Author Spotlight
Katie Murphy
The menu: Chipotle. The topic of conversation: a man who was shot in the face. There had been an armed robbery at a nearby gas station that day, senior Sofia Borja’s father Andres explained over family dinner.
A burglar shot the owner in the face with a shotgun, took his money and ran. Andres was the first responder, hauling the victim out of a store while pressing his palm into a chunk of missing cheek to stop the bleeding.
Being an emergency medical technician comes with seeing things you never want to see again, he says. America can be darker than he imagined while growing up on the crowded, violent streets of Colombia.
Andres immigrated to the U.S. with his mom when he was 9 “in search of the American Dream.” Since then, he’s fought for an education, a career and acceptance in 79%-white Johnson County as one of the few Hispanic EMTs. All to provide the best possible life for Sofia.
This means navigating cultural differences while experiencing once-in-a-lifetime traumatic events weekly. Hundreds of Andres’s 15,000 ambulance trips in his 15 years as an EMT in Johnson County have involved fatalities. Like the day at the gas station.
“Luckily, the owner only had a hole in his cheek and his head was intact,” Andres said. “But the blast was at such short range that it gave him a black gun powder burn on half of his face, like a cartoon character from Looney Tunes.”
The story he told his family about that day excluded the most violent details, like usual, to avoid burdening them emotionally. Still, he talks about his day because he values honest family time. But Sofia grimaces over her meal when her dad compares their lasagna to human brains smashed out of the skulls he’s seen.
“Dinner is the worst possible time to tell graphic stories because I’m eating,” Sofia said. “When he starts relating food and work, I’m like, ‘Oh my god.’”
Except Andres is sometimes only available to catch up with his family at dinnertime, since brutal 24-hour shifts and stress bleed his days into nights. He knows emergencies can happen any time.
“Sometimes I get calls at 2 a.m. where I have less than four minutes to arrive on a scene awake enough to manage [a patient’s] heart failure,” Andres said.
Still, not every patient is fawning with gratitude: some scowl at him to “go back to his country” or demand for a white EMT to treat them instead. Being a Hispanic EMT in Johnson County means saving lives with a side of cultural complications, especially in more affluent white cities.
“There’s some areas that are… special,” Andres said. “I’ve been called a terrorist before. But my job is to take care of people, whether they just killed someone, raped someone or made racist comments towards me. It’s just what I have to do.”
When he first signed up for EMT training in 2008, he expected judgment — as the only Hispanic in Johnson County Community College’s 10-month beginner program. Another issue from the start was that he hadn’t finished high school and his need-based JCCC scholarship required an 86% grade average to retain. Turns out calculating pharmaceutical doses wasn’t easy with a transcript that ended with pre-Algebra.
He scored exactly 86% on his first unit test. An American Dream career was on edge.
“I was so scared afterwards that I started studying all the time,” Andres said. “I couldn’t go back to working construction jobs putting metal lathes in concrete and painting walls.”
He’d spent most of his life working construction jobs until a short stint as a translator at a chiropractor clinic to make extra money. Meeting doctors at the clinic introduced him to the medical field — an area he’d never been exposed to while growing up immersed in predominantly Colombian neighborhoods and blue collar jobs.
The JCCC program was the first place he’d ever regularly been the only Latino person around.
“School was the first time that I was truly immersed into the whole American cultural way of things,” Andres said. “All my classmates were white, and it was scary. I had never had a job where I had to contend with the abbreviation of ‘RSVP.’ I got an email saying it, and I eventually was brave enough to ask, ‘Where is this RSVP department?’ My classmate laughed and told me that it’s French meaning that I should respond.”
Andres revealed Latino culture to his peers in return for lessons in American customs, inviting some to his extended family’s annual Colombian Christmas party. Encouraged by his new friends and the drive to provide for a young Sofia, he reviewed electrical heart conduction and sinus rhythms to protect his scholarship. His time was split between studying and watching or reading to Sofia.
Ten months later, he graduated with honors.
He still says that white people are scary today — except sarcastically and with a wink.
Andres dropped out of high school at age 13 to stucco cinder blocks full time where he was living in Houston, Texas, paying for half of his family’s rent. Fifteen years later, he became the first Borja to not build roofs, clean homes or cut hair — and the only Latino, Spanish-speaking EMT in Johnson County.
But his family wasn’t proud. Not at first.
In Colombia, first responders aren’t respected, but treated more like “fast food workers.” Firefighters are lucky to have a working truck back home, he says. His mom thought his JCCC program was just ambulance driving school.
But now-teenage babies Andres has helped deliver, overdose victims he’s saved and heart attack patients he’s revived have seen him doing much more than just drive the ambulance.
It wasn’t until Andres and his mom were flying home from Colombia six years into his EMT career that his mom really understood. Over the intercom, an urgent voice asked for passengers with medical experience to proceed to the back of the plane. A man with purple lips and ashy skin was splayed out in the aisle, unconscious.
Andres got to work: propped the man’s legs up into a passive lift, assessed his heart rhythm, ran fluids. Five minutes later, when the man woke up, Andres finally caught his breath.
“When I looked behind me, my mom was bawling,” he said. “Just bawling her eyes out because she finally saw what I do for a living. Now she goes around telling all of our relatives nearby and in Colombia that I’m a doctor. Even though I’m technically not. I get international calls asking for medical advice.”
When Sofia was 3 and lost motion on her right side from a nerve collapse, Andres was able to calmly and quickly help her to the hospital, saving her from permanent paralysis. Sofia feels safe today knowing that calling him is as safe as calling 911 — literally.
“Even when he tells graphic stories about babies being hit by cars, 18-year-olds overdosing and leg amputations, I’m so proud when he comes home from a 24-hour shift because I know he’s saving lifes,” Sofia said. “With the hardships that he sees, I’m impressed by the way he emotionally handles these things. He doesn’t really complain.”
When his ambulance gets muddy, Andres cleans it. It’s not in the job description, but a good Colombian son is tidy, according to Andres’s mom. He answers dispatch calls in Spanish when no one else can understand the patient. He joined the honor guard committee to walk in local funeral processions. The EMT standby team to see even more patients. The hiring team to help find diverse, new talent. He’s been recognized for his efforts with 10 medallions and a promotion to lieutenant.
He calls himself a “living example of the American dream.”
“Back home in Colombia, you could be a genius and still not succeed without political connections or knowing somebody,” Borja said. “The first thing that I loved about America is that every apartment complex has a pool. Now I love how if you really, really want a dream and work hard, you can make it happen here.”
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