Jimmy Waga: The Postman

No threat or disaster can stop Filipino-American postal worker Jimmy Waga from his daily rounds. Not even the anthrax scare that has already claimed three lives and infected several others.

"For me to get scared and stop working because of anthrax is something I cannot do," a defiant Waga says. "If I let myself be cowed by anthrax and just keep worrying about my safety, then my work will be disrupted and the perpetrators would succeed in their mission of disrupting our normal way of life," he tells STARweek, which trailed him for an hour one morning as he went through his round of the commercial and residential neighborhood around the Journal Square Station of the US Postal Service.

A mailman for the past 25 years and resident of Piscataway, New Jersey, the Manila-born Waga is among an estimated 30 Fil-Am mail carriers in Jersey City. While several of those Fil-Am postal workers were contacted by STARweek for an interview, it was only Waga who agreed to give his insights and talk about the risks of his profession.

"If what I’m going to say can help inform people and allay fears or ease tension, why not?" he says, as he cheerfully began distributing over 2,000 letters for that day.

While thousands of postal workers in Washington, New York City and Trenton began taking preventive medicine and were tested for anthrax, Waga said no such safety measures have been offered so far for Jersey City postal workers.

Waga said he would welcome any offer of Cipro or flu shots from his employers. "It’s a preventive action, just to be on the safe side," he says.

"So far, we were only issued rubber gloves," he adds, "and I feel very uncomfortable using them." Editha Gavina, a postal clerk at the Bergen South Station on Martin Luther King Drive in this city, says she and her co-workers were also given rubber gloves and white masks to protect themselves from skin or inhalation anthrax.

"But I can’t breathe with it," she says, laughing, referring to the mask. "No one among us can stand wearing mask for a long period of time."

Gavina says their postal station–which employs about a dozen Fil-Am mail carriers–is always on red alert for possible tainted letters or parcels.

"We are worried, of course, but we have a job to do and life must go on," she says. "I just pray that we don’t get affected here."

Since the anthrax breakout, Waga says his superiors at the US Postal Service regularly brief them on how to properly handle mail or parcels that may be contaminated such as those that bear no return address, are half open or oversized.

A work of terrorists or not, Waga says his superiors have been telling them that the brains behind anthrax are bent to "totally dysfunction" the mail system, which is one of the major means of communication in America along with the telephone and computer, and thereby paralyze people’s lives and the whole country in general.

Several customers Waga met that day besieged him with questions about how he was doing in the wake of the anthrax attacks. "We’re doing fine, thank God," he tells them with a smile.

"Many of these people are worried because anthrax is something that cannot be ignored," he says. "It can happen at the spur of the moment," he says. "But if you will start living in fear, then it’s not good."

A banking and finance graduate of Ateneo de Cagayan University in Cagayan de Oro in southern Philippines, Waga is married to the former Nenita Sanggalang and they have two grown children–Joey Waga and Jeanette Mojares.

He immigrated to the US in the early ‘70s at a time when the World Trade Center buildings were being erected. He even held office at One Liberty Plaza across what was then the majestic Twin Towers when he worked with Merrill Lynch as a bookkeeper in 1973.

"I miss the World Trade Center," Waga says of the skycrapers that never failed to fascinate him as he drove by the New Jersey Turnpike everyday. "But what bothers me most is the death of those thousands of civilians who have nothing to do with the political or religious issues or ideals being fought by the terrorists." (The Wagas are friends of the family of wtc victim Judy Hazel Fernandez of Cantor Fitzgerald.)

Waga says that until his retirement (in the next three to five years), he will continue distributing mail and live up to the motto of the Postal Service.

"I’m happy with what I’m doing," he says. "This is where I got the money to take care of my family and send our two children to school. They are now both professionals and with their own families."

"Of course right now I’m worried–everyone is," he admits. "But anthrax can’t stop me from working. I figure when it’s your time to go, it’s your time."