Tagtuyot

Drought

Imagine having no place to live in.. nothing to eat... to drink... nowhere to protect yourself from the harmful rays of the sun.

Barely scraping by each and every day in an attempt to provide for your family, selling nothing but the things you scavenge from the garbage, from the rivers.

My mother did it. My mother was brave. She fed her eight young children including me, and she never complained.

We would travel from the dump we called our home, up the rocky jagged mountains, through the tall grass containing venomous snakes just to get to the river. Where we would relish in the coolness, drink and nourish ourselves, regain any and every bit of the pride we lost being homeless.

That was 30 years ago.

My siblings and I are no longer children. Our mother is no longer here. She, the protector who provided for us—gave us her entire life, just so that we could live a better one.

I went back to the river.

Up the jagged mountains filled with debris. Through what remained of the tall grass as all that greeted us were vermin and no snakes. To the river filled to the brim with litter and the leftovers of vandalism.

I had to turn around to hold my tears in.

"Do you need to take a break?" My co-worker said to me softly.

I shake my head no. Taking a break would be putting off this task that I should've done years ago.

'It's been too long,' I closed my eyes before reopening them with a determined look.

"No need. Let's begin."

The loss of water was like a drought. Trash filled every inch of every area. I smiled, something like this won't destroy my willpower.

I turned around to face my group of volunteers, I thanked each and every one of the 200 people that came today to help clean up the river and the area surrounding it.

Putting everyone into different groups we set off to cleaning, picking up the trash, diving into the river to retrieve everything in its body.

We recycled, we trashed, we cleaned..cleaned..cleaned. Until everything was finally...done.

We looked at the spotless area around us and smiled feeling accomplished. I turn to my group again.

"Did you bring your water purifiers?!" I shouted. The responding yells were deafening.

"Good! Bring them in boys!"

Hundreds of plastic rain barrels were brought in. Each from a different house from the nearby villages.

We purified the river water—almost the entire day and brought the water back to the villages.

Many families used the contaminated water to grow their fruit trees which provided them the water and food—coconut, they needed as the river had been compromised. But now they had fresh purified water.

"Salamat.." A young girl said walking up to me. She reminded me of myself when I was younger. I smiled at her and turned around to face the sky.

'Ina? Are you watching me?'