People go to Boracay to relax but a Filipino celebrity makeup artist experienced the opposite in her recent visit.
Makeup artist Barbi Chan yesterday wrote a now viral Facebook post where she complained about the lack of medical facilities in Boracay after her daughter had a health scare while they were vacationing on the island.
Chan’s post has been shared more than 1,700 times.
In a phone interview with Coconuts Manila, Chan said they had just arrived on the island for a family reunion when her daughter hit her head on a cupboard on Dec. 29.
The next day, her daughter had fever and started vomiting incessantly.
“We started to become worried because she hit her head on that cupboard and we were afraid she had a concussion,” Chan recalled. “We were staying at Fairways & Bluewater and the nurse there told us to bring her to the doctor because her condition wasn’t getting better.”
Chan and her husband brought their daughter to Boracay Alert Medical Clinic, one of the only two clinics in town, which they later learned doesn’t have the adequate equipment to determine their daughter’s illness.
“At the clinic, they did everything they could but it had nothing. ‘Do you have this? None. How about this? None,'” Chan said.
She added: “My child was having convulsions but they (nurse and doctor) were discussing what they were supposed to do.”
The medical professionals could only manage to give the child sponge baths to control her fever.
“It was a non-stop sponge bath. They didn’t even have a real sponge. They used a cloth torn from one of my daughter’s clothes and we used that for the baths. The pail that we used to gather the water was even used for other purposes. They were panicking and they took whatever was available,” she said.
Chan also lamented that it was expensive to airlift her daughter out of Boracay and into Manila, which their insurance company ended up paying PHP500,000 (US$ 9,514) for.
“I’ve been told that foreigners have been airlifted out of Boracay because there wasn’t a proper hospital in the island. Someone also told us, ‘You’re lucky because you have insurance.'” she said.
“[People] get a sprain or get into accidents and they don’t have the facilities to treat it. What if you don’t have insurance? They want to attract tourists but they’re not taking care of people there. What’s gonna happen [to them]?”
Chan said that authorities should have thought of setting up a mobile ambulance or a clinic with adequate facilities when they rehabilitated Boracay.
The island was rehabilitated and closed off from tourists from April to early October 2018 after President Rodrigo Duterte called it a “cesspool.”
“They had so much money when they rehabilitated Boracay. How could they have forgotten to include [a clinic or hospital] with enough medical facilities?” she asked.
Chan suggested that the local government could ask contributions from businesses to set up a modern clinic on the island if they didn’t have enough funds.
“There’s so much money [being brought in by tourists] and we want to be the number one tourist destination. Why don’t they ask for contributions from hotels so that they could build these medical facilities?”
She also complained about the condition of the roads. “The beach is so nice. But the roads have been dug out and destroyed. The traffic was so bad because the holes weren’t repaired. You can actually see the sewage because of these holes.
“It’s too bad I wasn’t able to take photos. All they did was all superficial beautification.”
They later found out that her daughter had influenza. She has now fully recovered after staying in a hospital in Metro Manila.
The experience left Chan with one valuable lesson.
“I have learned my lesson. Before I travel to any island, I would check if there’s a hospital there. What we went through was the worst experience of any parent.”
Chan’s friends and followers were sympathetic. Mary Jean wrote that she’s keeping Chan’s daughter in her prayers.
Zawawi Ahamad wrote that at least Chan and her family had resources and that he feels sorry for those who visit Boracay on shoe-string budgets.
Felix Fausto Jr. said that the experience shows that it’s “not always fun” in Boracay.
Have you ever had a health scare in Boracay or any of the country’s other islands? Leave a comment below or tweet to @CoconutsManila.
