Sun.Star Essay: New Year resolutions

Saturday, December 31, 2011

A DAY and just a few more hours after the flash floods occurred following the Sendong storm two weeks ago, a mortuary in Cagayan de Oro city made known to its clients that they were running out of coffins for children, even as the owners worried about having only five embalmers (each one normally able to prepare only one dead body in four hours), also as mortuaries in the area are perhaps now running out of embalming formaldehyde.

We’re not talking here of chemical preserving compounds but of the lives of children lost in just a bit over a day. In their minds, they were perhaps preparing for Christmas; their parents getting the children happily ready for it, even in simple, inexpensive but loving ways. That was a few hours before the disaster.
Read about it in the front pages.

Have something to report? Tell us in text, photos or videos.

Or watch the disaster as seen by only one disaster victim, like the head of a family in Cagayan de Oro. The man said the water came inside the house fast and the family had to rush to the second floor. But the dirty water continued rising, so the family climbed up to the ceiling. Still the water’s rush didn’t seem to stop, as though aiming to grow in quiet waves up to the ceiling, so the family moved farther through an opening the man made in the roof.

The water finally stopped rising a foot before the ceiling, the man said.

Safe for the moment up on the roof, the family stayed for hours up there before relief came.

This is a story of a family whose version of the disaster may be considered slight compared to the other cases of horrifying deaths, even of those missing, especially children in Cagayan de Oro, Iligan city and Negros Oriental.

As the man talked on television during this interview, he said no one was hurt in his family. But on this gloomy day in the city and the country, he was sad and happy, thankful for the safety of his loved ones but… At this point during the interview, he broke down, his voice cracking.

And the problem is not only lack of coffins for children but one regarding how to find and identify the bodies and where to bury all the dead (as of press time 1,200 bodies found). Some authorities thought of a mass burial, others did not agree for it would be like loved ones losing their special identities.

Of course, there are the other problems, both of the living and the dead. Health, food, clothes, shelter. And hundreds more of the people haven’t been found even while there are more and more bodies uncovered as they’re washed ashore or when dug up.

What’s more, everything else isn’t working—electricity doesn’t work, and there is not enough water to use, for drinking or for the embalming process, while mortuaries in the area got a total of about 200 bodies in the first hours of the disaster.

The sad sight of destruction and hopelessness is happening as the year ends and another begins.

With the New Year coming in, we have a chance to help our neighbors and ourselves, consider what we forgot to do, or even what we just promised to do in the year before now.

We could let our New Year’s resolutions go beyond the personal matter in goals and reforms although the culture is about a promise that a person makes to himself alone.

Let’s go further than the usual pledges to resolve as a year ends and another begins—not just losing weight for health, exercising regularly, quitting smoking, sleeping well.

How about a people (as we are individuals) making resolutions for the New Year on the protection of nature which is abused and exploited and now hitting back? When you consider the anger of a nature not treated fairly, and the disasters that come our way, we need to resolve to help save our communities.

The outlook of people and the government should be to preserve nature— save the environment, like reduce and control logging and mining, live away from waterways, carpool with friends, or walk, recycle the recyclable….

Let’s try and make firm resolutions, for new beginnings for our children.

Not only this year.

(ecuizon@gmail.com)