Pag-amgo: An Education in Freedom

“You do not know what freedom is until you are required to use it for someone else.”

In November 2013, Typhoon Yolanda (internationally named ‘Haiyan’) was a long-tracked Super Typhoon that devastated the Philippines, notably Tacloban City, but less so Bogo City, while Cebu City, where I lived, came through with nothing more than strong winds and heavy rain. A few days later, after the typhoon had passed, my parents, along with a few family members, prepared to travel to Northern Cebu with volunteers from a church and asked whether I wanted to come or stay with my grandparents, who were unwell and needed someone nearby. I was still young, and I said yes for reasons that had nothing to do with duty, inasmuch as Northern Cebu was somewhere I had never been, and I simply wanted to see it. I would rather admit that than pretend otherwise. After all, how many of us only confront the suffering of others when it is presented as a curious spectacle rather than a genuine moral obligation? So, the choice was mine: my parents had left it open for me to stay and keep my grandparents company instead. I chose to travel toward the wreckage I did not yet fully understand, not knowing it would become an education in what freedom is for.

My family and I reached a relief post in the mountains outside Bogo City. My own task, most of those two days, was smaller than deciding who received what: carrying canned goods and meal packs from the boxes to the line, usually two or three at a time, and placing them directly into each person’s hands, inasmuch as there was never enough to be generous with everyone. I met people who had lost their homes, including fisherfolk who, hungry and starving, arrived with a composure that almost resembled calm, describing their circumstances in ‘subdued’ voices. Carrying ration after ration under a merciless sun left my hands sore, and yet each ration also meant a family leaving that line with enough to outlast the next few days, which mattered more to me than the soreness.

What I witnessed one afternoon made the weight of it clear: a mother, holding barely enough for her own children, dividing her family’s relief pack with a neighbor the distribution list had overlooked. No one asked her to. She simply did, though she had little to spare. Why do those with the least often seem to be the quickest to give? Chinese revolutionary Mao Tse Tung once wrote, “The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant.” Watching her, my own reasons for traveling north suddenly felt exactly that: ‘childish.’ Watching her, I understood, in whatever limited way a child understands anything, that material deprivation did not diminish a person’s capacity for generosity or dignity. She also taught me something before I had words for it: that being counted correctly mattered more than I had realized. I did not know yet how soon that idea would matter again. By the next morning I wanted to stay, because helping again no longer felt like curiosity. It felt like ‘responsibility’, consciously chosen. As Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “We are left alone, without excuse,” a statement that reflects a reality that makes our freedom less of a privilege and more of an inescapable obligation to act.

That understanding sharpened further inside a ‘half-roofed’ evacuation center, where I saw a man sitting on a mat near the entrance, his shorts folded and tied off just below where his legs used to be. Being really young, my immediate, unfiltered thought was simply that it looked really ‘weird’. I caught myself staring and immediately looked away in embarrassment. Nobody explained it to me, and I did not ask. I felt unsettled, then guilty for feeling unsettled, insofar as my confusion itself was shameful. I did not have a clean word for that feeling then, and I still, till this day, do not fully have one. To wit, it was not disgust, not quite pity, but something closer to shame mixed with curiosity, the type of ‘feeling’ a child gets when something matters and they do not yet know why. A world leader once wrote in his world-famous manifesto, “Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.” I later learned neighbors had carried him through the floodwaters, since there was no other way to reach the center.

The food line that day moved in rows across the room, and his mat sat off to the side near the door, half blocked by sacks nobody had moved. I noticed, the way I had with the mother, that volunteers kept passing that corner, not out of cruelty, but by reason of it not being part of the ‘path’ anyone walked. Is neutrality just a quieter form of cruelty? I stood there deciding whether to tell an adult or do it myself, scared of both, scared it was not my job, scared of getting it wrong. I took a meal pack from the case, carried it over without being asked, and set it near his hand instead of holding it out, unsure if that part was even ‘allowed’. He nodded, said thank you, and went back to eating. As Simone Weil once said, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I could not know what that small acknowledgement meant to him beyond the food itself, but the calm and simple way he received it, as though being noticed at all was already enough, told me that dignity does not always need grand gestures. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin once said, “a single death is a tragedy, while a million is a statistic.” The same cold math applies to the living. Sometimes dignity is restored simply by being counted as a person, not a name missing from a list. What I understood, even then, was that he had almost been missed for a reason that had nothing to do with him, only with where the room put him. I did not return from Northern Cebu unchanged, even though I was too young to name what had shifted. It has taken me years to understand what I only felt then: in view of the foregoing, responsibility is not about what a society claims to value, but whether the people it is quickest to forget stay protected when everything else falls apart. I went north as a child chasing something new and came back, however unknowingly, with a heart trained to look for the overlooked, and a standard, understood only later, that a choice made in service of another’s dignity is one I am obligated to keep living up to, whether that means noticing the classmate left out of a group project or the neighbor left off a barangay list, and refusing to let anyone stay ‘invisible’ because no one thought to look.

“There are risks and costs to action, but they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.” The floodwaters eventually receded. The physical wreckage was cleared. But the inevitable, subtle disaster of human indifference, continues to remain. I traveled north to exercise a child’s simple freedom to go, only to finally learn what that freedom was actually for. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously challenged: