Aftermath

I have no idea how to start this blog, so I will start with my own current situation. I’m at work, in a temporary office where my computer screen is visible to anyone who walks down the hall. I leave the Philippines in three days for the next leg of this half-year journey. I’m listening to George Winston’s “December.” Usually, Thanksgiving marks when I begin listening to this album, because it reminds me of driving home in the dark and the snow from Thanksgiving at my relatives’ house, listening to the sounds of the piano and linking them inextricably with happy feelings of the holiday season. I listened to it in college when I was missing out on all the Christmas celebrations in New York City, busy toiling away on final papers. I listened to it in Micronesia when I missed Thanksgiving for the first time and was looking forward to spending Christmas on the beach with my family in Guam. I’m listening to it now, because it’s snowing in New York and I want to be a part of that, despite the relentless hazy, humid heat outside my office. Beyond that, I guess, I want to think of my home and force myself to feel a constant gratitude for it while other people struggle with the reality that theirs have disappeared.

Last weekend in Manila, we had about an hour’s worth of heavy rain and wind. I was almost excited to step out into the typhoon weather, and watch the squall from a café window. It was just a passing burst of a storm, and then it was over with a pointed definitiveness. But in the aftermath of it all, as numbers and statistics and stories incessantly roll in, this impression of finality has quickly faded. I want to make this tragedy personal because it is so close to me, but it really isn’t. I was oblivious to the chaos that was happening while I was out to dinner, drinking poorly made mojitos, wishing my jeans weren’t wet to the calves. During my short time in the Philippines, there has been more than any country’s fair share of crises: typhoons every other week, armed conflict in Zamboanga, and the Bohol earthquake. None of them, I imagine, made many headlines outside the Philippines despite their terrible and widespread effects. But everyone back home, in their concern and their confusion, wondered if the thing they did hear about, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, had any immediate impact on me. I want to say that it did, because it’s what I feel is expected. But just like the humanitarian crisis a few hours’ flight south of me, and just like the earthquake that violently rocked a place I had visited just two weeks before it happened, Haiyan’s effects just leave me feeling heavy and disoriented, in a powerless and ignorant kind of way.

I want to illustrate how I feel about Haiyan, but have been wildly unsure how to do that, because my feelings are tumultuous and complicated. My colleague and friend put it well to me saying she feels no different here – an hour’s plane ride away from mass devastation –  than if she were back home in the States, thousands of miles removed from it. Oh, another big typhoon in South East Asia, what are the chances.

If my petty frustration over the potential for my weekend plans to be ruined by the rain is any indication, I unwittingly feel the same way. I am so much closer in proximity, but there is still a deep and cavernous distance separating me from it. I feel a very detached sense of sadness, the kind you feel after hearing about any sort of disastrous third world event. The only thing really tethering me to this particular tragedy is that I have been to these places, and met a good number of people in them. I keep thinking especially of our boat drivers in Coron, the first place I visited in the Philippines for a quick holiday, and their houses that they happily pointed out to us, situated right by the shore. Now in Coron, 14,000 people are without homes; most of them were destroyed.  

2.5 people need food. Everyone needs water. There is no health service delivery, no schools open, in some places no way to communicate. 4 million people have had their livelihoods and sources of income destroyed. 50,000 women face gender based violence. Thousands of children have been displaced.

Usually, the numbers are just numbers; to me and to everyone who can’t comprehend what it is to be immersed in catastrophe. Listing them does little but overwhelm or inspire sympathy. 11.3 million people affected; almost 700,000 displaced. Reports of death tolls from the hundreds to upwards of 10,000. These numbers are too large to be fathomable. But now they represent people I’ve met in places I have been to, and that’s an entirely different sensation. I can’t consider the sums, because I can’t wrap my brain around what they really mean – how vast the devastation is and how many people have become just faceless figures in these stacks of statistics piled into towers of categories and databases. I can only consider the people to whom I can put a face, and wonder where they are, and imagine what has happened or could happen still, and that is heart wrenching enough.  

I don’t really know how to react. Talking about it, listening to reports and anecdotes, volunteering, donating… these things are meant to make me feel closer to something that is still so far away from me, and better about the fact that I have something to offer. I obviously want to help, but how much can I really do, and how much of it is for me more than it is for the people that need it? It’s difficult sometimes not to reinterpret altruism as self-righteousness, or to feel like anything short of delivering immunizations or rescuing a child from a pile of debris is ultimately superfluous, even when it’s not. These are all part of the complexity of things I’m feeling: how much is too much, or too little? How intensely should I feel, and how do I really feel? Am I actually helping, or just trying to assuage my own sense of powerlessness?

In Manila, just like back in New York, things bustle on as usual. There’s little change. People wonder how I am feeling about all of it, physically and emotionally.  They shake their heads at the tragedy and at the numbers, rising every day. But if we saw the face behind each of those numbers, if we were forced to confront each of the millions, how deep into us would our sympathy dig? How much would our compassion and sadness be intensified? The only thing that draws me to this in a very personal way are the people and places to which I’ve become connected in the short lengths of time I have spent with them. I can’t imagine compounding this by the thousands; it exhausts me to try and measure the loss.