Incessant rains and a rainy graduation

In Metro Manila during the rainy season, the air is different and not just because it is damp and cold. It really is so much more than that. It is dark and gloomy and suffocating all at once because the rains put the spotlight on the sordid underbelly of our daily urban life.  You see men and women freezing in the cold, begging for alms. You see drenched children desperately selling their sampaguita despite the weather, as if everything our national flower symbolizes such as hope and prosperity will work for the seller too, as much as the buyer believes it would for him.

The heavy rains also magnify all the wrong decisions we’ve made in the past – from the absolute lack of urban planning, to the way we audaciously throw our trash just about anywhere except our homes, to a fake beach that has now become a garbage pile.

What emerges is what has been waiting to unravel all along – the grotesque decay and rotting of urban life; of an overpopulated capital region that is bursting at the seams. What comes next is a sea of floating garbage and trash and children wading in this ocean of soot and dirt.

Disasters

I haven’t even mentioned the disasters – an overloaded boat capsizing with not enough life vests and emergency protocols or people who end up missing during a typhoon. The result are lost lives and shattered dreams.

What follows, too, are the usual diseases such as typhoid fever, cholera, leptospirosis and hepatitis A and other ailments of unknown etiology.

Nobody is safe, whether one is commuting through what feels like a gauntlet run on our sometimes flaky and erratic MRT or LRT or moving around in one’s own vehicle. One minute you are battling the torrential rains, the next minute your car is stuck in knee-high waters. You can take the Grab but with its monopoly, be prepared to shell out a fortune on its exorbitant rates.

But this is our home country, whether we like it or not. Love the Philippines, we must. Our climate is tropical, characterized by abundant rainfall. We get hit by an average of 20 typhoons every year, five of which are extremely destructive.

There is really nothing much we can do except to work around this reality. Every concerned LGU must do more to prepare; mandatory evacuation must be practiced and disaster response teams must be quick, as quick perhaps as when the government rebrands or comes up with new logos. Of course, it must be efficient and there must be no room for corruption.

The rainy, muddy graduation

It’s also high time we revert to the old academic calendar after changing it years ago to August from June, with classes ending in July instead of May.

It was meant to synchronize Philippine education with the rest of Southeast Asia but what happened was a highly impractical set-up for a tropical country like ours.

Classes continue through the hottest months of the year and in fact, some students collapsed just last summer in a school in Laguna because of the heat.

And then there’s Sunday’s commencement exercises of the University of the Philippines, Diliman campus held at the open-air University Amphitheater where the general commencement exercises have been held every year since the 1960s.

Sunday’s graduation was rainy and muddy, a scene that seemed straight out of a dark or dystopian movie such as that murky scene from 1982’s Blade Runner where pedestrians were walking with their umbrellas under incessant rains, except that even in the movies, rarely was it that a graduating class was seen drenched in the rain.

It’s supposed to be one of life’s greatest moments after all but there they were, Diliman Class of 2023 – rows and rows of young boys and girls under mostly black umbrellas, rain splattering all over; and their shoes dirty with soot and mud.

It was an unnecessary hassle which we could only blame on a discombobulating academic calendar.

Former UP College of Mass Communication Dean Roland Tolentino summed it well:

“UP Diliman graduation ceremonies done in 15 minutes.  I therefore conclude, again and again, ibalik na ang academic calendar sa dating April-May summer break.”

He said it’s such a waste of collective resources and time for the biggest event in a student’s life and all because of internationalization.

I wonder how the students felt. I saw some rain-soaked graduates posing for photographs along University Avenue after the ceremony with UP’s famed graduation sunflowers in the background. It’s possible that they did not mind the weather at all. Perhaps, nothing could rain on their parade.

But I don’t know for sure. I’m only guessing. I do know that the Filipino spirit is strongest in the face of difficulties.

Perhaps it’s also because of this that things get worse before they get better here in our nation of 114 million. We almost always just accept things with a smile, quick to cry but also quick to wipe the tears until the next disaster comes along. Lucky are the authorities who just get away with their hilarious responses because Filipinos have gotten tired of calling their attention.

This, sadly, is the story of us – a vertigo-inducing dark comedy movie that plays over and over on instant replay; bonus track today, as it is on most days these days, is the hypnotic sound of rain wafting in the air.

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Email: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.