In the Aftermath of Catastrophes

It's 5:39 a.m. I'm sitting stupidly in front of my husband's desktop, trying to shake some wits out of dreamland and back into my addled brain before dawn.

My computer won't start. I don't think it crashed, or at least I hope it didn't. For some reason known only to the divine and the idiotic alike, it just REFUSED to start. Totally unresponsive ever since last night, despite working perfectly well for most of the day. My husband, the more technically-proficient one between the two of us, has thrown in the towel on this case.

I'm not devastated. Just on the verge of freaking out as practically all the files that I will need to get through with this week--and even the next--are all inside the bowels of that sleeping machine.

This is a sanity break. Am still cross-eyed from trying to edit a long-overdue briefing paper that would be better off if rewritten from scratch instead. I'm suppressing the urge to surf for J-pop videos on Youtube. In a while, I will attempt to make breakfast while navigating around an elusive leak in the kitchen sink. In around three hours, I'll be at the office writing a press release on the environmental catastrophes left in the aftermath of typhoon Reming.

I would've wanted to start this week with a barrage of rants about retiring PCs and the limitations of Vulca-seal, but realize that it's absurd to do so when other people are having it worse elsewhere. While we from Metro Manila (along with the ubiquitous billboards erected by companies) have been generally spared from the wrath of typhoon Reming, our toiling brothers and sisters from Southern Luzon and the Visayas regions have not.

My office mate has had the roof of his house and his small pig pen literally blown off as the storm hit his hometown last Friday, as with most of his neighbors. A cathedral in Marinduque reportedly had its roof swept away by the bluster of winds. The peoples of Marinduque, Albay, and Mindoro Oriental--some of the areas most adversely devastated by poverty, militarization, and large-scale mining operations-have had it the worst, absorbing the full impact of the storm. The exacerbating impacts of destructive and unstable mining projects such as Lafayette's polymetallic mine in Rapu-Rapu island (which already had two mine spills) has yet to be fully disclosed by the government and companies which are scampering to protect their trading stocks from plummeting.

A forwarded message from one e-group recounts text messages from eyewitnesses of the tragic mudslides in Albay:

"...Grabe talaga! Am here in Bicol and witnessed how it was. And yung mga nasa likod ng factory nalunod and natabunan ang mga bahay. Parang dagat na...

...Horrible talaga...ang dami patay. Ang mga bahay natabunan ng mga sand, mud and boulders...

...lagpas sa haus namin ang muddy water. Ang dami patay sa Guinobatan.

----sa Ligao, for the first time, umabot sa 2nd floor sahig yong baha na maputik talaga. Kahit minsan ay di pa nangyari yun.

...sabi naman ng ate kong doktora sa Albay provincial hospital since 1965 pa, sanay na siya sa nakakakita ng patay, pero sa biyahe nila from Legaspi to Ligao, kinilabutan siya sa mga nakita nila along the way: patay, bahay na may konting tuktok na lang ang nakikita, and similar scenes."

The responses to the catastrophes left in the aftermath of Reming only underscore the priorities of those in governance. Foreign governments and international institutions have sent in their expressions of support. Concerned citizens and even the New Peoples' Army are helping out in the relief work for typhoon victims. But while the Arroyo administration is reportedly processing the initial tranch of the rehabilitation fund after belatedly declaring a state of calamity yesterday, it seems that GMA's allies are still more interested in pursuing plans for Charter Change than ensuring that the people will be able to withstand and be less adversely affected by other natural calamities in the future.

How typical. Typhoons may come and go, but some things (like this blasted government!) never change.