June 2006-2008

I arrived to the office today, anxious. I guess that was because I was only informed about presenting before a group of visitors from the US at 10 pm last night and I was barely prepared. When finally it did not push through I thought my anxiety was going to go away. For a few minutes it did go away, but when I joined 12 relatives of victims sing before the same group this afternoon, and heard them sing with conviction as well as almost breakdown and become teary eyed in the middle of their presentation, I felt goose bumps all over me and anxiety grow inside my stomach.

When I was asked to translate some of the stories for the foreign guests, I could not help but become emotional as well as I followed each word and relive with these relatives the pain of remembering how their loved ones where abducted or killed.

My head ached, my stomach turned. I didn’t know where to go, or to sit or stand. It’s as if it was June 2006 again and I was meeting the relatives for the first time and did not know how to console them.

Yes, June 2006 is an unforgettable month and date. It’s the month that marks the abductions of Sherlyn Cadapan, Karen Empeno, Leopoldo Ancheta, Rogelio and Gabriel Calubad, Prudencio Calubid, Celina Palma, Gloria Soco and Ariel Beloy.

It was as if a typhoon of signal #10 overcame us. The incidents came one after the other. The office was often filled with people, crying came at different times and from different individuals.

One sat at one end of the room staring into space. One sobbed inconsolably. The phones kept ringing, the media kept coming, we kept planning and trooping from one camp to another. We were desperate, the families were desperate. They needed all kinds of help. We did not stop.

We have continued doing the same things we did since then. We would find leads then dead-ends. But we would keep our hopes up. In the end we became a family. And the loss of one, became the loss of another. The search for one, was a search for all those missing.

Maybe I don’t know how they feel, because I still haven’t lost a loved one, but I guess being with them is almost the same as being the relative or wife or daughter or sister of a victim. Maybe my tears are endless because even if the years have passed, the stories stay the same and the pain never goes away, especially if you have a remorseless government who insists that “ …there is consistent effort to POLITICIZE Human Rights in the Philippines” and a ruthless military who tries to make fools of you, by giving you the runaround and continues to wreak havoc over civilians. Putangina nila!

I still don’t feel good tonight. I don’t know if I will have a dreamless sleep tonight, or when I will stop crying.

I don’t really care for the headache nor the stomach cramps, I just care, that we have families and victims to look after and that if there are no one else to do this, who will? They only have us. They trust only us. And in the end all we have is one another. We must never stop.