It has been awhile since I last posted something here (Lagi naman!) I know, I have yet again neglected this space of the cyberworld. Guilty! But now that I'm back, I'd like to share something. Since I'm done with my requirements, I'd like to share this reflection paper I made. It is actually one of my requirement in Rotation five and I thought you'd like to read this one. It's a bit sentimental in a way because I somehow got too immersed with the thought of reflection paper that I began to reminisce things that happened over the crisis.
So here it is ...
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It’s Over
I always say that my life had been an utter bore in Zamboanga. It had been remotely redundant every single day. You wake up early, you go to school before 7 a.m, you take a minute space on an old crowded jeepney, get stressed from the things you should study for and then go back home at 7 pm where you take another minute space on an old crowded jeepney again. It was boring alright but If given a chance to choose between ruthless war and boring but peaceful life? I’ll choose the latter
I thought that living in Mindanao had prepared me for wars, but I was wrong. Ever since the MNLF stand off, I already sensed the mood that was devoid of festive chatter and noise that usually come when you start a day became unusually drop dead in silence. It was replaced with the noise of guns, bombs and whatnot most especially when the sun sets by the west.
While you were sleeping soundly on your bed, you hear the chopper soaring high above the clouds; you hear the continuous firing of the quad and then the explosion which followed suit. It was as if never ending chaos going around. The Smoke. The Gun fire. The Curfew. The Armed men. Everything! People get killed, People risked their lives, People lost their homes and there was the most painful part --You can’t even do anything about it; Nothing but wait. You wait and hope for the better. You wait and hope in vain until it’ll over and done. As you assure yourself that you’d lived for the next day, someone’s going on for their last breath and you can only feel a tinge of guilt about having nothing to do about it.
In Visayan local lingo my 12-year-old brother asked, “What are they really fighting for,Ma?” I remember how my Mother paused as if regarding the question for awhile and turned to look at my father. I contemplated myself. What are they really fighting for? For an 18-year-old myself, I was, and still am,a little naïve over things. I thought I got everything figure out but the truth is that I could only decipher a little of it. The Crisis itself was a mystery to me—not in a sense because I don’t know anything, it’s because I wanted to know the story behind it like two sides of a coin. I wanted to see it out from the box. It’s like Ice berg over the Atlantic, you see the top of it and you think you got figured it out but down below the deep dark cold ocean there’s more to it that we really don’t know about.
Throughout the month-long crisis of Zamboanga, I began to realize the little time I took for granted. I began to realize how much time has been wasted waiting for something—a miracle maybe—to happen.
“What’s the reason that led us to this? What’s really up behind these things?” I began to wonder but somehow as days went by, I haven’t really got my answer. During those times, everybody was cautious. A face, any face, could be suspected of gathering intelligence for the other side.
I thought I was prepared for war but truth be told, No one is really prepared to anything actually and seeing how that crisis brought a dreadful change to my beloved city, it made me somehow grip to a lone string of hope that somehow it is over.. for now.
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