Five of us very senior aquabelles, ladies who do water aerobics, with our young aqua exercise instructor and two very senior husbands, took off for Anvaya Cove for a breather—three absolutely perfect days of exercises in a one-level pool and some feasting, too, and two restful nights.
We shared the rent of a magazine-pretty home with a magnificent view of sky and sea. We escaped the city, sans guilt, not only to relax and enjoy but, perchance, to get a better perspective as well as refuge in philosophy and faith in the company of favorite peers.
Looking over the calm sea, and trying hard to forget we may have given it away already, we listened to the chirping of birds busy building nests somewhere above the roof; they were going about their day-to-day existence as if everything were right with the world. In such paradise, it was indeed easy to forget the turmoil, the injustices, the poverty going around—and even the mysterious coronavirus we precisely had left behind.
Or so we thought, until a message from social media intruded on paradise: The President was to address the public at 6:30 p.m.—he would actually come on two and a half hours later, well after our dinner. Looking unsettled, he began reading from papers handed to him by his sidekick senator, Bong Go. Behind him sat a row of generals. The tableau was as familiar as it was disconcerting.
No contingent plans
No martial law, just a community quarantine, he announced. It was a lockdown, by any other name, under military and police control. Absent were any contingent plans to deal with the repercussions for the daily people wage earners and other poor. Of all people, he thanked Go for, of all things, his hard work, and Xi Jinping.
I felt let down. I had just watched the prime minister of Singapore online, himself a legitimate military officer, in civilian clothes, reporting by himself to Singaporeans. His straightforwardness, his calm tone and his dignified delivery—giving assurances of his government’s best efforts and laying out sensible and thorough plans—must have eased his people’s fears.
We left paradise the next morning, Friday, took a three-hour shopping stop and a late lunch, and arrived very late Friday night due to heavy traffic, itself in turn due perhaps to a race against lockdown.
It was not until the next morning that we learned that our condo had been locked down in quarantine. The Monday of the week we left, a male friend and neighbor in his mid-60s living a floor below us had been taken to the Manila Doctors Hospital. His wife accompanied him. On Sunday morning, a letter from the condo administrator came, saying he had succumbed. His wife, as of this writing, is still quarantined in the same hospital.
Our prompt barangay captain himself accompanied health disinfectors to work on our common areas, especially on the stricken floor, and they have been coming to do more disinfecting and checking.
Equals
In a flash, life, as we knew it, changed, and so must we. Enough of greed, the root of panic buying and hoarding. I don’t want to forget the face of an old man, a tricycle driver desperate to go on working for daily food for his family. In near tears and croaking speech, he protested against being driven off the road and making his desperate living. His pained look and words, caught on television, continue to haunt me: “Ang hirap nang mahirap”—it’s hard to be poor.
How, indeed, can we ignore the likes of him? And it’s not just about the Philippines and our inept or corrupt government and the inordinate accommodation he gives to the Chinese; it is bigger than even that. The novel coronavirus does not discriminate between rich and poor, does not choose race and stature. We are finally made in that sense equals as nature intended.
The common denominator is our being human, and the answer is our sense of humanity. As always, there remains hope and God’s mercy; as random as the pandemic is, there have been more survivals than deaths. The bigger nest
The community quarantine has forced us to stay home indefinitely. Thank God, my husband and I like each other’s company. We can use the time to assess the nest we have built for ourselves and our relationship with each other as well as with other people, and for the moment with our little condo community in common cause—we have only over 30 units.
In the face of the current trials, we might discover how much we can do without and how nice it is to share. Let’s look at the bigger nest, the common home to all of us Filipinos. Where are the masses of poor in the picture? Suddenly, so much money is coming from the very rich, money they had always had to give. Why did it have to take this deadly visitation to be generous, just a little generous? As modestly off as we are, we ourselves feel attacks of conscience.
Shamefully, the opportunity in crisis seems more attractive to some than the humanity. People in power or of influence seem just unable to help curbing their self-interest. One critical aid they take advantage of is the test kits that tell you if you are infected or not.
Test kits are in such shortage that they have to be reserved for those evidently stricken or in danger of having been stricken, like health and other frontline workers. Some high people in government and their families have appropriated them. It is only test kits, not yet the vaccine itself.
We are all in this together, and lessons abound. “No man is an island … Everyman’s death diminishes us all,” John Donne reminds us. From the children in an African tribe who prefer to share among themselves the prize in a mere game, instead of competing for it, there’s the culture of Ubuntu: How can I be happy if everybody else is not?
And from John F. Kennedy: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”