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I come from a beautiful city. The cleanest one in the metro. A fine city with good people, the best pancit and the biggest shoe ever created. A city painted pink, because pink is a fresh and clean color. Every morning, mamang taho comes by with a smile on his face to bring us fresh taho for breakfast. Whenever we hear a squeaky bike horn outside our gate, that just means that Kuya’s come in from Olandes with freshly baked pan de sal to sell. Whenever my neighbors and I feel bad, we go down to the Riverbanks to unwind and to buy ourselves french fries. Marikina is my home.

Then Typhoon Ondoy came.

Every morning, I wake up to the drone of low-flying aircraft and government choppers hovering over Marikina. Leaving the village gates is like going through a warp zone. All the houses just outside my village are soaked in mud with their belongings strewn outside to dry. At one point there were janitor fish on the sidewalk, swept in from the river. Everyone on the streets, the walking dead. The Marcos Highway, a muddy parking lot. Don’t even ask what Provident looks like. The riverside is a brown wasteland, with people standing on the sidewalk with cups in their hands, asking for spare change. The trees that weren’t washed away by the current look like grotesque mockeries of Christmas trees, with trash strewn on its branches instead of tinsel. Brick walls were demolished to the ground, exposing the skeletons of buildings covered in mud.

My city is now a wasteland. My pink pastel city is now a muddy brown.

My friends and family have lost their homes to the flood. My grandmother, aunt, cousins and niece lost their home in Provident, and are currently staying with my other aunt in our village. I’m not the only person who had family that lost everything because of the freak storm.

This is the kind of stuff we read about in the newspapers and see on National Geographic, but tend to ignore because we think that it will never come close to us. When it does, we can barely believe it. This time, it just hit way too close to home.

I will not stand for anyone who makes off-color comments about the storm and its aftermath. During times like these, I believe that we must all count our blessings and be happy to be alive instead of poking fun at others’ expense. I believe we should all band together to help a brother out because in one way or another, someone we know has been affected by the storm. If we could set aside all our hubris for just a moment and take the time to really understand what’s going on, it would motivate people to help out even just a little bit.

Someone’s grandmother died. Someone’s relative lost their house and all their worldly possessions. Could be mine, could be yours. No amount of money will ever be able to replace the loss of life brought about by Typhoon Ondoy.

Yesterday, mamang taho made his rounds. I noticed that as he filled our bowls with fresh taho that the gleam in his eyes was gone, replaced by a big emptiness. Standing in neck-deep water for fifteen hours does that to you. I’m still waiting for our pan de sal guy to toot his horn outside our gate, because I’ll take it as a sign that things will somehow be okay. Today, my auntie went with my mother to the grocery, dressed in clothes and shoes that I had given her, telling me about her daughter who just got a managerial position at a restaurant in Timog. Things like these, they give me hope. Hope that somehow, things will be okay. My heart goes out to everyone who was affected by the storm, especially my brothers and sisters in Marikina, Pasig and Cainta. We’re all looking out for you.