When His Community Calls, Sahar Answers
Living in a small farming community, Magen David Adom EMT and ambulance driver Sahar Chachmon knew that when an emergency happened, it could take precious minutes for an ambulance to arrive. So he decided to do something about it. Seven years later, the 23-year-old volunteer now provides an immediate lifesaving response to residents across seven neighboring communities, sometimes even to members of his own family.
For Sahar Chachmon, the decision to join Magen David Adom began with a problem he could see in his own community. Living in Moshav Sde Uziyahu, near Ashdod, Sahar knew that when someone needed emergency medical care, the nearest ambulance could sometimes be several minutes away.
“I saw that in the area where I live, it takes several long minutes for an ambulance to arrive and provide the initial response,” Sahar recalled. “So I stepped up and went to learn how to save lives.”
He was just 16 when he began volunteering with MDA. Seven years later, Sahar is an EMT and ambulance driver at MDA’s Ashdod station in the Lachish Region. For the past two years, he has also kept a community standby ambulance with him, allowing him to respond directly from home and provide emergency medical care across seven neighboring moshavim.
It is a responsibility that follows him everywhere.
Today, Sahar is married and the father of a young baby. When he is not volunteering with MDA, he works as a farmer on his parents’ farm. But when an emergency call comes in, everything else stops. “I’m addicted to the field and to the adrenaline,” Sahar said. “The moment the dispatch center sends me to a case where I’m needed, whether it’s Shabbat or a holiday, I leave everything and go.”
One of those calls remains particularly close to his heart. Sahar was dispatched to a kindergarten where a young girl was suffering from a severe allergic reaction. Her condition was rapidly becoming life-threatening. Sahar arrived and immediately administered epinephrine using an EpiPen. Within moments, the little girl began to improve.
Only after the immediate danger had passed did Sahar discover something he had not known when the call came in: the little girl was his relative.
For Sahar, the experience brought home the reason he first joined MDA seven years earlier. In communities where every minute before an ambulance arrives can matter, having a trained responder nearby can make all the difference.
Today, the teenager who once wondered who would provide that first lifesaving response has become the person his community can count on, at any hour, on any day, whenever the call comes.
