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Baby in the Backpack

by Patricia Evangelista

The backpack sat on the curbside. The surface was flaking, the purple print scratched. We found it in the afternoon,
beside three corpses in body bags. The men working along the highway said that the bodies had just been recovered.
They said there was a baby in the backpack.

It was cold that day. The air smelled of dead. I remember crouching beside the bag and hunting for the zipper,
remember thinking I had to verify the story, remember feeling uneasy. It was a morbid act, like opening a strangers
closed coffin. Maybe it was a convenient excuse, an odd conservatism in a city where the dead had been shoved into
plastic garbage bags. I didnt open the bag, ran my hands over it instead, tracing the lumps of head and hands and
folded knees.

It was 15 days since the storm, and there was a corpse inside the backpack.

I write this late at night, in Manila, almost three months after typhoon Haiyan. It is difficult to write. I meant to write
something else, have been trying to write something else for a week, an analysis of post-disaster vulnerabilities and
government mishandling. I did the interviews, read the documents, watched the congressional hearings and the
resulting glad-handing and politicking that came with it: the secretary of the interior smiling, the mayor of the broken
city smiling back, the men and women in the background smiling along, all of them grinning as if they were not
witness to weeks of calling each other liars and frauds.

Instead Im writing about how it was, on the ground, the apocalypse that all of us found when we landed on the
Tacloban tarmac. I seem to be unable to write about anything else. Ive been a columnist for ten years, a reporter for
the last five. My beat is disaster and human rights and the stories that fall in between the dead, the lost, the rebels
and the survivors. Nothing Ive seen prepared me for what I saw after Haiyan.

I dont claim to be a veteran. What Ive seen is nothing to what many others have seen, and my version of reportage
is very often limited to individual human experience instead of the larger implications. I fixate on images, sentences,
narrative arcs, the smoke in the sky, the blood on the doorknob, the bottle of White Flower carried by the defendant,
the color and pattern of the tiles on the floor of Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 221 instead of the decision
handed down by the trial court judge. For me, Haiyan was the rainbow blanket around the dead boy. It was the father
who covered his drowned daughters corpse with a tin roof to protect her from the rain. It was the man who walked
daily to his girlfriends grave, the plastic panda floating in the water, the baby in the purple backpack.

There were many other stories. Government ineptitude. Political infighting. The scale of displacement and the
terrible conditions forced on the survivors. I admit I went looking for the dead, an easy thing in Haiyan country. My
reasoning is the same as it's always been in a situation where morals are suspended and the narrative makes no
sense, it is necessary to hold whatever truth is left: that the dead shouldn't be dead. 6

Maybe there is some ego involved here, the awareness that the sights and smells and sounds that will force the
average person to turn away is something that can be handled without flinching, safe under the cloak of public
interest. It is necessary to pretend those of us who report are tougher than everyone else. It is necessary, very often,
to pretend this is a job, a commitment, a challenge met that separates us from the government clerk or the lawyer or
even the reporters who cover the seemingly safer beats. We understand, for example, that it is possible to step away,
to retreat to some safe mental corner while noting down the observation that the body in the water is probably
female, that what may or may not be breasts are still under the faded yellow shirt, in spite of the fact the face above
the shirt has been stripped of skin and flesh.

It is of course presumptuous for me to use the word we instead of I, but I is a pronoun that I have used under
protest in the last few years. I is personal, it redirects the spotlight, it is arrogant and indulgent and emphasizes the
primacy of personal opinion instead of the real story. I dont pretend to speak for all journalists, or even for some
journalists. Im not certain I even speak for myself, as the safe mental corner that I used to have is no longer
particularly safe. Fourteen million people were affected, at least 6,000 died. What I felt and continue to feel is not the
story I mean to tell, as there are many things more deserving of public space than the confusion of a 28-year-old
journalist, especially one who demanded for this coverage and found out that the magic cape has holes.

Everyday I asked the questions. Framed the interviews. Rolled the video. Held up a hand to stop a weeping man
midsentence because of the roar of the C130 swooping overhead. Nodded, in understanding, as if it was possible to
understand how it feels to watch wife and children drown while hanging on to a slab of concrete. I asked survivors

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about the height of the waters and the loss of daughters, and although many of them were desperate to tell their
stories, it was impossible not to feel exploitative, that we were, or I was, using their grief to add to the grand drama
that was the aftermath of typhoon Haiyan.

I dont pretend I made any sort of difference. The stories I told were stories people might or might not read or watch
or share, in the language of the Internet but they were only stories, and at the end of the day I knew I was leaving,
knew that in a week or two weeks I would be in Manila at my desk and the weeping father would still be there, in the
dark, dreaming of his lost babies. I suspect I went looking for the worst to validate my being on the ground. It would
be romantic to say I was bearing witness for the victims. The truth was that I went from shock to further shock, and I
was afraid, always, that I wasnt doing anyones story justice. Covering Haiyan was like walking into a Salvador Dali
painting and discovering the paint was still damp.

I asked for a week longer, after a week I stayed one more, and then was allowed one more. I like to think I stayed as
long as I could, but thats only one way of telling the story. The longer I stayed, the less guilty I felt. I admit I didnt
finish out that last week, because on the 16th day I found myself on the coast shooting a womans corpse hanging
from a tree. It took a long time to see the body. I was standing less than five feet across, I could smell it, I was told it
was there, but her head was pushed back and her arms were the color of dead wood and my brain refused to
acknowledge that what I was staring at used to be a person. When the image suddenly made sense in my head, I took
the photo, then turned to vomit into the bushes.

