HOW we remember our storms can help us survive. Think back to the days after Yolanda struck this country in its core. How are we different now? How are we stronger?
On an objective level, Yolanda/Haiyan was the worst storm of our generation. The typhoon damaged or destroyed 1,140,332 houses in the 13 hours that it churned over the Visayas on that Nov. 8 four years ago. It also left 6,300 dead, according to the national disaster council’s final report on the calamity. As of that writing in November 2013, about 1,062 were missing and 28,688 others, injured.
Yolanda/Haiyan destroyed P5.77 billion worth of public infrastructure, crops or farm equipment, and other productive facilities (warehouses and markets, factories and poultry coops) in six regions. That made it, easily, the most destructive of the 720 cyclones that plagued the Philippines from 1970 to 2013.
And yet when I think of Yolanda now, I remember the long lines of vehicles that filled the highway to northern Cebu for several weekends after that, loaded with food, clothes, water, and construction materials for relatives or strangers who had survived. I remember the private citizens who, after work or school, went to crowded and overheated centers to help bag the food and other goods that were meant to ease some unknown family’s pain. To be sure, there was a sense of helplessness and dread in the earliest days. “Good luck to all of us,” we said. And yet, despite what at first felt like impossible odds, we were lucky indeed.
This is the gift that is also our curse. Our memories are short and selective. Most of us have forgotten about the thousands who struggled to keep their heads above water when that surge swept into Tacloban, their limbs scarred by the broken trees, iron bars, and dead or dying animals that whirled among them. Remember the survivors, if you want to stay sane. And if they survived then, why stop them from building again in the same dangerous shores on which their homes once stood? What we choose to forget can save us, and at the same time make us weaker.
You think something as huge as Yolanda would make us more mindful. And for a while, it did. Yet today, I still burn fuel on my drive to and from work, still use single-use plastic products like bottled water and sandwich bags, still consume far more than I ought to, because the consequences of these mindless behaviors seem distant. Or maybe because when I remember Yolanda, I remember mostly the sense of neighborly support and generosity that surfaced in the storm’s wake.
It’s the same thing with Ruping, which I remember more vividly although it struck 23 years before Yolanda did. It caused far less damage, but felt more personal. Ruping, known abroad as Mike, damaged or destroyed 7,240 houses. The wind yanked 11 sheets of galvanized iron off our roof, and as soon as it stopped howling, we went out into streets filled with our neighbors and retrieved those sheets. Like our neighbors, we got all of these back.
We did lose two shelves worth of my mother’s collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, which we spread out all over the garden to dry but couldn’t save from mildew and rot. Two days after the storm, a lechon my parents had ordered for my birthday arrived because there was no time to cancel it, the phones being down and there being other, more urgent matters to attend to, like fetching water every evening. Since there was no power yet either, we chopped the lechon up into one-kilo portions and drove around to deliver them to friends. It remains one of my favorite birthdays to date.
How we remember our storms helps define how we’ll prepare for the next one. All at once, the memory of our survival keeps us vulnerable, yet also keeps us steady.