Homeless Diver

“…the vessel carried 724 passengers, 111 crewmembers, and 26 sanitary aides.”

What is a sanitary aide? Is it a health care professional or a janitor? And why the term ‘aide’, are they not actually qualified in this field?  Who are they aiding, the crewmembers?  That would make 111 supervisors for 26 staffers..on a ferry that sank in Typhoon Fengshen.

I’m going to assume these are some form of health care people but it still leaves me wondering why the requirement to have so many and not even properly trained ones at that. 26 for only 800 people seems like a lot. Are they transporting a leper colony? Just how sickly are these passengers? Obviously they’re not regularly trained medical personnel or they would not be using the terms ’sanitary’ or ‘aide’. So we now have 26 people who generally can clean up human bio waste and generally keep it from like being the below-deck hold of a 1700’s slave ship. I think. Generally.

When I think of the term aide, I think of a subordinate staffer. But then again, whenever I think of the term sanitary, it’s always followed by the word ‘napkin’.

I’m not making light of this but it was odd to see this combination of words in an article about the Ferry search being halted because of toxic pesticides that werent ever supposed to be on a passenger boat:

A handful were positively identified by clothes, scars and jewellery [sic], including a policeman who was returning from Manila on the ferry after processing his retirement papers.

Wearing face-masks, relatives wept. Some fainted and vomited, at what they saw. One of the bodies, a female, was clutching a headless baby to her chest.

Across the street, music blared from karaoke bars.

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