Disturbing the Universe.

I remember the days that I wanted to have a darker shade of curtain in my window coz I don’t want to be disturbed by the sun’s rays shining thru my window.I remember being so eager to put on my window blinds to shut out the light so I can sleep longer.

But today is not one of those days.

I think I have never been more happier to see the sun streaming right thru my window. I think I have never enjoyed having a house that faces the “morning sun” as much as I do today. The sun is up – everyone. And it holds a very unspoken promise that today, marks the beginning of a new Philippines.

Ondoy and Pepeng – perhaps the two storms I would never forget in my entire life – has shown the world what Filipinos are really made of. Yes of course it’s got the bad – and I don’t need to enumerate it, we see it everyday in different websites, photos of people with no homes, people who lost their families in the storm – everyone having lost something, everyone has their own stories to tell. We see it everytime we get out of our house. The disaster typhoon has left a very big scar in the whole of our country.

But I don’t want to give you another blog post of just how hard it is to face the losses we have encountered during the past week. Instead, I want this post to be just like how the sun’s rays were to me this morning.

I want to start with myself.

The reason why we had to hire someone to help us with the household chores is because I’m one heck of a lazy person. And usually I won’t admit this on my blogs but as I’ve said, today is different.

Before we had Nanang, clothes were just everywhere. We didn’t bother to fold it coz we’d end up having them strewn away somewhere anyway. I hate folding clothes, I’d rather wash a ton of clothes than fold it.

Why am I saying this? Because when Ondoy took the clothes of our brothers and sisters, I knew I had to do something – and that meant having to sort out my old clothes and see which ones are up for donations. For the first time in my life, and I’m a bit embarrassed to say this, but for the first time – I knew I had to stand up and do something. My friends and I went to volunteer repack goods and that also meant having to sort and fold hundreds and hundreds of clothes.

I had to segregate shoes, which before you won’t really see me touching the shoe of another person, but on that day, I touched and segregated hundreds of them. Socks? Yes, we did too. Underwear? Panties? Yes, we folded it up like THEY were brand new.

The good in all these – despite everything, is that once again, we showed the world that in times like these – walang mayaman at walang mahirap. You see people of all kinds, wanting to help other people. You fall in line in Shopwise and there’s people before you with a cart full of canned goods and noodles and you know automatically it’s for donations. The people who were blessed enough to be saved from the flood didn’t just sat infront of their tv sets and watched everything happen. They stood up and helped. And that’s not something we see everyday.

People you don’t know – suddenly offers you help, be it asking you to come inside the car so they can drop you off where you need to go – be it people who continuously twitter the updates so that people would know – people giving out foods, preparing foods not for their businesses but for evacuation centers. People saving the lives of other people. Security guards jumping off a roof to save another person, army men who we were used to be afraid of because they carry guns and ammos, you see people clinging to them now, you see them carrying victims on their backs so they would be safe.

Need I say this people? HEROES ARE EVERYWHERE.

So despite my wanting to curse and curse Ondoy for everything he’s done to our country, I’d like to thank him too – coz despite everything that he has taken away from us, he’s showed us too what’s inside of our nation. This calamity has showed us what we can do as Filipinos, what part of ourselves we are willing to give for people who needs us.

I just hope that when this is all over – when there are no more evacuees in our evacuation centers – the same spirit who made you take that stranger on your car – would still be there. The same spirit who made you share your salary to people who need them would still be there even when Ondoy is no longer remembered by us.

Ondoy has proved one point – that we are HEROES of our country. But WE have to prove something, too. – That from this day on, we will not need Ondoy or Pepeng to show us what we can do for others, instead, it’ll just come from within. YOU taking a step out to help other people.

Because they need us. Because we need them.

Because they don’t call us Filipinos for nothing.