March 1521, October 1944, November 2013, January 2015
The cataclysmic devastation wrought by the Third Landing might yet lead to real transformation following the Fourth Landing. The Gardener makes a quick review of the four tales.
The First Landing
For almost a millennium during the pre-colonial time, Leyte Gulf was viewed by many as practically the “end of the world.” Travelers then originated from west of the Gulf. Whenever Chinese, Indian, Kampuchean, Arab, Siamese, Singhalese, or Malay traders reached Samar-Leyte, they knew they could go no farther. Beyond the area was a vast ocean that seemingly had no end, from which came the strongest typhoons, storm surges and the heaviest rains. Adventurers who dared sail that vast sea were believed destined, sooner or later, to fall off the earth. They just never came back.
When asked what their place was called, the inhabitants gave the name “Kan Daya” (meaning, the possession of Daya) – referring to a past hegemony of a great chief by that name. In any case, all travelers stopped their journeys here. There simply was nothing more beyond Kan Daya. Nothing – “Waray,” the inhabitants would say when asked what lay beyond.
Arrivals – by junk or sampan of roving merchants – always came from the setting sun, none from the East – never ever. But one day, on 16th March 1521, news of the arrival of complete strangers, aliens, white men who came in giant boats, caused a shock wave of disquiet among the communities scattered along Kan Daya’s coast. “This could not be,” they thought – “arrivals from the endless sea where the sun rose?” Arrivals always came from where the sun set.
From www.lookandlearn.com
But it was true. Captain General Ferdinand Magellan, that Portuguese hidalgo and adventurer in the service of the Spanish Crown – the First Conquistador of the Pacific and First Circumnavigator of the globe (titles he did not know he had just earned) had arrived and made the First Landing on Leyte. For the first time in the history of humankind a living person encircled the globe! The indisputable proof was that the local folk understood perfectly and responded with the same tongue to Enrique, Magellan’s Malay slave. Magellan and Enrique had no doubt about it: they were now where they came from although they had taken another route – the route which now showed how big the globe was, proving in the least that the world was indeed a globe.
Magellan told the mystified inhabitants of Samar-Leyte that it had taken him and his party twenty moons over vast seas to reach their shores, which, he was sure, were the gateway to the East.
Now here he was – an inner knowing told him – standing on the crossroads of history and cultures, on Kan Daya, where West finally merged with East. He had survived Earth’s biggest body of water, which he may have wrongly baptized “Pacific” and presently found himself at its northwestern edge by the narrowest strait in the world, which he now baptized “San Juanico Strait.”
This was Leyte almost 500 years ago. The people of the place were not quite sure what impact this most surprising arrival of complete aliens would have on them and their life ways. For one thing the aliens exhibited fire power that deafened their ears! Did they intend harm or good? For, clearly, they could do much harm. Could they also do much good?
Only much later, when the Spanish colonization and subjugation of the archipelago finally got under way, would it become clear how the First Landing on Leyte had in fact led to the loss of 900 years of freedom and prosperity, and the loss of life on a grand scale in one revolt after another of a people used to freedom and self-possession.
The inhabitants of Leyte had never heard of the powerful Pope in Rome who commanded Kings and Emperors and had, more than 25 years earlier, divided the world into two by means of an imaginary line of demarcation from pole to pole 100 leagues (about 320 miles) west of the Cape Verde Islands.
Borgia
Spanish-born Pope Alexander Borgia VI gave Spain “exclusive rights” to all newly discovered and undiscovered lands in the region west of the line. Portuguese expeditions were to keep to the east of the line. Neither power was to occupy any territory already in the hands of a Christian ruler.
Under that imperial legitimacy, by virtue of the power of the Pope, Leyte should have been considered as belonging to Portugal and not to Spain but certainly not to itself – so funny, wouldn’t you say so now? Not then, for they were quite serious about all this colonization and Christianization, and easily accepting of “de facto” situations wrought by cross-and-sword as fait accompli which easily became “de jure.” The First Leyte Landing ensured that at least one, in fact only one future nation would become predominantly Christian in the vast ocean of non-Christian Asia teeming with Hindus and Buddhists, Muslims and Taoists, Shintoists, Animists, Ancestor-Worshippers and what-have-we.
