007 ~ Starting Afresh

At present, the PNP maintains a pool of Filipino police officers awaiting orders for deployment anywhere within the continents of Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.

Not long ago, these police officers were applicants who underwent a series of tests administered by both the PNP and the UN. Not long ago, they were closely scrutinized and measured by proctors and observers at camps around the country, as they labored under time pressure. They went without compromise or arrangement, with neither right nor privilege to cry, “Wait!” or “Take Two!” (let alone, “Take Three!”).

They meant serious business, going to the testing site on schedule, ready and confidently demonstrating their mental and physical proficiencies, not any more needing to waste other people’s time. They have refined their agility and muscle power, their driving and firing skills, way before exam time.

Thus, prior to departing for the mission area, the officers on standby have proven themselves worthy of serving the world.

The profession is not a joke. The mission area is not a playground. The hostilities are not part of a tabletop exercise that can be aborted at will. Instituting the host country’s police force is not as easy and relaxed as typing names and birth dates into the personnel databases; it is not an escapist’s chore and excuse for sneaking into a minimized browser to read personal e-mail.

There are no second chances when pro-Taliban activists in Afghanistan, mercenaries in Côte d’Ivoire, extremists in Nepal, or heavily armed gangsters in Haïti, open fire at any moving object –much less, at somebody getting complacent under the UN Blue Beret. There are no reversal prospects on the hazard-filled roads of Kosovo and Timor-Leste. There is no repelling the ferocious disease-bearing insects from stinging away in Liberia and the Sudan.

In sticky situations, the police officers should be able to use soul, heart, mind, and body, to extricate themselves. It is only by the ability to exist, feel, think, and do, as survival and morals together require, that anybody in danger can come out the least scathed.