A foreigner asked me some years back , days after a tsunami killed hundreds of thousands of people in Asia specifically in Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia of which one is better to die : war or disaster. I replied disaster. It was a stupid choice.
I was in Manila on the 26th of September, the day typhoon Ondoy made a landfall. I was supposed to attend the last Sunday of the bar exam after a couple of years of almost ”animosity” in the field, primarily to take a grasp once more on the atmosphere. I was one of those trapped along Quezon Ave., Quezon City. I spent the night inside the bus with some people from my former school denied of the usual comfort for travellers. It was a sort of a road trip because we were not able to reach our destination, but not a road trip after all. The latest count of casulaties from the National Disaster Coordinating Council have risen to two hundred forty (240) and still counting, notwithstanding the many individuals, children and families starving in evacuation areas around Manila.
Fear, however did not engulfed me during the ordeal even when my cellphone ran out of battery and there’s no other way to get informed of what’s happening around than the radio powered by the bus gas, which made us hear the angst, pleas and sobs of the many families and individuals begging for rescue. Perhaps, this is because i grew up, like many Filipinos, with calamities and disasters. It has always been a way of life and the “spirit” that i could always surpass whatever the ordeal may bring. Though i was worried a bit when the building on the left side of the bus we were in, caught fire. To make the situation panicable, beside the building was a paint station and right behind our bus was a gas tanker while strong winds made the heavens look like dancing firecrackers as naked faces of barefoot and footless people keep passing back and forth the streets struggling to cross the rapid water breast high some neck high, all day and night long. I thought these people are, like me, just in a hurry to be home with their love ones and feel safe. Yet we just cannot move anywhere like other vehicles around us. It was seemingly a bad omen, whatever the word means.
Two men in wheelchair took shelter in a waiting shed near our space, battling the strong rain and wind with only plastics wrapped around their bodies while hundreds of children were sleeping in the floor covered with cartoons and newspapers along the corregidors of Sto. Domingo church. We would share the adhacent spots for many hours. Pasalubongs intended for barristers like cornics and bibingkas were shared to them.
“We were only at the right place at the right time” said one friend. Our driver was smart enough to locate the proper position of the bus where we would stick for the rest of the night until roads to lead us outside Manila were partially passable.
Climate change or war against another idiology.
Stupidity kills people.
