Paul Smietana, 39, telecommunications specialist
Paul T. Smietana and his wife went to the Philippines last month to pick up their newly adopted daughter and bring her home. It was a triumphant moment for them after months of navigating the red tape of adoption bureaucracy both in this country and in the Philippines.
This week the new parents were to take 21-month-old Connie Marie home to Taunton, where her nursery had been prepared.
But on the morning of Oct. 22, when the temperature soared over 100 degrees, Mr. Smietana went for a run outside the small village of Quinaoayanan, home to his wife's family. While running, Mr. Smietana collapsed and died, apparently of heart failure, according to his brother, Robert of Wildwood, Ill. His body was found several hours later by the side of a road on the outskirts of the village .
A telecommunications expert, Mr. Smietana was the principal owner of Smietana Communications of Taunton. He was 39.
During their 12-year marriage, Mr. Smietana and his wife, Chitadelia (Badoin), often visited Quinaoayanan, in the province of Pangasinan , about an eight-hour drive from Manila.
They had been there about 2 1/2 weeks prior to Mr. Smietana's death, waiting to bring home Connie Marie, whose departure was delayed by bronchitis, according to Mr. Smietana's father, Thaddeus of Attleboro.
Connie Marie was born to a relative in the Philippines, a single mother who had asked Mr. Smietana and his wife to become the child's legal parents, his father said. From the time of the baby's birth in January 2005, her new parents were part of her life through regular visits and long-distance phone calls.
Mr. Smietana had learned to speak Tagalog and would sing lullabies to Connie Marie in her language during his frequent calls. She would coo back.
Paul Thaddeus Smietana was born in Attleboro on Christmas Day to Thaddeus and Barbara A. (Fredette) Smietana.
He graduated from Attleboro High School in 1984. In his early 20s, after graduating with an associate's degree from New Hampshire Vocational Technical College in Laconia, Mr. Smietana enrolled at the University of Rhode Island to study electrical engineering. After he was side lined with a leg injury, he decided not to return to college and started working as an electrician.
Mr. Smietana often told his mother that he could never work at a job that kept him "in a suit and behind a desk."
He followed that dream through a job with GTE Corp., which took him to Cairo for two years in the early 1990s.
In 1991 and 1992, he set up cellphone networks for the military in Egypt; he traveled the country and learned to speak Arabic, his brother said.
He met his wife at a function at the US Embassy in Cairo, where she was working, and they began dating.
They were married in Attleboro in 1994.
When he returned from Egypt, he traveled around the United States installing telecommunications equipment for GTE before leaving the company in 1995. .
Mr. Smietana was an award-winning tournament bass angler, whose dream was to compete in the national bass fishing championship, but he may have lost his best chance of making that goal in 2003 while fishing in a divisional competition in foul weather on Lake Champlain.
Mr. Smietana and his fishing partner stopped to save a windsurfer who had lost her board and was stranded in the middle of the lake, said Roy Costa, president of Rhode Island B.A.S.S. Federation Nation.
"She was just a little blip, maybe about a quarter of a mile away, but they went to her and pulled her out."
She was suffering from hypothermia, he said. The two fishermen took her to shore and waited until she received proper attention, losing three hours fishing time and any chance of winning the tournament.
In 2004, Mr. Smietana's role in the rescue garnered him the Rhode Island Federation's sportsman of the year award.
Well before Connie Marie's birth, Mr. Smietana had become a sort of folk hero in Quinaoayanan for the kindness he had shown villagers. When he first went there to meet his wife's family and found they had no running water in their home, he paid to have it installed.
On every visit, he and his wife brought clothes for the children and toys to replace the boxes and tin cans they played with. Often, he would hire a truck and take them all to the beach.
"When I dropped Paul and Chi off at the airport this time," his father said, "they had one small suitcase between them and three large boxes of clothing for the kids in the village."
They also mailed items from home. "Paul sent a lot of care packages," his father said. "He paid for dental care for some of the children and school tuition for others.
"With Paul, you didn't have to ask for help for anyone," he said. "If he saw someone in need, he helped out."
Mr. Smietana's disposition was sunny. "You could never be sad around Paul," his father said. "On the gloomiest day, he would light up a room."
Mr. Smietana never avoided a difficult task, his family said. Perhaps his most difficult was giving the eulogy at the September funeral of his 32-year-old cousin, Jason Paul Gagne of Needham, a freelance video engineer, who died in an automobile accident.
He made the eulogy light-hearted, his brother said, telling of his and Jason's youthful escapades and their fishing and canoeing together. It was bittersweet and warm, he said, with religious proverbs to comfort.
"Paul had a quiet and steady faith," his brother said in an e-mail. "By his bed, he kept a copy of the Bible, tattered by constant reading."
In addition to his wife, daughter, parents, and brother, Mr. Smietana leaves another brother, Theodore of Taunton, and a sister, Kristen Rounseville of South Attleboro.
A service will be held at 10 a.m. today in Evangelical Covenant Church in Attleboro. Burial will be in North Purchase Cemetery in Attleboro. 