Looking for lost hope in a devastated community

When the ambulance arrived, two medical staff jumped out and ran into the Peace Ark field hospital holding two boys in their arms. The boys had been found in a swollen river. One was 7 years old, the other 6.

Although the boys showed no life signs, emergency surgeon Chen Ruifeng and another doctor gave them cardiopulmonary resuscitation and hoped for a miracle. All to no avail.

“Let them go. It’s too late,” said the doctor after using a flashlight to check the pupils of one of the boys while Chen continued to perform cardiac massage.

“I didn’t want to let them go, but sometimes life is so fragile, especially in disaster areas,” said Chen.

The local school has been closed since the typhoon hit the area, and the sweltering weather had driven the boys to the river for a cooling swim.

Every day, the field hospital receives dozens of people. Some were injured as buildings collapsed or were hit by flying debris. Others fell ill after their houses were destroyed and they were forced to sleep in the open.

It seemed as though the two hours of the typhoon have resulted in an endless tragedy; 20 meters from the tent I slept in, wooden crosses marked was piled on both sides. As I walked, I counted 14 graves, each marked with a cross.

Without an electricity supply, I went to bed early and rose at 5 am to watch the sunrise and jog along the shoreline.

Sometimes I got up too early and had to walk alone in the darkness. But the glimmer of approaching daylight on the horizon always calmed me down and made me feel safe. Almost everyone I met on the road stopped to say hello, or greeted me with a smile and a wave.

The ground on both sides of the road was once farmland, but it had been turned into a swamp by the flood. The Red Cross and relief teams from several countries had erected tents on the few dry areas close to some relatively undamaged buildings.

There was a memorial park for Douglas MacArthur on the beach, believed to be the place where the US general and his forces landed in the Philippines on Oct 20, 1944.

I sat next to the statue of MacArthur, who wears sunglasses and is posed to look as if he is walking from the ocean toward the villages.

I watched the sunbeams cutting through the clouds in the purple sky, lighting up the water and damaged sidewalks. That’s the beauty of watching the sunrise: no matter how dark life gets, you know things can only get brighter.