Yes, the First Landing at Leyte Gulf did lead to the introduction of Christianity in some sort of way. After Magellan fired his cannons for demonstration purposes, 800 of Kan Daya’s residents wanted to be baptized.
The Second Landing
Gen. MacArthur (from http://www.royblack.com)
In the mid-twentieth century, Japanese invaders succeeded in trampling on the Philippines’ “sacred shores.” The pseudo-justifying slogan was “Asia for the Asians.” Could the West ever return to the Far East again? If it could, whether it knew it then or not, it would have to do so on the same Kan Daya shores, on Leyte Gulf. General Douglas MacArthur knew this, and that’s precisely what he did – unleashing the greatest naval battle in recorded human history – the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
MacArthur first convinced his Joint Chiefs of Staff that in their strategic plan to defeat Japan, they had to take back the Philippines first: “The Philippines occupies the pivotal point of control relative to Japan, Korea, China, Burma, French Indochina, Thailand, British Malaya, and the Netherlands Antilles.” [The whole “Far East” in other words.]
But the key to the Philippines had to be identified and MacArthur saw this in Leyte Gulf: “the natural gateway to the rest of the Philippines; its possession would greatly facilitate and support further operations to the north as well as expedite control over the remaining islands in the Visayas group.”
MacArthur further argued that “Leyte occupies a commanding position in the Philippines and its repossession by the United States would not only divide Japanese forces in the Philippines but would also provide excellent anchorage together with sites for bases and airfields from which land-based aircrafts could bomb all parts of the Philippines, the coast of China and Formosa.”
“Leyte Gulf,” he emphasized, “is large and open, offering an excellent anchorage for a considerable number of vessels, including those of largest size.” He hoped “to develop Leyte Valley into a large air and logistical base to support further massive operations.”
The Japanese imperial forces had the same belief and likewise prepared to do battle in Leyte Gulf. Thus, later, “after the loss of Leyte, I realized that victory was impossible,” said the Japanese strategist and commander, General Yamashita.
Needless to say, the Battle of Leyte Gulf resulted as well in thousands of the inhabitants dying the collateral death. The giants were clashing. The bombings were no respecter of status: civilian Leyteno or military Japanese or the US Armed Forces – they were driven en masse to the Great Beyond.
With the Second Landing, Leyte Gulf became one of the biggest cemeteries on Earth. Approximately 16,900 military people died in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. 15,000 of those causalities were Japanese, the other 1,900 were American. The battle was fought over three days in October 1944. In all, the invasion and “liberation” of the Philippines cost the U.S. 10,400 and the Japanese over 250,000 casualties. Who knows how many residents of Leyte Gulf died as “necessary collateral damage” in this Second Landing? Nobody was counting.
The Third Landing
The Third Landing inflicted a controversial number of casualties to date – or so it seems – and a razing to the ground of thousands upon thousands of homes and farms, factories, schools, hospitals and churches, of everything standing up without discrimination so that one must describe the one-sided battle that lasted no more than a few hours as cataclysmic to the max. The devastation was much worse in this Third than in the Second Landing.
Someone remarked that if there is a Typhoon Alley on Earth, then the Philippines is situated dead center. It also rests on the unstable “Ring of Fire” where volcanoes blast periodically and tectonic plates slip one beneath the other, with catastrophic effects on population centers.
Not all but most of the big typhoons make their first landfall in one or the other island of the provinces of Leyte Gulf. It is probably correct to surmise that many inhabitants of the area did get scared with the talk of a Super Typhoon coming their way, but not overly. They survived so many before; they’d more than survive this one too – they thought.
