assuming crash position - first Ketsana, and now Parma
some of you have emailed to ask after me after the devastating tropical storm and floods last September 26. thank you for the concern. perhaps there may be others who know about where i am from and may have stopped for a bit and thought to themselves -- "hey, i wonder how binsoup is doing right now." thank you as well.
i count myself and my family lucky because while hundreds of thousands have lost their homes and livelihood, and members of their family and community, my we have been spared. my daughter attributes it to the fortuitous decision made by her paternal grandfather who in the late 1950s decided to hitch his middle-class fortune to a then newly opened housing development in the heart of a newly chartered city named after the dead President of the abbreviated Philippine Commonwealth. the district where my then still unmarried father-in-law ended up owning property sits on a relatively elevated section of the city which is part of a chain of hills bordering the valley Marikina which got inundated by the recent floods. This same property got passed on to my husband and my children, and it's been our home since the day my husband and I decided to be together and stay together. The house is new though. We tore down the old 50s style bungalow, elevated the lot by two meters and built a two-story duplex in 1991.
so my family is lucky. the thought should make me thankful, and i suppose i am. but it is also terrifying to think that some things that may spell life or death or you and the people you care for are not in your control. the dramatic turn in the climatic changes in my part of the world in the last week affirms for me the humble place of our species in the universe. I have friends and colleagues who live in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Australia and though the Internet has made the world a smaller and more interconnected place, my first instinct is not to send email but to make sure our family and our next-door neighbors are alright.
those of of you who have been following the news or surfing youtube are almost certainly aware of the outpouring of international and domestic support for our flood-wreaked archipelago. you must have already come across news or commentaries about the poor performance of our government to respond quickly and effectively to the impact of the disaster. survivors of Katrina could probably relate. but as a people, the Filipinos trudge on. there are one or two stories of rioting evacuees, too hungry and desperate to queue up for the relief goods. and a couple of stories about opportunists out to make financial gain on the misfortunes of others. it's all very human. but just as tragedy has a way of bringing out the worst in people, it also gives us a chance to reach out to people and to treat each other better than we'd normally do.
we may be a nation mired in vicious poverty and violent political and ideological strifes, but in situations of crisis and tragic national misfortune our people somehow still manage to remember that we really are one village who just happen to live in 7,000 + islands.
we are still in the midst of bringing out the dead in the aftermath of Ketsana, and already Parma is threatening to pour down and rattle our islands in the next couple of hours. we are bracing ourselves.
if you can not hug your loved ones tonight, keep them in your thoughts. i'll think about sunshine and warm days when the electric company shuts down power as they have warned they might do.
i count myself and my family lucky because while hundreds of thousands have lost their homes and livelihood, and members of their family and community, my we have been spared. my daughter attributes it to the fortuitous decision made by her paternal grandfather who in the late 1950s decided to hitch his middle-class fortune to a then newly opened housing development in the heart of a newly chartered city named after the dead President of the abbreviated Philippine Commonwealth. the district where my then still unmarried father-in-law ended up owning property sits on a relatively elevated section of the city which is part of a chain of hills bordering the valley Marikina which got inundated by the recent floods. This same property got passed on to my husband and my children, and it's been our home since the day my husband and I decided to be together and stay together. The house is new though. We tore down the old 50s style bungalow, elevated the lot by two meters and built a two-story duplex in 1991.
so my family is lucky. the thought should make me thankful, and i suppose i am. but it is also terrifying to think that some things that may spell life or death or you and the people you care for are not in your control. the dramatic turn in the climatic changes in my part of the world in the last week affirms for me the humble place of our species in the universe. I have friends and colleagues who live in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Australia and though the Internet has made the world a smaller and more interconnected place, my first instinct is not to send email but to make sure our family and our next-door neighbors are alright.
those of of you who have been following the news or surfing youtube are almost certainly aware of the outpouring of international and domestic support for our flood-wreaked archipelago. you must have already come across news or commentaries about the poor performance of our government to respond quickly and effectively to the impact of the disaster. survivors of Katrina could probably relate. but as a people, the Filipinos trudge on. there are one or two stories of rioting evacuees, too hungry and desperate to queue up for the relief goods. and a couple of stories about opportunists out to make financial gain on the misfortunes of others. it's all very human. but just as tragedy has a way of bringing out the worst in people, it also gives us a chance to reach out to people and to treat each other better than we'd normally do.
we may be a nation mired in vicious poverty and violent political and ideological strifes, but in situations of crisis and tragic national misfortune our people somehow still manage to remember that we really are one village who just happen to live in 7,000 + islands.
we are still in the midst of bringing out the dead in the aftermath of Ketsana, and already Parma is threatening to pour down and rattle our islands in the next couple of hours. we are bracing ourselves.
if you can not hug your loved ones tonight, keep them in your thoughts. i'll think about sunshine and warm days when the electric company shuts down power as they have warned they might do.