It's 2:15 p.m. and soon he'll begin preparing IV drips and checking temperatures, tasks assigned to an entry-level nurse. "So much to learn," says the self-deprecating bachelor with the lilting accent. Except for the fact that he's one of only two male nurses on the floor at St. Vincent's Midtown Hospital, he's just one of the girls, co-workers say.
Well, here anyway.
But a world away, in his native Philippines, Jacinto remains at the center of a roiling controversy — a sellout to his critics, a paragon of hard work and admirable ambition to his supporters.
Once upon a time, Elmer Jacinto was his nation's most promising young doctor. But doctors in the Philippines are not well paid, and so he boarded a plane to America.
To make more money. To become ... a nurse.
It hasn't worked out exactly as he had expected. Life in New York has proved exhausting and full of unforeseen pitfalls. And back home, many of his countrymen still find his choice a difficult one to accept, because the parable of Elmer Jacinto raises grim doubts about their future.
"Jacinto encapsulates perfectly the country's fundamental question today," one Filipino newspaper columnist opined. "Namely, why should anyone want to stay in it?"
When Elmer Jacinto graduated high school, the island of Basilan offered limited choices.
On Basilan, where dusty farming towns press up against thick tropical jungle, electricity is a sometimes event. Telephone lines deposit calls at dead-ends. Both problems are blamed on the Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim extremist group with an outsized reputation for violence.
So when Jacinto sat down with his father, a school teacher, on a spring night eight years ago to parse his prospects in the glow of kerosene, they set aside talk of dreams to examine reality.
"There is money in nursing," the older man counseled.
Jacinto finished at the top of a nursing school class of 250, and found work at the local hospital before leaving for a better-paying job in the city. In hindsight, the move seemed fated. Not long after, Abu Sayyaf guerrillas stormed the hospital, taking nurses as hostages. One of Jacinto's former co-workers was killed during a shootout with Filipino soldiers.
But in Manila, Jacinto pushed ahead, soon enrolling in medical school. For the second time, he rose to the top of his class, then joined 1,800 other aspiring doctors from around the country to take the national medical exam.
When the scores were released, Our Lady of Fatima University proudly hung a banner over its doorway to herald the results. Its valedictorian, Elmer Jacinto, was the No. 1 young doctor in the nation.
Jacinto, though, was already making other plans. His parents deserved more than even a doctor could give them. In a world where jobs and workers are shifted back and forth across borders like game pieces, he would play his hand — setting aside the goal of becoming a neurologist to work as a nurse in America for far greater pay.
His choice should not have been a surprise. Nearly a million Filipinos take jobs abroad each year, making them some of the world's most mobile workers. Some of the most successful are nurses, drawn to the U.S. and other wealthy nations with a ravenous demand for health care and not enough skilled labor to meet it.
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