However, there was one thing people did not know. Nor did the government understand exactly what it knew. [We have to assert this if we charitably grant that a government is merely stupid but not evil.]
Yes, the government, meaning the national government of Roxas, Gazmin, PNoy and Soliman – not necessarily but probably in that order – had quite succeeded, they thought, in carving an image of competence following Typhoon Sendong of Northern Mindanao, Typhoon Pablo of the Davao Region, and the Bohol earthquake. They escaped most criticisms unscathed. Any imperfection or failure of management was quite successfully blamed on local government units. The national government had money, wherever it came from (DAP), and therefore it was always the savior.
In the run-up to the storm, PNoy dispatched the big three to Tacloban, calling on them to ensure a “zero-casualty” encounter with this naval armada that the weather bureau was calling “Yolanda” (“Haiyan!” Similar sounding “Yoling” was one of the worst in 1971 but who remembers?). Wasn’t his “popularity” due to his government’s record of “effective management?” Let this new Battle of Leyte Gulf highlight his MacArthurian stature and show the world that the raging battles over pork barrels PDAF and DAP were not worth the continued attention they were commanding.
Highlight the management skills of “Crown Prince” Roxas in contrast with the politicking of outsider would-be-the-next-king Jejomar Binay. Turn the crisis around by managing the news first of all: everything else would follow, right? Wrong! In events the magnitude of a real war, the news can’t always be managed even if you almost own the most popular channels. True, the first casualty of war is truth, as Churchill never tired of pointing out, but truth will always out especially with the presence of foreign correspondents, as Mohandas K. Gandhi always said.
In fact, it was a foreign monitoring source that gave the deadly warning. The United States military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii said they were seeing sustained winds of more than three hundred kilometers per hour (194 miles) and gusts of 380 kilometers (236 miles) per hour. That meant, said the U.S. National Weather Service, that “catastrophic damage will occur,” with large areas left uninhabitable for weeks or months.
In Manila, newly-installed Doppler radar stations gave the national government a clearer picture too of the storm’s size and the winds’ force and the turbulence of the water within. And they, too, saw that the storm could have winds as strong as 260 kilometers (162 miles) per hour – less than the more accurate US prediction. But both forecasters from either side of the Pacific spied something really unusual: the risk of “a storm surge” as high as seven meters, or about 23 feet. This was a rarity because although typhoons always bring high winds they rarely bring mountainous waves. This was the one thing most people did not know. Nor did the government understand exactly what it knew.
The bottom-line here was that the Yolanda armada was going to have an impact quite like a massive tsunami. And this, to repeat, this the national government utterly and criminally failed to communicate effectively, as denounced in anger and tears by media man Ted Failon, a native of Kan Daya. A tsunami, technically speaking, is earthquake-originated and our careful technical people did not want to be technically inaccurate. They could have in the least used a phrase like “tsunami-like” – but “storm surge” was clear enough, they presumed. And what a presumption!
This was the state of Kan Daya immediately before the Third Landing. And the rains came, and the winds blew, and the floods rose in quick and quiet fashion. The Yolanda Landing was unopposed, victorious, and cruel.
Yolanda’s operation was simple. It submerged the inhabitants of Kan Daya by the hundreds and the thousands. When it left after a few near-interminable hours of black water torture Kan Daya could not even count how many hundreds or thousands of her inhabitants died in the deluge. The bodies of relatives and friends started showing up at the downtown area of Tacloban, at Brgy. San Fernando, Sagkahan, Marasbaras, V&G, Brgy. 88, at San Jose near the airport where a police training camp was located. The Yolanda armada immediately took out and submerged 200 national police trainees by the Tacloban airport.
At the Red Beach barangays in Palo town, at Brgy. Salvacion and especially Brgy. San Joaquin, how many inhabitants were immediately drowned as so many of their forebears were almost 70 years earlier? And, of course, so were Tanauan town’s Santa Cruz, Calogcog, Maguey, Likod, Buntay, San Roque, Sto. Nino, Cabuynan and Bislig near the well-cared for Olot and other barangays of Tolosa town.
