TRIBUTE | Nursing our hearts

MANILA (MindaNews / 12 May 2026) — Her name is Shehana Ansaruddin. But I only found out after her passing. 

She was also Ambuh, an aristocratic form of Inah, mother, to which she responded no matter who called. I refered to her thus from the time we met a decade-some ago — in Basilan, where her daughter, today’s three-term Isabela de Basilan Mayor Sitti Djalia Turabin Hataman, gently drives the most transformative period experienced in this part of the Philippines.

The Mayor’s Ambuh — and ours — showed up daily in different circles, invariably busy with sundry folk seeking intense conversation, and with her extended family’s comings and goings. A grandmother many times over, she was also a professional working beyond retirement. 

But at no time did she trade on influence. This was stunning to me, because her immediate family included elected officials at local, regional, and national government. In fact, her work life coincided with her son-in-law, Mujiv Hataman, serving as Regional Governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. 

I was fascinated by this dimension of her rarity. Still, through the years of our scattered conversations, Ambuh showed through as something more than rare. And much more significant. 

She was a Tausug woman, married, one among hundreds of thousands from the BaSulTa region who took up co-parenting as co-breadwinner toil. She was already with child while still pursuing her degree. She became a registered nurse. Unfazed by risk, she spent seven years in Saudi Arabia when women overseas workers were essentially unprotected. 

Returning to Basilan, she then put in nearly three decades as a Department of Health rural health worker, serving the tiniest of islands around Basilan and further. Eventually becoming OIC Municipal Health Officer. Mayor Sitti writes in her eulogy that no doctor wanted this job. 

Ambuh was matter-of-fact in her story-telling. Her work typically involved taking small boat transport to the tiniest islands and walking through roadless terrain to deliver vaccines, reproductive health provisions, information and training, medicine, first response to illness. She delivered babies and signed death certificates, often alone, encompassing entire lifetimes in her care. 

This was during the decades of war, kidnappings, grisly deaths, anger, and despair from Basilan to Tawi-Tawi, and Central Mindanao, at the height of the Muslim war of secession from the republic. Ambuh was the worker at the very tip of the national health infrastructure, which is abstract except for the skin-to-skin contact of nurse and patient in villages of a few houses.

While working, Ambuh raised children possessed of great leadership and greater humility, I suppose because she just kept working this unrewarded work. Mayor Sitti recalls that her political work to push for the Reproductive Health Bill in Congress owed to seeing her mother help women who would otherwise not have the power to plan their families. 

Mayor Sitti recalls growing up “….in a home that served as a health center too.” Their mother met “…patients in the house, would even let them stay with us for days when needed. One time from school I had to rush to pay the electricity bill because we got disconnected and that would spoil the vaccines in our ref, na mas marami pa po kesa pagkain namin.” (“…which were more than our food”)

Ambuh was invisible beyond the thousands she helped in places that were only vaguely part of the republic, outside the national imagination, consigned to exist for decades under the blanket term “war zone.” She remained invisible outside her family, who had to explicitly understand a parent who was driven by nursing itself, as profession and personality.  

Her family got used to her carrying on, without drama, with work that allowed her big heart the expansiveness it apparently needed to exist. She didn’t even need to articulate a reason why she kept on. Even when I probed the character of her drive, she didn’t even think it was a drive. 

Every time I caught her relaxed in-between her everyday to’s-and fro’s, she’d recall for me details of her sorties. All of it seemed extreme to me. She reached people who were but for her visits unreached by government delivery service. And she herself was hardly recognized by government; salary sometimes delayed. 

I have few regrets in my own life, but one of them is not having recorded our conversations. So I keep her in my heart, a mother to me, I decide, sharing her with Mayor Sitti and siblings. 

Ambuh is so special because of the simplicity and power of her essentially undocumented work. But: doubtless there are others like her. Those who care for the rest of us and are never recognized.

As overwhelmed as I am — and I am in tears from taking measure of the privilege of knowing Ambuh — I check myself. Recollection of Ambuh must be acknowledgement of her in the plural: she is singular, but she is also all other unremarked health workers who are unfazed by anonymity.

Postscript: Only a few weeks before her death, Ambuh figured in a capsized boat incident in an internal sea crossing. She almost drowned. 

(Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator, cultural critic, and policy analyst. She recently finished the Marawi Information Center, focused on the Marawi Siege; and is finalizing Museo Pantan, a museum to cross cultural understanding in Isabela de Basilan.)