual citizenship.”
No-one could have imagined as we approached the tail end of 2019 what was around the corner.
As 2020 started the coronavirus swept across the world and arrived on our shores in February, and by March we were plunged into the nightmare.
For medics such as Jefferson, it was to be the most testing time of his career.
We were all made to feel very welcome and still do to this day Jefferson De Vera