Shortly after President Aquino marked his 100th day in office, in 2010, I wrote a column attempting an analysis of the new commander in chief’s self-evidently well-defined sense of limits. The unfortunate controversy over his decision to omit Tacloban City from his packed schedule commemorating the first anniversary of “Yolanda” over the weekend reminded me of that attempt; perhaps (if you will allow me) it bears a second look.
TACLOBAN CITY, Philippines — Let me do away with bragging rights first. I can proudly say I am one of the toughest persons on earth after surviving the strongest storm ever to make landfall.
Having said that, I will never forget the glass windows of our station exploding in front of us, as if a bomb had gone off, and then the seawater rushing in, flooding the building as it was then the city around us.
Everyone was in a panic not knowing what to do as we tried to save ourselves.
We swam, held on to anything we could, trying to evade flying debris and crashing waves, painfully pounded by the needle-like rain.
THERE is no overstating the fact that on the anniversary of Haiyan what is demanded of us is a reckoning. It should be a time to look honestly at what has been done, what remains neglected, and in what state the survivors have been left. It is a time for truthfully assessing what it was that government did wrong, how – despite insisting that they warned the people of Samar and Leyte about the magnitude of the storm – government itself was unprepared for Haiyan.
I was getting my first dose of chemotherapy on the day Yolanda hit Tacloban, November 8. I was doing research on my fourth novel, William McKinley’s World, about Tacloban and Balangiga in 1901. My veins were dripping steroids and taxol, cytoxan and dexamathosone as I was looking at pictures of the dead killed by American forces in 1901. And when I turned on Facebook, I saw this other horror.