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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The winter of our disconnect</b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A <i>Brush Dance </i>calendar sent to us by an SF colleague has the following writing for November: "Promise yourself not to solve all of life's problems at once." We call this month the winter of our discomfort, a play on Shakespeare's lines made famous by Steinbeck's <i>The Winter of our Discontent. </i> The aftermath of Yolanda's fury (Haiyan in international winds) caught the world's attention, mobilizing flurries of compassion from many sectors, with the dire reality of logistics and of safety net infrastructures in taters or just plainly absent now finding desperate rages, of opportunistic looting, and even armed rebellion from victims and suffering masses. It got us unhinged; thus, our "disconnect". </div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Leyte in the Philippines was a stumping ground when we lived in Lapu-Lapu City of in Cebu Province, locale to the International Airport, now the hub of national and international relief efforts as the Tacloban International is slowly getting useful. We promoted corporate procedures in the new global economic structures, trained folks in participatory methods as local folks shed off their reliance on top-down "charity", and drummed awareness of the new humanization of world culture that impinged on everyone's consciousness everywhere! We heeded Pierre Tielhard de Chardin's admonition: "The task before us now, if we shall not perish, is to shed off our ancient prejudices and rebuild the earth."</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Our investment, personally and professionally, was considerable, from southern Luzon to northern Mindanao and the whole swath of the Visayas from Borongan of Eastern Samar to the NIDO fields of Palawan, and many points in between.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">To be sure, the area spanning the San Bernardino Straits between Samar and Leyte is not where one would locate Benigno Noynoy Aquino's popularity zone. The President was once characterized by a former campaign aide as "not one of the brightest lights in the national marquee". Not surprisingly, he committed a graceless <i>faux pas </i>when he contradicted the published estimate of 10,000 casualties in Tacloban and pegged it at 25% of that number. The latest count is now proving his naiveté. His claim to fame is being an offspring of the Ninoy and Cory Aquino household, blight to the Marcos regime, and Leyte is a Romualdez country with its unrepentant <i>matron d'eterne</i>of extravagance Imelda Romualdez Marcos and her extended family maintaining a grip on politics.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">We did once date a fair maiden from Palo, the devastated area south of Tacloban, in our late teens, visited Isabel a few times when it was just opening as the locale for an industrial park, and facilitated numerous cooperative and credit union financial operations from Catarman of Northern Samar to Maasin of Southern Leyte, laying our head on hard boards and puffed pillows in places like Catbalogan, Ormoc, Baybay, Sugod, etc.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">We were also involved in natural resource management from the uplands to the nearshore in now globally familiar places like Bohol (recent site of a 7+ magnitude quake), Siquijor, Cebu, the Negros provinces of famed Bacolod and Dumaguete cities, and among the lilting cadences of the voices of Iloilo.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">While we would like to think that the area is a bit better off than when we first hit its shores a good fifty years ago, we had never been one to be anxious about the marks of accomplishment as we were simply determined to be there and with disciplined colleagues to " just do it"! Some of my co-workers, however, are not as detached, particularly of the current dispensation. Considerable emotional investments continue to flow even as we learn that a Pinoy physical therapist from New York got on the first plane he could catch to personally go to Palo in search of family and do an onsite ocular look-see on his ancestral home no longer visible on Google Earth pictures.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="2" style="font-size: small;">W</font><font size="2" style="font-size: small;">e find the varied responses from the international community encouraging, including those from Indonesia and Malaysia. I am reminded of my sister-in-laws narration of the time she and my brother were in an Indonesia market where he tried to bargain his way through some of the artifacts. His Ilongga </font><font size="2">wife pulled him over and whispered: "I already know what their real price is." "How do you know," my Iloco brother asked. "</font><i style="font-size: 13px;">Nagbi-bisaya sila, eh!</i><font size="2"><i> </i>(they are speaking Visayan)</font><i style="font-size: 13px;">," </i><font size="2">she replied. Though ASEAN collaborators, the three countries might just find again their common ethno-linguistic heritage!</font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13px;">In a world where we spend millions on drones for legal</span><font size="2">ized</font> murder, and can position supplies and materials to enable deployment of a battalion of Marines anywhere in the world in no time, have floating hospitals that can be rapidly staffed, and satellite photo capabilities 24/7 of any location on the planet to update databases accessible to the general public in the Cloud, our disconnect represents simply a wipe-out of all previous methods of relief delivery in the past. With strong quakes and fierce winds getting more common, it is time to get back to our drawing boards, institutionalize relief efforts, so it will not take six days to clear a tarmac or body bag the dead when another disaster hits anywhere in the planet.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 13px;"><i>Ang aking dos sentimos! </i>(</span><font size="2">Para mi dos centimos, f</font>or my two-cent piece!)</div>
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