The aftermath

Last Wednesday afternoon I had dropped off the last of my old laptop accessories at the shop in Magallanes, rain dripping off the end of my nose and little drops spraying around me as I shook off my umbrella. "You’re lucky, you just made it," one of the guys in the store told me. "I’m lucky?" I questioned trying to dry off as much as possible and hoping I didn’t get sick. "Yeah," he added. "A storm’s coming. You made it just before it arrives." I nodded with a polite smile thinking, yeah, I guess that makes me lucky but the constant fall of rain over the last few days kind of made me think otherwise.

I kind of dismissed the comment. Then Thursday morning came, my mom walked into my room at around seven telling me to get up and charge all the tech gadgets that needed charging because a storm was indeed coming. I shook her off with the usual you-know-I-don’t-function-before-eleven wave of my hand and thought okay, even if we lose power it’s bound to come back eventually. Huge mistake! This storm they were both talking about, now famously or rather infamously known by everyone as "Milenyo," and which I had dismissed, hit the Philippines with a vengeance that day causing devastation the likes of which I haven’t seen in a very long time. Trees uprooted, billboards reduced to shreds, and disasters of every variety among the poor people caught in nature’s furious path.

To say the storm was bad would be a grave understatement, but I think that equally as bad as the storm ravaging the city was the terrible aftermath and the slow road to recovery. I’m actually writing this column as I sit in the airport waiting to board a plane for the United States remembering how last Wednesday I was thinking I could finish all my last-minute errands over the weekend before departing on Sunday. That, of course, proved to be much harder than I had originally planned seeing as how Milenyo cut off the electricity as early as Thursday morning twisting, cutting, and generally destroying power lines all over Metro Manila. The phone lines were not spared either and even the beloved mobile phone, which everyone relies on, was left crippled when server networks went down. Basically, it was a quick trip back to the Medieval Ages and we all suddenly found ourselves, literally, groping in the dark.

I know everyone can relate. We haven’t had blackouts like that since the ’90s (Thank God!) and as the sun slowly began to set on Thursday while Milenyo made its exit, leaving as its only form of consolation a bit of cool breeze, we found ourselves in the dark, in the heat, and without a clue when things were going to get back to normal. My mom and I took refuge in her room, as my folks have large balcony doors which offered a slight breeze that kept us from melting, and took turns between falling asleep and listening to her mini battery-powered Jollibee radio for the latest updates on the power and the phone lines.

I kept thinking to myself that it was only going to be a few more hours before the power came back, especially since the winds and rains had finally stopped. Had it been bright enough for me to see the devastation outside I might have seriously rethought that wishful hope. In either case, as the minutes slowly ticked away and nothing happened, we found ourselves getting more and more bored by the minute. The only thing to do was eat, and as I try to avoid carbohydrates in general, I ended up munching on ground beef taco meat that my mom made and refried beans. Not exactly the ideal snack.

But then again, no conditions are ever ideal during a storm. Finally, that night, when my dad came home and the entire family was in darkness and boredom we decided to just play games to pass the time. We ended up playing Monopoly and as we can all be quite competitive we played pretty ruthlessly. It was fun, actually, and the first time our family had done something like that in a very long time. My mom ended up winning that night and though I had managed to finagle Park Place from my dad and build some houses on the most expensive lots on the board, it was too late to go up against the stacks of play money my mother had already amassed.

Afterwards, we all retired to our rooms and bunked down for the night. It’s strange because even though I regularly sleep with the lights off, during the power outage, when all the lights were completely off, I couldn’t sleep a wink. I alternated between lying in my bed, aimlessly walking around the house doing nothing, talking on the phone (Thank God our phone lines worked), and carefully working on my laptop, slowly rationing my battery every time I flipped it on just in case the power didn’t come back as soon as I thought it would.

Being in the dark really got me thinking, though. I thought about how, even in this technological age when everything is available to us at the push of a button, we’re helpless when we don’t have electricity. Without power, nothing works! We may have battery life in certain gadgets but even that runs out as we all learned when the blackout lasted far longer than the one day that people had anticipated. As I was looking for things to do at home during those hours without electricity, I constantly drew a blank. I could only read for a few minutes before the light from the flashlight began to hurt my eyes. I couldn’t even take a decent bath as the water flow at our house was also reduced because the water pump needed power to distribute water to the second floor.

It’s amazing how we feel so technologically advanced and how everything is easy and accessible, yet one fierce storm can quite easily drive everyone back to the dark ages (literally) for over three days. Even the malls – the people’s usual last bastion for air conditioning and power – were not spared. They were running on emergency capacity and weren’t much better than being at home. It really was unbelievable. A day after the storm when I went out and tried to run some errands, I noticed long lines everywhere I went: a gas station, a grocery, an ATM. It was like people were emerging from their underground bunkers and slowly restarting their lives. And all this after a storm that lasted roughly a day. Imagine if the typhoon had been here longer? Would there have been anything left after the rains died down?

Just like in the wake of every great natural calamity, people slowly rebuild. Whether the power came back in one day or two or three, it would assuredly only be a matter of time before things finally started getting back to normal. One big lesson, though, which I’m sure the experience has all reminded us of is this: no matter how advanced or indestructible we think we are, in the end we all bow down to Mother Nature.