‘The path to recovery will be long — physical, psychological and economic. It will be difficult for many to remain patient, especially when they’ve lost livelihoods and/or loved ones (if not both).’
I AM enjoying my trips “home” to Alaminos, Laguna. I have to admit, quite sadly, that while my father was alive and living there I did not enjoy visiting his hometown. On the rare times I’d go it would be on every other weekend just to pick him up so we could travel all the way to Himlayang Pilipino in Tandang Sora to visit my mother’s final resting place.
What I didn’t like about “going home” then was the traffic, especially since Alaminos is such a bottleneck that anyone traveling to San Pablo, to Lucena or onwards to Bicol would know.
And I am quite impatient when it comes to traffic.
I was also uncomfortable “going home” because, well, it was my dad’s house and there was so much about it that made me uncomfortable. Much about the house was old — even the plumbing — and except for his room the other rooms were stockrooms more than living quarters. The only places I was comfortable in were the ground floor living room, the dining area and the kitchen. But as soon as I was done eating it would be eat and run, with my dad in tow, so we could travel back to Manila as soon as we could before traffic built up on the SLEX.
Things are so different now.
First, of course, is the fact that four years after my father passed away — and because there was nothing much to do last year when the pandemic hit us — I decided to finally have the house “restored” and renovated. The old rooms that I didn’t want to walk into are gone, with the dividing walls collapsed so I now have a library/study. The bathrooms have been remodeled to my liking; my father’s old library on the second floor is now my bedroom; and the area he used to use as his bedroom is now my TV room. In short I no longer feel like a stranger to the house, or that it is his house; I now feel at home, and yes I am now comfortable using the word home rather than house to refer to it!
In addition, thanks to improvements on the SLEX, including the institution of the RFID, traveling home is a breeze. While I still exit at Sto. Tomas and traverse the old Maharlika Highway for 15-20 minutes on average, the SLEX extension that is now being built will soon allow me to exit at San Pablo and drive maybe just five more minutes to get home. I hope all the remaining right-of-way issues could be settled soon — some involving properties of my relatives, I think!
I suspect it will take more than 12 months to settle all the remaining ROW issues. Which means it will take more than 24 months before I could drive all the way from Magallanes to the San Pablo exit. But heck, the last 55 years of my life were spent traversing the old national highway that passed through San Pedro and Biñan and Sta. Rosa and Calamba then Tanauan and Sto. Tomas just to get to Alaminos, so maybe I can wait two to three years more.
And I guess the same could be said of the Philippines and this pandemic that remains a threat to the lives of many people. The path to recovery will be long — physical, psychological and economic. It will be difficult for many to remain patient, especially when they’ve lost livelihoods and/or loved ones (if not both). But I suppose there’s nothing much that we can do except to make sure government remains on the ball, 24/7.
Brace for it: this will be a long road to recovery.