The perennial evacuation center

A lot has been said about how typhoons Ondoy, Pepeng and Ramil have revealed the best in us. Overnight, Filipinos mobilized to help those in need. Basketball courts were transformed into repackaging stations. Supermarkets quickly emptied. And never would anyone have guessed that a cup of instant noodles could be such a powerful symbol of hope. But to sustain the relief efforts beyond the temporary, we have to remember that the social and environmental problems these sought to address were not swept in with the storm. We weren’t introduced to them in the past month or year. Rather, we’ve lived with them our whole lives.

I admit to making a mistake that illustrates the point. “So that’s what an evacuation center is like?” I asked after my friend explained the horrible conditions in which typhoon victims were forced to live in. Like pigeonholes or canned sardines, he said. But underlying my question was an assumption that was soon corrected: they weren’t living there just because of some typhoon. Those weren’t temporary evacuation centers that he just described. Those were their actual homes. And we let them live in those pigeonholes, typhoon or no typhoon.

Alas, one silver lining in all this is that Ondoy has energized the movement of advocates and activists who fought for what once seemed like lost causes. Years of trying to raise awareness and shouting into megaphones never yielded a response anywhere like what we see today. Far more effective than reading through graphs modeling the world’s projected weather changes as a result of global warming is actually experiencing those weather changes yourself. Likewise, it’s a lot harder to run away from social issues when the same floods that you find others wading through on TV are happening live in your own living room.

It’s important to note that Ondoy didn’t create these problems. What it did was present them to us in a way that made them unavoidable. We were once comfortable passing by signs of poverty and throwing our trash into clogged canals, knowing the repercussions of our actions but not caring enough to change them. The comfort of our pre-Ondoy surroundings allowed for a certain complacency. With a month’s worth of rain unleashing a flood of biblical proportions upon Metro Manila, it’s safe to say that the complacency is gone.

Still, that complacency can always make a comeback. As floodwaters subside and the whole ordeal retires into memory, we’re in danger of reverting to the old “normal” and letting the relief effort be as temporary as the storm. That misses the point. The real tragedy that we’ve spent the last month addressing wasn’t the effects of a couple storms, but of years neglecting the social and environmental issues that have surfaced in light of it. The real tragedy continues today as victims return to their real homes that at times are no better than evacuation centers.

We’re talking about these problems now, but the irony is that these problems exist regardless of Ondoy. The only difference is that we don’t usually notice them. As the Columbia University Professor Jeffery Sachs writes, “Every day, your newspaper could put on its front page that more than 20,000 people died yesterday because of extreme poverty.” In a way, the typhoons have helped put these people in the headlines, though now, weeks after the typhoons, they are in danger of being forgotten once again.

It’s here that the cynic might say that we’re being too fickle. We were all aware of the injustices of poverty and the warming of our planet long before Ondoy swept into Manila, and yes, there is a long, long list of things that we should have done differently in then, and that we have to make up for now. But in any case, that’s all behind us. Like the African proverb goes, “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago; the second best time is now.” Figuratively or literally, it sounds like a plan.

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