Extra ‘ordinary’ People

Every now and then you meet people who change your life, not dramatically or forcefully but just meeting them changes you. Changes how you see the world, how you see yourself.

I met many people like this in the Philippines. So many there isn’t time to write about them all. But they all shared one thing in common and this was selflessness. They all shared a deep desire to change the world around them, to respond to disaster not with fear and apathy but with hope and honour. And they did this in the everyday ordinary of life. But in that everyday, they made sacrifices. Some left their own families and children behind to move to a completely different part of the Philippines, to help those in need. They left everything that was safe and known to enter into the chaos and uncertainty of disaster relief. They took on another person’s burdens and laid their own to the side.

I stood in the middle of a mass grave speaking to one of these extraordinary people as he explained to me that when he first came to Eastern Samar he was horrified by the devastation that the typhoon had left behind. The pain and the grief of the people he met was inescapable. He had nightmares every night but he continued on, none the less. I asked him how he kept going, in those first few months when things were so difficult and he simply told me ‘it is my job, I am here to be strong’. And that was that. No other explanation was provided. He stood looking out to sea, the untold stories of so many buried around us, people who had lost their lives far too early and I understood. His needs were secondary, his priority were the people he served.

And he served them by getting up every morning to be in the field by 8am where he would meet with families struggling to survive, he worked all day until 6 and then by night wrote up his case notes of the day’s activities. He had 100 names of children on his list and he impacted the life of every single one of them and that of their families. He helped them to restart their lives through small businesses, he found homes for orphans, he showed parents how to keep their children safe from the ever present risk of trafficking, and how to protect themselves in future disasters.

But above all else, he gave them hope, hope that they could have a different future, that they are not resigned to poverty and destitution. And he showed them love. In a world where they are invisible and forgotten, where their own society shuns them and their government ignores them he showed them that they are important, they are special, they are loved. They are worth fighting for, they are worth the nightmares and the long hours. They are not a statistic on a long list of names, they are unique and they are eternally loved.

I think of the Philippines often as I look out from my office into the dark, grey skies of Dublin, wondering if anything I do makes a difference and his story reminds me that everything I do makes a difference. What that difference is, is my decision to make.