Songs of Innocence and of Experience

People waiting for relief supplies, Bagong Silang, Caloocan City, September 2009

It is nearly impossible to fathom -- let alone put into words -- the weight of all that has happened here in the Philippines since my last post in early September. Time and again, I'd find myself sitting down to collect my thoughts, ready to write. And, time and again, I wasn't ready to. Apparently I'm not so good at attaching words to overwhelming, traumatic experiences. It amazes me that many writers (including some of my favorite journalists) spend their entire careers doing just that: diving head-first into war, genocide, disaster, disease and other unthinkable human experiences, and writing about them...on a deadline. My own puny fumblings leave me in awe of these people (and remind me why I chose another profession). Indeed the past few weeks have often seemed like a demonstration of the modern Filipino experience, equal parts heart-wrenching and triumphant.

At the end of September, Manila and much of the northern Philippines received the full force mauling of Ondoy, the worst storm to hit this area in at least a half century (typically, most storms would roll through further to the South).  Water rose, dams burst, storm drains and canals were quickly overwhelmed, the vast sections of Metro Manila that sit below sea-level (and, in that sense, lend it a surprising similarity to New Orleans) found themselves under several meters of water -- water that would remain in those low-lying communities for literally weeks, having nowhere to go.  Most here call Ondoy a "typhoon" though, in reality, it never advanced beyond "tropical depression" status.  It's devastating impact came from the sheer volume of water it let loose, and the slowness of its track over land.  Add to all this the fact that local water levels were already high due to previous rains, and "perfect storm" conditions began to align.  Manila is a metropolitan area with a population somewhere far in excess of 11-million people.  No one will ever really know the true figure, due to the enormous communities of undocumented squatters and otherwise poor that comprise its expansive edges.  Communities that are constantly fed by an influx of people from the provinces, and who have nowhere to settle down but on the margins, huddling in cracks between buildings, living atop refuse heaps and marshes of human waste, balancing on neighbors' roofs, subsisting quite literally "on the brink".  Such unmentionable places generally happen to sit in the lowest-lying areas, in flood-plains, hard by rivers and canals, available simply by virtue of their undesirability to anyone with a choice.  As in NoLa, likewise in Manila.  To make a long story very short, but no less painful, it was Manila's poorest who found themselves suddenly without a home or any possessions, fighting for their lives against raging currents and toxic conditions.  Children and elderly relatives sometimes swept away.

Amidst this litany of human suffering, all of us in my NGO (Gawad Kalinga) found ourselves deep into post-disaster relief efforts, 24-hours a day, for over 2 weeks -- delivering desperately-needed food, clothing, medical supplies, shelters and emotional support (what little we could offer) to disaster victims.  During that time, I was always either helping to make supply drop-offs or helping to set up disaster-preparedness systems for future such storms (Typhoon Pepeng arrived the following weekend).  As physically and emotionally draining as that type of work is, it's naturally difficult to forget how much worse the recipients of your work have it than yourself.   Indeed even now, 2-plus months later, many thousands are still without homes, and with no real hope in sight.  As I had written in my previous post, Filipinos waste little time with grief or complaints.  This is life, they tell you.  You move on.

In mid-October, exhausted by relief work and the emotional roller-coaster of Ondoy, I found myself in very different circumstances: sitting on a mountain-top in the city of Baguio, on property owned by the family of my good friend Steve from PC Romania.  I remember sitting there as the sun set, gazing at a gigantic bank of fog that ebbed and flowed over the ridge-line on which I was sitting.   The fog seemed very much a living organism, breathing in and out, eddying and flowing in random but precise geometries, alternately revealing and obscuring the next, distant mountain-top.  Weaving the last rays of dying sunlight in beautiful, curvilinear tendrils.  Then, suddenly, extinguishing them, severing the limb from the body.  Soupy darkness.

I wrote in Romania about my recurring sense that the world we live in -- or at least the world I live in -- is often revealed in such brief, intense bursts of color and feeling.  As though suddenly and without presage, the curtain is pulled back, and in that instant we see the workings of the universe, and our own lives within it.  Maybe there is beauty in that moment, maybe something far less palatable -- but there is always truth, and always purpose.  In that glimpse, we can see where we stand and where we are (perhaps) going...before the curtain drops once again.  I have felt this way at various times in my life, and as unbearable as the relief work so often was for me and for everyone else involved, I knew I needed to be there, at that moment, doing that work.  I knew the ground my feet stood upon, and I knew the task at hand.  How strange it is that we can have two so vastly different responses to the same event.  As both are so utterly inexpressible, I'll give up.

And the titanic ups and downs of life in the Philippines continued unabated in November: The ecstasy of seeing a native son, Manny Pacquiao, win his 7th world boxing title (a record not likely to be broken any time soon...and, in Manny, a public hero of whom Filipinos admit this country is desperately in need at the moment); And the barbarity of politically-motivated mass killings in Mindanao.  As predictable as we may find such contrasts to be in our modern world, it needn't stop us from imagining that things could be different, better.  Neither should it stop us from doing what we can to make it so.