The British were impressed.
James Walton, who had sailed for 16 years, couldn’t believe what he saw in Panay when he landed there last month. “Just the sheer strength of the communities on these small tiny islands that have withstood a wave that was 4 to 5 meters high, have lost everything and still wake up in the morning, smiling and getting on with their lives—that sheer strength of community I’ve never seen anywhere else, ever. It was a rewarding experience … Probably one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had in the Armed Forces.”
His shipmate, Mike Utley, put it this way: “I went ashore every single day, to the places that we were operating in, and everywhere I went, everyone smiles, despite the sometimes horrific destruction. You know, 90 to 95 percent of their homes were destroyed. They still smile, they still want it to work, they were proud of the lifestyle they had and they wanted to get that back. You know, that’s inspiring for anybody.”
Accompanying our story on this was a photograph of mostly shirtless young adults playing basketball on an improvised board-and-hoop amid the teeming shambles, the storm having reduced the neighborhood into a huge garbage dump. The kids wore effort in lieu of smiles on their faces, taking their game pretty seriously. They seemed oblivious to the spectacle of devastation around them.
I caught a glimpse of this spirit myself some weeks ago. I saw a huge group of Taclobanons one Sunday noon gathered at a house in Quezon City. They had fled the city temporarily, their homes had been turned into wreckage and they had no idea when they would be going back. They had become dependent on the kindness of kin at least, if not of strangers, seeking shelter with them in various corners of the metropolis. Thankfully, a month before Christmas, they hadn’t been turned away from the inn.
While the adults gathered among themselves telling stories with the aid of bahalina and other libation, the kids gathered around a videoke which was playing on a TV. Before long they were singing the songs they knew, vying with one another for the microphone. And before long they were dancing to the beat of the more danceable music. The first thing I thought of was, thank God for the recuperative powers of youth. The second thing I thought of was, thank God for one of the most musical people on earth, neither hell nor high water could keep them away from their laughter, not an earthquake or a supertyphoon could keep them away from their song.
Arguably, this is not without its downside. I’ve often wondered if our ability to smile through our tears was a sign of fortitude or really just an acceptance of the fickleness of the terms of our existence, we are able to come to terms with death so easily. Or the tears well up in our eyes so copiously but dry up so swiftly, too.
Only recently, that point was driven home to me by our lack of hue and cry over the bus that tore out of the Skyway in Sucat and plunged into a van below, killing 18 people, 17 in the bus and one in the van. The incident merited mention in the world news, the number of dead from the accident being quite startling. We did show some interest in it, it was on TV and the papers for a few days, but that was all.
I myself kept thinking about the passengers in that bus, and indeed the occupants of the van, waking up at the crack of dawn to go about their daily business of eking out a living, probably dreaming of the things they could buy their children this Christmas with a bit of luck and extra income. Only to never come home again, only to never see their loved ones again. It’s enough to make you cry, it’s enough to make you mad.
Can it be that the plenitude of death and dying around us has inured us to it? You have to wonder if it’s indomitability of spirit or that overused word, resilience, that allows us to get past grief blithely or magnificently, devastated in possessions but not so in emotions, or just a variation of the bishops’ favorite advice to us when disaster of epic proportions, natural or manmade, strikes us: “Let’s move on.” Who knows? Maybe a little of both.
But I’ll leave this for another day, right now I’ll take my blessings where I can find them. Despite a history of oppression and suffering, or probably because of it, we are not a dolorous people, we are not a brooding people. Smiling through the pain has been our way of coping with it. Of course a great deal of it owes to religion, too. Call it the opium of the masses if you want, but you need opium, or morphine, too, when you are in hellish pain. It does soothe the fevered mind or tortured soul that you believe you will be reunited with the departed some day when you yourself pass on from this vale of tears.
Certainly, we can do with the respite. And it does offer respite, if not joy, to hear the bells ringing for the simbang gabi once again in the ruins that used to be the churches of Tacloban and Iloilo. It does offer respite, if not a sense of fighting back, to hear the tinkling of laughter at least among the kids as a people try to pick up the pieces of broken homes but not very broken lives. It does offer respite, if not triumph—for a while I couldn’t bear to hear Christmas songs in supermarkets, the manufactured cheer seemed artificial amid the desolation in the South—to see and hear the living tell tales of survival and heroism with or without the aid of libation, furiously try to win a basketball game, and gather around a videoke, raising a chorus of voices for Ellen Degeneres at least, if not for God, to hear.
If that’s what it takes to get us out of a tragedy that’s enough to drive people out of their minds, by all means let us smile. By all means let us sing.
And dazzle the world along with it.