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.

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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 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.

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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

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.
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 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 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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