2016 Ramon Magsaysay Awards: Vientiane Rescue: Laos’ saviors of the street

MANILA, Philippines – Like the Good Samaritan, Vientiane Rescue cannot stand idly by and watch people die.

It was in 2007 when a small team of volunteers in the Foundation for Assisting Poor People of Lao People’s Democratic Republic used a donated ambulance to form “Rescue Vientiane Capital” to provide first-aid service on the city’s roads, but only on weekends.

In 2010, Sebastian Perret, a Frenchman living in Laos and a trained paramedic and firefighter, aghast at how victims of road accidents are left to die because of the utter lack of emergency assistance, joined the foundation as a volunteer.

Shortly thereafter, Perret, Laotians Phaichi Konepathoum and five other 15-year-olds who were also volunteers, established “Vientiane Rescue” (VR) that would operate a free ambulance service on a 24/7 basis despite the absence of equipment, sponsors and formal training.

The group is one of the recipients of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award, which honors greatness of spirit and transformative leadership in Asia.

In electing VR to receive the award, the board of trustees recognized its heroic work in saving Laotian lives at a time and place of great need, under the most deprived of circumstances, inspiring through their passionate humanitarianism a similar generosity of spirit in many others.

Just how significant has the group become to deserve the recognition?

The streets of Vientiane, capital city of Laos, have virtually turned anarchic as the country began to prosper. The city, with a population of 800,000, lacks road safety education, strict licensing requirements and traffic management, thus endangering the lives of people.

Compounded by the absence of emergency rescue services, the road fatality rate in Laos is one of the worst in Asia and the Asian Development Bank has cited road use management as a priority need that the country must address.

In an interview by littlelaosontheprairie that appeared online on Oct. 27, 2015, Perret said “it was really very hard” in the beginning as “we always arrived too late, under skilled, without adequate first aid equipment and sometimes with an empty tank.”

“Little by little, I started to improve my Lao vocabulary and gave proper first aid training to the team. We got donations for gas, equipment and help for us started to arrive. Today, we have 200 volunteers across (four) offices in Vientiane to be able to get to the place of accident within three to seven minutes,” Perret said.

Driven by pure humanitarianism, VR volunteers, composed mostly of students and poor Laotians, worked 20 to 168 hours a week out of the house of one volunteer when they were starting and later rented a bungalow; the volunteers slept on roadsides on their night shifts, often subsisting on nothing but instant noodles and sometimes unable to respond to calls for help because their ambulance had run out of gas.

“There’s only one official emergency service in Vientiane: the fire department. Fire fighters usually arrive 40 minutes after the start of the fire, while we can get there in less than 10 minutes. This is a way for us to make a difference. Hospital ambulances charge patients, and they don’t do roadside accidents,” Perret said in the interview by littlelaosontheprairie.

“There’s also a Vientiane municipality ambulance paying service, with brand new vehicles donated by (non-government organizations) and international aid, but they lack equipment and training. For fires, people help each other. But for road accidents, people just watch and usually wait for us to come. There’s no first aid knowledge among the population that could be seen as a public health issue. I think people are scared to do it wrong,” Perret shared.

Perseverance and passion

Through sheer perseverance and the passion to help, the ragtag group of volunteers improved and professionalized its services, acquired more equipment and expanded the range of its work.

Perret produced a basic first aid manual and accessed paramedic training for volunteers with the help of Thai partners. Gradually, the group’s heroic work attracted more volunteers and some assistance from local and foreign donors.

At first, Perret said they were supposed to be just an ambulance service and it did not really make sense to start scuba diving, fire and animal rescue.

But as city residents got word of the group’s uniquely dedicated and free service, they started call outs for any kind of life threatening situation.

“We now are a ‘I don’t know what to do’ service. When people are in dismay, they just call us. And our image is our only level of wealth. We can’t afford to miss one emergency, because people trust us. We have to be able to answer any kind of emergency,” Perret said.

“People start to respect our work and recognize it. We want Lao people to understand that our service is only staffed with locals. There (are) no foreigners, no international organizations and no institutions behind us. It’s just locals for locals. We want to show them that it is possible to be different, to see others as part of the same family, a human being family, and to care about each other,” Perret said.

Today, VR has one-truck firefighting unit, a one-boat scuba rescue team, Laos’ first; a mini-van converted into the country’s first emergency medical service (EMS) ambulance, seven other ambulances and three more base stations – two of which were made out of shipping containers.

Its uniformed volunteers attend to a free 24-hour hotline that responds to 15 to 30 accidents a day. In 2015 alone, VR responded to 5,760 road accidents and between 2011 and 2015, the group has helped save as many as 10,000 lives.

When asked about his future plans, Perret was quoted as saying in a Nov. 22, 2015 article that appeared on the website, War is Boring: “I do love and respect these volunteers so much.”

“We are a family, we do care for and love each other. It would be very hard for me to leave. I had a nice life in France but here I know we can make a difference and this give our lives, my life, a sense of meaning,” Perret said.

“They’re the best people I’ve met in my life… so often they risk their lives to save people they don’t even know. We do not make miracles everyday but sometimes we do and that’s amazing,” Perret said.