An explanation too difficult to accept

Where there is smoke, there is fire. I do not know who authored this line if, at all, it was a product of a deliberate attempt at a literary venture. For all we know, this could only be an Anglican counterpart of the Cebuano quote "kon dunay aso, dunay kayo''. However this line evolved, I saw its physical manifestation few days ago.

There was this news that the honorable Secretary Dinky Soliman of the Department of Social Welfare and Development was to write her reaction to an embarrassing news story that allegedly got published in a British tabloid. The report said that she would belie the accusations that some of the relief goods, apparently from Great Britain, found their way to a mall in Metro Manila. It was the official function of the DSWD secretary to bare the facts because no anomaly would be more humiliating than to see goods, supposedly given free to typhoon victims, sold in the open market. If the indictment were true, theft was a small part of the equation. Our national pride being at stake, the author should be shot at the fabled Luneta Park, like a Chinese drug trader, in the Martial Law days.

If we were to believe Secretary Soliman, it never happened that relief goods were sold by blood-sucking businessmen and not given free to identifiable beneficiaries. Personally, I was on her side. The act, if true, was unthinkable. I could not believe that any Filipino had the heart to siphon, from identified distribution centers, goods intended by foreign donors as help to typhoon victims, and openly offer them for sale. Certainly everybody would agree with me the alleged act of stealing those goods was not only stupid, it was a form of national betrayal deserving every Filipino's ire.

Unfortunately, there was a semblance of "kon dunay aso, dunay kayo''. While it was a local scene, it somehow gave substance to the otherwise malicious indictment made by foreign media against national leadership. What was the "aso"? By quirk of accident, it came out as a real smoke, as if wholly intended. If, in fact, it metamorphosed into a poetic justice of some kind, there could be none better.

Shortly after a fire gutted down some houses in a barangay here in Cebu City, an evacuation center of sort was set up. Not long after firemen controlled the conflagration, relief operations personnel began their designated task perhaps, unmindful that there were still some red-hot embers. Unlike previous disasters, the response of the city authorities was both efficient and amazingly fast. Did they get their expertise from the relief operations they conducted for the victims of the earthquake in Bohol? Or did they learn this skill from helping typhoon Yolanda victims get back on their feet?

I like to presume it was the Cebu City government that put the temporary shelter up because the calamity hit this city. Naturally, reporters highlighted the event as historic in proportion, if speed were the standard. It was not easy to put up the evacuation center that fast.

It was when tv cameras zoomed in on one of the makeshift shelters that made me reflect on the issue Sec. Soliman was about to take. What I saw was a tent, so spotless in appearance that I concluded it was brand new. Across its face were some written characters that could only be alien. Below them were words indicating that those tents were given by the Red Cross organization in China.

At the back of my mind, the question was simple. How could the Chinese Red Cross know that only the day before fire burned several houses in Cebu City such that it could immediately fly to Cebu from China tents to be put up as evacuation center for the said victims? Unless they employed Clark Kent, it was just impossible to react that quickly. So, I could only conclude that those tents could form part of the relief goods intended for Yolanda victims.

Having made that observation, it dawned on me that the accusation of some British relief goods being sold in some malls in Metro Manila might have some truth. The justification that here in Cebu City, the relief items were not sold but used differently, for another calamity, is just difficult to accept.