A foreign correspondent who was covering the aftermath of super typhoon Yolanda in Tacloban revealed that he was at loss on what to think when he found teenagers playing basketball in a wrecked neighborhood of the city overflowing with debris.
In an article in Yahoo News, American journalist Todd Pitman said he didn’t expect to see people having a good time. He was even more stunned when he learned that the basketball goal was one of the first things this neighborhood rebuilt. Later on he said he realized that the kids wanted to play simply because they want to take their minds off what happened.
Pitman became a witness to countless families who lost loved ones to the typhoon and to thousands of survivors who endured hunger, thirst, makeshift shelter, little if any medical care and desperate long wait for aid to arrive. But as the crisis eases and aid begins to flow, he saw people smiling and joking, if only briefly. For some, there is a newfound enthusiasm for life that comes from having just escaped death.
The veteran journalist who had covered the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami in Japan said every nation is resilient in its own way, but there is something different in the Filipinos which he didn’t encountered in other disaster zones.
Pitman thinks it has something to do with an expression Filipinos have: “Bahala Na,” which essentially means: Whatever happens, leave it to God.
