During extreme events that upend our collective life, we should also be concerned about each other’s mental, spiritual and psychological health aside from the urgent need for food, clothing and shelter. After all, emergencies require attention to both the corporeal and the psychological. 

The intensity of the southwest monsoon rains exacerbated by Supertyphoon “Carina” (Gaemi) last month triggered memories of when Tropical Storm “Ondoy” (Ketsana) caused widespread flooding in Metro Manila in September 2009. The Pasig River tributary near our home in Manila overflowed, and we had to wade through thigh-high floodwaters to retreat to the second floor.

I was visiting my parents at that time. Almost as soon as the roads were cleared, I returned to Baguio City—higher ground where, I thought, as bad a flooding could not possibly happen. About a week later, Typhoon “Pepeng” (Parma) poured rain nonstop on most of the Cordillera region.

Everything was cold and wet, and the musty smell permeated my small rented room and the entire house in Baguio that I shared with four other boarders. I lived on the second floor, in a neighborhood with plenty of pine trees. Whenever there was a break in the rain, complete silence reigned, as if even the birds were holding their breath. But as soon as I let myself get comfortable with the possibility that the rain had stopped, the pitter-patter on the galvanized roof resumed, then grew to a crescendo.

I felt like Chandler or Joey from the TV series “Friends,” looking out the window as rain poured outside.

But we had enough food in the house somehow, and I was able to take walks in our shared living spaces to break the monotony. Electricity came and went as the wind slammed more water against the house. That lasted for six or seven straight days. 

Cabin fever

By Day 4 or 5 I was getting desperate, wondering when or if this onslaught of rain and wind would ever end. Then I thought about the other people who were undergoing the same, or even worse, experience in flooded urban areas or in landslide-prone communities.

I touched base with fellow volunteers with whom, in the past, I conducted community and school activities in Benguet, Ifugao and Mountain Province, such as sessions on voter education, leadership training, and journalism workshops. I asked them how they were. We were all afflicted with cabin fever and miserable with being without sunlight. 

This was before the technology of Zoom, so we couldn’t even find solace in a virtual meeting room. I proposed an idea: As soon as the rain stopped (because surely it had to stop at some point), we should find a way to conduct some sort of counseling sessions with people in Benguet and Mountain Province.

Somehow, through networks, we were included in a group facilitated by the Sunflower Children’s Center of Saint Louis University (SLU), which provides psychotherapeutic counseling services. They were already planning to hold psychosocial Interventions with children in certain areas, and welcomed volunteers. As soon as the rain stopped, we attended a crash course in psychosocial Interventions conducted by the Baguio-Benguet chapter of the Philippine Mental Health Association.

When in dire straits, we reach out to one another to share some humanity—pakikipagkapwa. Looking at and seeing others as fellow human beings, we are reassured that we are not alone and that there are other people who care for our welfare. 

Admittedly, we volunteers were all still reeling and none of us felt fully equipped to provide adequate care. But having shared the traumatic experience with our would-be “clients,” we at least felt capable of empathy with them.

We collected donations of recreation play sets and art supplies from individuals and SLU’s Medical Outreach Mission Fellowship Initiative as well as volunteer organizations Ako Mismo and Youth Alliance Philippines-Northern Luzon. 

But the incessant rainfall had caused massive landslides, making the roads inaccessible to vehicles, so it took a few more weeks before we made it to the evacuation centers. Along the way we saw mounds of earth, rubble, and all kinds of debris, and roads with entire sections missing, as if they had been lopped off.

Children’s drawings

In Benguet one day we went to a school in Itogon, and on another day to a site dotted with tents in Little Kibungan in Barangay Puguis, La Trinidad. In Mountain Province we stayed for a weekend at the parish and open gym in Sitio Bulala in Barangay Kayan East, Tadian.

In each place we heard unique yet similar stories of displacement and death. The pictures that the children drew were of mountains almost flattened, houses and community structures destroyed, and bodies laid out side by side—images so seared into their minds that they had to draw them. 

I was amazed at how the children, when asked to say something about what they had drawn, narrated the events matter-of-factly: how there was a rumbling that night, how it happened so suddenly, how one moment the mountain was intact and then the mud was gushing towards them from all directions… I bit my lip when, after being asked what the figures of people lined up on one side of the picture meant, they talked about a neighbor, a classmate, a relative’s family members who had perished.

We had signed up to conduct sessions with children, but with the low volunteer: community member ratio, some of us were invited to conduct sessions with small groups of adults, too. We were met with profuse tears and pregnant silences, but also with expressions of gratitude. Many groups had already provided (and continued to send) relief goods—temporary shelter, blankets, clothes and food—but in each place we visited, we were told that we were the only ones who had come to spend play time, art therapy, and storytelling sessions with the children.

Community spirit

By the time we completed the series of interventions in November 2009, we felt that we had undergone therapy ourselves. Listening to other people’s experiences and sharing the space as they processed their pain also helped us come to terms with our own. In solidarity and community, we all took steps toward healing.
As I reflect on these experiences now, it seems to me that we Filipinos have come to rely on each other’s community spirit for survival. The emergency response and provision of food and other material needs has been, once again, largely left to us—to our bayanihan. I hope there will be more systems set up to respond to the mental health needs of our people who need it for all the different kinds of trauma that they experience every day.