Doctor brings healing to children of storm

EVEN WHILE BATTLING CANCER

- — Caecent No-ot Magsumbol/LPM

Even in the face of her own illness, Dr. Arlyn Jawad Jumao-as has never turned away from suffering, especially when it involves children.

At 58, the Basilan-based physician is undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer, a diagnosis that came as a shock to her family and colleagues, especially since she has never smoked.

Yet when Typhoon Tino battered Cebu and left hundreds of families displaced, Jumao-as chose not to rest. She chose to respond.

Her advocacy for the “children of war” in Mindanao—those wounded, orphaned, or traumatized by decades of armed conflict—has long defined her medical practice.

As a young doctor in Lamitan City back then, she treated toddlers with gunshot wounds, children maimed by explosives, and teenagers bearing the invisible scars of trauma.

Many had been caught in the crossfire between government troops and Moro rebels, or in the indiscriminate offensives of terrorist groups. Some did not survive.

Those who did often faced lifelong disabilities and psychological trauma.

Jumao-as herself lost her father to a landmine planted by Moro rebels in their hometown of Santa Clara.

That personal loss, and the countless lives she tried to save in her clinic, shaped her belief that no child should suffer alone.