At 4am today, I entered the second floor comfort room in one of the laboratory buildings at RITM. As I was washing my face to wake myself after being on duty for almost 32 hours, I heard silent whimpers in one of the cubicles.

Wait, I know that voice. I’m bad with names and I’ve only been here for a month, but I distinctly remember the short-haired girl in lab scrubs who used to come to my office with logbooks and documents in tow.

“What a cheerful girl,” I used to think, and so I couldn’t believe she’d be the same girl crying behind a bathroom door.

I lightly knocked on her door and asked if she was okay. “Ay, opo, nagbabalat lang po ng sibuyas,” she jokingly said in between quiet sniffs. “Yeah, I get you. I do that sometimes, too. Nakailan ka na?”

“Pangatlo pa lang po in the last 12 hours.”

We laughed a little before I left. I turned around to knock on her door again, just to say, “hey, we’ll be okay. We’re in this together.”

I am not a healthcare worker; I am with the communications team of RITM, and yet, I spend ungodly hours in the office along with my equally sleep-deprived team.

You can only imagine how much more exhausting it is for lab and hospital personnel who are in full PPE and on their feet for days in a row;

for our hotline responders who have telephones glued to their ears for hours; for data encoders who clickity-clackety on their keyboards from sunrise to sunrise;

and even for janitors & security guards who run around pushing mops, collecting toxic trash, inspecting& delivering goods, prohibiting foot traffic in infectious areas, and accommodating authorized entries of vehicles despite the complex being crowded by trucks, vans, ambulances.

All of these faces you don’t see on TV are here to serve you and the country. Fueled by nothing more than caffeine, donated food packs, and sheer determination to fight the disease in their own way.

So much passion deserves the utmost respect and appreciation. I’m only one person and my voice may not be heard; I can only say so much to let everyone know in RITM how much I’m grateful for and inspired by them.

But if you like what they do here, send them a message through the hashtag #helloRITMfrontliners. I promise, your encouragement and recognition of their invisible sacrifices will go a long way.