There were many more bodies before and after that, mass graves with hundreds of tangled dead, but none of them
had me heaving with my hands on my knees. Maybe it was the fact she hung meters away from the shanty of a man
who refused to leave for an evacuation center because he was waiting for his missing wife to come home I want to
be here when she comes, he said. His name is William Cabuquing, and he was one of the survivors who packed the
bodies of his neighbors into bags 14 days after he staggered home bleeding after being swept across the bay. He did
not know who the woman on the tree was.

That night I was on the phone with my editor. Are you all right, she asked. It was a question that at that point seemed
terribly important, and I stuttered and mumbled and was largely inarticulate until I managed to say, after a series of
evasions, that yes, I wanted to go home.

The truth is that there is no going home. It is difficult to write about it, and more difficult to write about anything
else. I am aware there are many journalists who can move past stories like this, that my job demands I move past it
myself. I also know there are others like me who have been smoking too much and sleeping too long, who have come
home to wake in the night, unable to move on to other stories and other responsibilities, aware, one way or another,
that whatever story comes along, Haiyan is out there, and the promises we made are still no more than promises.

I like to think of journalism as an attempt to make the public imagine. We cannot protest against what we cannot see,
we cannot move when we cannot be made to feel. Six thousand is a large number, larger than Ketsanas 464, Bophas
1,067 or Washis 1,453, but it is difficult, as with any statistic, to remember that each one of the thousands in each of
the storms shouldnt have died, could have been saved, deserved, if nothing else, to be buried with some attempt at
dignity instead of being left to rot in a muddy field covered with campaign posters. We are meant to understand that,
to imagine that, to stand in the shoes of the man scrabbling in the muck for his fiance. To forget what happened
makes us all guilty, makes us accomplices to what brought them here, allows the same tragedy to happen again and
again, as it has happened, again and again.

I dont know what I intended to say. Maybe that I cant forget, or that Im afraid I will. Many of us who were on the
ground are afraid to say what it was like, because were supposed to be tough as nails. Were supposed to be brave.
Were meant to serve the story. Were supposed to walk away from the mass grave and report the number and the
state of decomposition. We can stand in the hellhole that was Zamboanga City in September and say yes, we can take
more. Were afraid if we say we cant, we wont be sent to the next story, will be told we dont have the balls, dont
have what it takes, cant deliver, wont survive. I say we because its harder to say I, and maybe that was what I
meant to say.

Evangelista, P. (2014, February 02). Baby in the backpack. Retrieved from http://www.rappler.com/move-
ph/ispeak/49484-the-baby-in-the-backpack

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Communing with the Pinoy family

You will notice that the Filipino is a strange and wondrous mix. Gilda Cordero-Fernando and
M.G. Chaves write: Open the Filipinos head and you will find: a Quarter Pounder hamburger, a
beauty contest, a Hallmark card, an apple pie, a ticket to Disneyland, a surgically lifted nose, an
English-speaking yaya. (Lundagin mo Baby! Pinoy Pop Culture, 2002) Then, add a good
singing voice (inclined to make birit), slather on some whitening cream, put on a Team Pacquiao
shirt and youre more or less ready to go.

Enter a Filipino home and you will find soy sauce and vinegar in the kitchen and a pail and tabo in
the bathroom. If there is a family car, it will have a rosary hanging from the rear view mirror and a
driver who will make the sign of the cross before turning on the ignition. If you are ever so
fortunate to have Sunday tipok-tipok or are invited to one, sit back and enjoy the parade of lovable
characters. There is bound to be a Tito Boy, a Tita Baby and various permutations of doorbell
names (Kring-kring, Bongbong, Tingting, Langlang). The Filipino family gets together at the drop
of a hat, be it a birthday, a graduation, a baptism or the arriving ceremonies of an overseas uncle/
aunt from Manila or Singapore or Dubai or Vancouver or California. The patriarch, either the
grandfather or the eldest son, sits at the cabezera. The matriarch holds court at the other end,
where she has a good view of everyones appetite and to oversee which viands need
refilling. You, as guest, will be seated at the right, across the uncles and the aunts. The little imps
will be running around with their assigned adults asking them to Eat na, eat na. And oh, if you
were ever so blessed to have been invited to a Pinoy wedding you are in for the grand dame of
all celebrations where everything is heightened to the next level. Everyone and everything is
scrubbed and polished to a high sheen alangan no two families are now joined. The mirth
shows in the newest family photo where everyone positions at the altar with the bride and
groom. All who are present gleefully scrunches up their face, stick out their tongue and contort
their bodies for the now requisite final family photograph the wacky shot.

Enter a Filipino office and you will still find extensions of family and community living. You
dont even have to leave the office. Here you have everything chicharon, siomai, 14k gold,
genuine/ fake/ firstclass imitation bags, insurance policies, heck, even memorial plots. The
patriarch or matriarch will still be called Tatay or Nanay and various members of the organization
are called Kuya, Ate, Manoy or Manang.

But things are a-changing. Di ba, once something seems to be set in stone, they change the
rules. The family now has American and European in-laws and grandchildren speaking in three
languages. The Sunday lunch now includes the overseas phone call from Mama who nurtures
other peoples children, while her own brood has little recourse but to take care of one
another. The grandmothers seem to be getting younger and younger, for the teens seem to be
having their own children. The younger ones are no longer running all over the place, but are
seated, immobile and zombie- like with either a DS Play station attached to their hands or
earphones sprouting from their ears. They are seated near the food, but they will not eat, afraid
that their nine-year-old bodies will grow fat and awkward.

The world does seem to be shifting and changing at a dizzying pace. Where should families turn
to? Now more than ever, there is a need for the family to gather strength and grace from what is
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true and unchanging. Today is the Feast of the Holy Eucharist, and it is at the Lords Table where
we receive a common holy communion. The Corpus Christi nourishes, strengthens and solidifies
each one who will partake of it with an open heart. This promise awaits your family and mine.

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/18202/communing-with-the-pinoy-family

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