I left for Thailand Monday after the deluge. The whole length of EDSA leading to the airport was clear of floodwater and traffic was smooth. I wrongly thought the worst was over. As news from my hotel room in Bangkok came, I realized the extent of the crisis. Many of the missing and the dead still have to be traced. Many homes, bridges and crops were damaged. The logistical requirement of feeding millions deprived of shelter and food was astronomical.

Although most of the images shown in CNN, BBC, Al Jazeerah and other cable news stations were urban poor or lower class areas, this great flood was at least, for a day, a leveler. It did not choose between rich and poor. In their middle-class community in Novaliches, my brother’s children and wife fled to the nearby public school as the street flood rose and entered their home when water from La Mesa dam was released. Provident Village in Marikina and Grand Villas in Quezon City, where several people were killed, was home to the upper middle-class. I shuddered upon learning from my high school e-group that the brother of a former classmate was among the victims in Provident. I had visited this classmate’s house one or two times with other friends during high school.

I don’t remember the brother but I do remember the pretty village.

True, the rich lost more in terms of property and prospective income but the poor will invariably suffer more. They do not have the network of kin and friends with the resources to help them rebuild their lives. They don’t have the savings to dip into. They will have to count on the sympathy of strangers to recover or at least to survive the day. It is this stranger-love that we see now animating the many volunteers in the different centers.

This giving of succor to the stranger beyond family and friends is what humanity and citizenship are all about. Humanity, to prosper, entails empathy for fellow humans. Empathy is not the same as pity, as Milan Kundera so painstakingly elaborated in his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Pity, of course, is also a useful human emotion that could effect the same response (such as giving donations) from one who feels and enjoys an advantage in a given situation. But empathy is sourced from a deeper sense of affinity for fellow humans since it transcends or is not defined by the social, moral, political or circumstantial inequity in the situation. Citizenship, on the other hand, is seen when “nameless” Filipinos take on the cudgels to aid “faceless” Filipinos, in the process sharing the burden and responsibility for the nation’s well-being.

So what was I doing in a five-star hotel, overfed from the huge meals served at the conference while many people have to line up for hours for their measly ration? I felt helpless and so far away from home. Despite the huge soft pillows of the king-size bed in the hotel that made rest so inviting, sleep eluded me at night. I was depressed.

I was depressed although in fact we were lucky that our house is on higher ground than the road, in a sloping area that ensured water would run down. The only direct personal inconvenience I suffered was to get stuck inside the university campus last September 26 with many other people in a cafe that was fast running out of food to serve. I can only imagine the depth of depression of people who lost most everything, big and small in significance, except their lives.

And while we grapple with the psychosocial dimension of tragedies, the more basic questions are pressing on us, like water trying to breach the dam. Beyond the food and warm clothes for the body today, how can we create jobs or mobilize capital to help people rebuild their lives with dignity through work? How do we more strategically prepare ourselves to cope with all the disasters that have yet to come?

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There are practical survival tips we are learning from this experience. Those people who got stranded on the roofs or upper floors of their houses had no food or drinking water to keep them by for the long wait for rescue or rescinding of the flood. So next time, do bring water jugs and biscuits with you, if time and wits allow. Many people are seriously thinking of having a boat in their house, or at least equipping their municipalities or barangay offices with these lifesavers, especially if the wet side of climate change persists. We saw that trucks are useless in heavily flooded terrain.

A more practical option would be to keep life vests, styrofoam boards, other floaters and ropes handy in the house. And yes, better make sure there are exits leading to the roofs from the upper floors. It is absolutely not safe to crawl and hide in the ceiling. And can the electric, telephone, and cable companies please tidy up all the lines hanging on the posts for people’s safety, even on regular days?

While some of these measures can be done at the level of family, community measures can help prevent more losses for everyone. Barangays must institute a functional early warning system against flash floods or the threat of landslides. Text messaging, sirens and even the pesky neighborhood karaoke joints can be mobilized for this early warning, and subsequently monitoring roles. We’ll need volunteer neighborhood corps with training on disaster response in communities. And certainly we have to ensure that the canals and drainage are always clear, and garbage properly disposed. Do our part and penalize those who don’t.

Somehow, despite this age of mobility and spatial rootlessness, we have to get back that special feeling of shared fate with our immediate neighborhood.

E-mail: mcf178@yahoo.com