This past Saturday, a fellow cadet alumni and myself joined Rescue 926 and CRS-AFP DRTU on Relief Operations in Baranggays Rosario and Kalawaan in Pasig City. Baranggay Rosario was pretty straight-forward. The baranggay officials asked the evacuees to line up, and the relief goods were delivered in an orderly manner. Afterwards, they got all the evacuees to exercise because they'd been (according to the lady on the microphone) mostly eating and sleeping for the past few days.
The exercises were fun (stick your arms out! Then Up! Side! Down! Up-side-down!) so adults with a sense of humor and even the youngest kids could enjoy it. While we were there, a woman paused the work to announce that another neighborhood had finally dried out, and it was safe for those residents to go home. The mayor of Pasig even arrived, and warned them, as he had done numerous times before, that they had built their homes on a danger zone. It was such a relief to see that not all officials coddle the squatters who vote for them.
We left as the noon heat approached, and our army truck rumbled us bumpily to our next destination. As we drove, it seemed like every baranggay hall had been turned into an evacuation center, and other organizations had filled in any gaps, so no baranggay was forgotten.
Despite the touch of summer heat and cloudless sun, not all the flood waters evaporated. The streets surrounding Pasig's city center were swamped, and many had made rafts or ferried passenger by raised bike-carts. Further along, many streets had a well-developed system of raised wooden walkways, but I'll get back to that in another post.
The flood waters we drove through got deeper and deeper, until finally we reached Kalawaan. After the locals moved some boats, our truck was able to back up to their front step. Otherwise, we would have had to wade through flood waters to reach them.
A crowd flocked to the entrance as we arrived. I made my way through that and finally got a good look inside the place.
"This is a real evacuation center," Sir Rodil told me as we stood inside the basketball court of Kalawaan, Pasig. The floor was crowded with woven mats, and at least a dozen thin wooden benches seperated blocks of 9-12 banigs. Those whose banig mats were too small, or those who had none, used empty sacks and cardboard to insulate them from the concrete floor. One fortunate family had children's foam puzzle mats, but maybe that isn't much of fortune after all. A large green tent gave shade and shelter to about six families. Each family seemed to have two square meters to themselves, and no walls, except for one family which had the foresight to bring their own camping tent, affording them the most privacy of the dozens of families crowded into that hall.
The parents, the adults formed messy lines based on the instructions of a baranggay woman with a loudspeaker.
Children ran and played across this room, some older siblings carrying the smaller ones if they fell and cried. In the places we'd seen previously, the children played outside as well, but the flood waters here stopped at the steps of this hall.
Sir said he worried most for the children.
But they seemed unaware of any problem. They ran and played. One boy did cartwheels in a clear space. Kids crowded around and grinned for pictures, some jumping in front of others and all enjoying the picture taking, few even caring to see what they looked like once the picture had been taken. The youngest eyed my camera and myself with amazement, pointing tiny fingers at the faces they knew on the screen. Half of the children were in clothes at least a size too big for them, but that's normal. If Olandes on a sunny day could amaze me, then what more of Kalawaan after the storm?
Asking around, I found out that nobody here was being sent home yet. The flood waters had risen instead of sinking due to rain during the night. Some people had been here for three days, some for five.
One didn't need to ask how they were faring here. The chain-link fences of the basketball court were festooned with drying laundry. Some families had the modesty to cover their drying underwear with a drying shirt or similar. Privacy was minimal, and food was modest. A man who was opening up a container of rice and fish or shrimp told me, "Kain na," the traditional invitation to eat with them. I smiled and declined, knowing I'd packed my own food and the invitation didn't require one to actually join in their simple meal.
A real evacuation center. To look at the whole space was a bit overwhelming, so I tried to focus on a family at a time, a group of kids playing here, old women tending to their toddling grandchildren there. And then I saw a woman smile. She and her son sat on what was probably an old tarp, and she'd just unpacked a banig, blankets, and clothes from the relief package she'd received. It wasn't much, but wherever I looked, mothers pulled clothes from those plastic bags and either handed it to their children or tried it on themselves. Dresses, shirts, etc, as though each bag had been meant just for that family. The kids trotted happily away, sucking on chocolate milk cartons or eating dry milk powder like candy from their packets. It wasn't much, but they were happy.
I hope I never need to take shelter in an evacuation center. I remember that during and after Hurricane Katrina, countless stories of horrific crimes flooded out of Louisiana and spread from there like a disease - families seeking shelter became helpless victims to inhuman low-lives, robbery being the least of it.
I was glad to see that in the Philippines, that problem is not as bad. We don't turn into beasts when we lose electricity, when our homes fill with water that does not belong there. We do not depend on convenience alone. At the height of the storm, though looting was a fear for some, what we saw more were people helping their countrymen. And that is part of the best of humanity - that when disaster strikes, we can help our neighbors.
