PHOTOS | Residents return to homes submerged by volcano's ash
The trip to Cavite was ad hoc, impromptu, and a host of other foreign-sounding words that could be used to refer to three grown men who almost got lost on the way to a danger zone.
Good thing two of those three males — photographer Bernard Testa and editor and graphic designer Jomar Kho Indanan — had useful, practical skills.
Both had a keen sense of direction, above-average driving abilities, and vast reserves of patience.
I had none of the above.
My wayfinding skills were shot (that's why I took the same routes); my driving was rusty (having given up on it a decade ago); and my patience had been running low ever since the Estrada administration.
In short, of the three males in an SUV bringing donated supplies to a disaster area that Sunday three weeks ago, I was the only one who was useless and clueless.
I was excess baggage, brought along to provide camaraderie to relief goods.
Had the driver and navigator chosen to ditch me in some tierra incognita, I would have had another foreign-sounding phrase handy to describe my agony: Soy fucked, as our Hispanic-American friends would say.
Fortunately, none of that ever took place.
Good cheer prevailed, allowing us to fulfill our mission: to deliver supplies to a hub of a makeshift evacuation center in Amadeo, Cavite.
Overlooked by government relief efforts, the hub — mainly a compound with several houses in it — served as the nerve center for all the 200 or so evacuees adopted by the neighborhood.
The evacuees were mostly from Barangay Buso-buso, the only village in Laurel town in Batangas that got submerged by ash from Taal Volcano's eruption in January.
As of January 19, 2020, no plans have yet been made regarding repatriation of these evacuees, said the man who was in charge and is the owner of the hub.
He didn't seem to be bothered.
At least his house now had some people staying in it, he told us, adding that all his children lived and worked abroad. One was in the Middle East while another was in Europe, he said.
Some evacuees stayed only for a few days and left to live with their relatives elsewhere.
And some, as Bernard's photos show, have decided to go home.
For the nearly 300 families in Buso-buso, ashfall or no, there indeed is no place like home.
And as they try to pick up their pieces of whatever is left of their lives, one thing remains clear: they will still need our help.
