By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
As I was telling a taxi driver who was complaining about how difficult life was this rainy season, we are still luckier than the farmers whose crops were decimated by the typhoon. We in the city are, chances are, daily wage earners. Or we have sources of livelihood not dependent on having to wait for months before you find out if you gained or not.
A farmer has to borrow money, usually at usurious interest, to come up with the necessary inputs for a planting season. Before that he had to spend about a month preparing his field. After planting, he has to care for his plants as he waits for these to mature and become harvestable. All in all, it would take around 4 to 5 months before he could reap the fruits of his labor. At any time during that period, a typhoon could come and flatten or destroy his crops. He would then be holding an empty bag with a number of creditors coming to call on his debts. He would be hounded day and night. It would take him months again before he could replant and then wait again for months. In the interim what would his family eat?
They would of course survive, no matter what, even if the kids would have protruding guitar like ribs due to malnutrition.
For us in the city, if we have low takes for the day, we console ourselves with the thought things might be better the next day or the next week. And often, they will be.
So as I got down the cab, I told the cabbie, we are still lucky and we should be grateful for whatever we have, even if not much. He nodded and said thank you for the small change from my fare I did not bother to take to serve as his tip.
The other week when we were enduring the wrath of Typhoon Egay, there was no electricity as expected. Everybody was going crazy as the remaining powers of our gadgets were slowly dwindling until most of us in the house declared “lowbat, ” even the power banks. What if an emergency arose?
Last resort would have been SM City Baguio. Luckily when we dropped by first at the office to check if our office was not flooded, we noticed the café downstairs had a generator. So our cellphones came alive. And our office was relatively dry, our records were intact.
During those “blackout” nights with no internet, we noticed a good thing, as so many others might have. The kids were forced to talk with each other and laughed together. No more being individualistic, tucked in bed or in some corner, each to his own world, glued to their respective cellphones or gadgets. We became a family again.
Indeed, there is a positive aspect of even the worst of situations.
Others experienced this in a different way. With refrigerators starting to defrost on their own, mothers and grandmothers had to bring out and cook their priced meats and other goodies and cook them before they got spoiled. Suddenly, the menfolk had so much “pulotan” and had a grand time as even the corner sari-sari stores were still too far from running out of liquor. As they became rowdy with jokes and laughter, they also found out it was nice to be a family again.
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