It's a strange sensation getting to know your "homeland", and I doubt that I really did it justice, but it was incredible to see a country so different from the one I lived in.
For background's sake, I was born in the Philippines and moved to Canada when I was a toddler. On her first plane ride ever, my mother moved both herself and her crying child to Toronto to live with my dad. I still don't understand how she managed the whole thing. Maybe that's the whole mother-beast-mode thing people talk about.
I've never really been one to travel. The whole airfare thing scared me, and I never know what to do with myself for hours on end. I also hate the idea of being treated like cattle.
But, after this trip, I think my view has changed.
The Philippines has long been regarded as a developing country. After the devastating effects of Typhoon Yolanda earlier this year (none of which extended to my family, thank goodness), people's eyes were turned to the island nation.
It was good to see all the aid efforts televised during the holiday season. A lot of places we went to had little donation tins for people to give to those affected.
At the same time, though, the whole thing was a bit surreal. Maybe a little uncanny valley, even.
When speaking to family there, I felt like the typhoon was just a footnote, somehow. While the world has especially ached for areas like Leyte, a very poor region of the Philippines, people there either didn't care or had other things to think about. I mean, my aunt's tree house (pictured above, it was made of bamboo and could have actually been quite nice) was knocked down because of the bagyo (Tagalog for "typhoon") - but that's all I really heard of it.
It was like how so many people in Canada, and the world for that matter, felt for the victims of the Lac-Mégantic derailment disaster this past summer. It was a national tragedy but, of course, the world moved on. As did many Canadians.
One of the best things about travelling is to see how similar people are, though they reside thousands of miles apart. Humans are the same everywhere, it seems.
Perhaps that's it - not a case of ignorance, but of resilience. We don't forget, but we do carry on.
In the past thirty years alone, the Philippines has seen more than its fair share of natural disasters. It's also a country that is struggling when it comes to emergency planning (after seeing how the cities are laid out, I can see why).
But it's important to keep looking and moving forward, as people are wont to do after all.
