M.B.C. told some of her friends on Messenger that she and others needed help repacking gifts for earthquake survivors who live on islets on Cebu’s northeastern coast.
It was Saturday night, the 4th of October, and the goods — bottled water, bags of rice, canned goods and hygiene kits, among others — were to be taken to the islanders by civilians and members of the navy after midnight at one o’clock.
M.B.C. and her friends worked hard at the donation drop-off point. Nothing but wall-to-wall carpeting and incandescent chandeliers reminded them that they were in a hotel hall. It would have seemed, to a passerby, to be a factory’s packaging center save that everyone burst into cheers and applause as operations leaders periodically shouted out updated bag counts.
Well before the relief convoy’s 1 a.m. departure, the volunteers hit their target of preparing 3,000 brightly colored packs of goods.
The chosen hours for delivery of relief, while unholy, were strategic. In the still of the night, traffic was expected to be lighter. After the magnitude 6.9 temblor struck Bogo City in Cebu’s north and surrounding areas on Sept. 30, the province’s northbound roads had been clogged with vehicles loaded with essentials for multitudes who had just lost their homes and were compelled by thousands of aftershocks to bivouac under rainy-season skies.
The traffic, some netizens said, signified widespread skepticism of the government’s ability, on its own, to handle relief operations. Volunteers would rather personally transport aid to beneficiaries than course it through a bureaucracy behind which they would be unsure where their gifts would end up.
History must have prompted reasonable skepticism.
In 2018, countless boxes of donations from Belgium, Norway and the United States were burned by personnel of the Bureau of Customs in Cebu. They were declared abandoned after they were shipped in 2014 for survivors of 2013’s Yolanda or Haiyan, the strongest typhoon to hit land. Donors failed to comply, the government said, with some requirements for the release of their giveaways.
In 2014, more than 7,000 family food packs for typhoon survivors got wet and were spoiled because they were not covered during transportation between Cebu and Tacloban cities. The value of the food was estimated at P2.8 million.
No citizen may be blamed for choosing, motu proprio, to help after disaster strikes. Government assurances of perfect performance, which history has negatively prejudged, cannot undo this choice. And regardless of what happened, the human urge to help is not, in the main, a pronouncement of the state of governance but a fruit of compassion and solidarity in the heart.
To try to ease the road snarl, amid which Cebu City volunteers have reported taking up to 11 hours to transport aid, the Cebu Provincial Government and other leaders have urged concerned citizens to refrain as much as possible from traveling to northern Cebu and to collaborate with the government as the lead agent of aid distribution.
Details of public-private partnership in post-earthquake relief and rehabilitation must be ironed out fast. We are not short of bright ideas. Students and young people have been in the lead in developing information and communications technologies to locate needy places and track relief. Telecommunications and power companies must do their share in enabling these technological solutions. The use of Cebu’s sea corridors for swifter conveyance of goods to the north should have been a priority at the outset.
In the suddenness of the earthquake, anyone who would listen has been reminded, in the words of new Cebu Archbishop Alberto Uy, that the time to love is now. This is why the Cebuano and Cebuana did not waste time in conducting relief operations. Today, they are called to collaborate to the best of their abilities to rebuild northern Cebu. When the time comes, they will properly mourn and honor and remember the loved ones they lost. And because love is universal and universality touches people of all places and times, the Cebuano will bid the government to have some love for the people of the future. They will ask questions in the service of love:
We live on the seismologically active Pacific Ring of Fire. Why do we not strictly enforce earthquake-proofing in regulating housing and other construction?
We live on an island marked by faults. Why do we not have the concentration of storehouses with prepositioned relief goods that we should have had?
Our fault-riddled geography is an admonition to constant vigilance. Why do we not have more frequent earthquake drills, more ubiquitous signposts to gathering places in case of emergency and more such gathering places instead of dense, unplanned conurbations where nearly every square meter of land is private property, up for sale, poorly tended, or the site of some building?