Anyone who was familiar with these highly populated places of the coasts not just in Leyte but in all Kan Daya may be forgiven for estimating that the Yolanda armada must have immersed unto death some twenty thousand people of the whole region.
The PNoy, of course, was irked, to say the least, if not profoundly angered that his “zero casualty” confidence could be so grossly contradicted. The police general who honestly and competently did so in the interest of truth was summarily removed from his post.
PNoy’s top three of Gazmin, Roxas and Soliman just did not know what to do. Ninety-six hours had passed, and national government had yet to make some effective move to help a decimated local government help a totally defeated community. Old habits die hard. By habit, therefore, they took the route of blaming others for their inability to cope. In the past, they often got away with such tactics scot-free. This time the people of Tacloban responded not merely with clear dislike and understandable contempt but with passionate hatred.
Had not Anderson Cooper and the whole universe of foreign media come to the rescue by shaming PNoy for the anarchy that had set in, the consequences of the Third Landing would have been much worse. The Yolanda armada wiped out not only thousands of lives and property in the communities of Kan Daya; it wiped out before the whole world all of PNoy’s pretensions to efficient management and effective governance.
With the Third Landing, the real test had finally come and he blew it.
Worst of all was the opportunism at its most indecent. People could not understand – could not believe – that hatred for one Mayor could be pursued at the cost of the lives of the community.
Surely now was not the time for petty partisan recriminations and resentments. This was a time of war and the enemy Yolanda armada was no push-over. More than anything else, unity was the paramount need on the basis of patriotic forgiveness and charity. But blame games? The very suffering people in the waste lands of Kan Daya thought the whole thing so psychologically immature and morally evil.
For the people of Kan Daya, the First Landing centuries ago ended up in the captivity of the whole archipelago under foreign subjugation. The Second Landing ended up in a restoration of neo-colonial rule on the basis of and in cooperation with a newly strengthened oligarchy. The Third Landing should have been viewed first by the people of Kan Daya and eventually by the whole nation as a new start – a new beginning. All was lost. Here was Ground Zero. This was Tabula Raza. It was surely time to get out of the nightmares to have new dreams for a new Kan Daya, stronger, greener, more prosperous, more intelligent, freer, more participative, and more ready to meet and withstand any number of Yolanda armadas yet to come. But this was not to be – not yet. Weeks followed each other quickly and the months rolled speedily into a little more than a year with very few dramatic instances of transformation.
Tacloban saw a plethora of brand-new motor vehicles, beautiful to behold, with beautiful people going to a few international eating places including fine dining at its best.
The Fourth Landing
from ph.news.yahoo.com
Pope Alexander VI’s successor, by the grace of God Supreme Pontiff in 2013, was very much a different kind of person – a Bergoglio, not a Borgia. He was a Jesus type. He idolized a medieval monk named Francesco of Assisi and took this name to be his own – “Pope Francis.” Inexplicably, in less than one year of his papal reign Francis already became the most talked-about person on Earth – a planetary rock star showing everyone that all we need is love, love, love: that is all we need.
No less powerful than any Pope in the past, Francis nonetheless does not rule over kingdoms and empires but unabashedly seeks to usher in what Jesus styled “the Kingdom of God” meaning the kingdom of love – in all of which he is incredibly credible.
As soon as Leyte experienced the Third Landing, Francis immediately sent out prayers and love through a tweet in his official account @Pontifex: “I ask all of you to join me in prayer for the victims of Typhoon Haiyan / Yolanda especially those in the beloved islands of the Philippines,” the Pope said. He immediately told a crowd of pilgrims, tourists and Romans in St. Peter’s Square that he wanted to assure the people of the Philippines and surrounding region that he feels close to them. He lamented the high toll of dead and the enormous damage, and then requested silent prayer for “our brothers and sisters.”
Right after his election, Pope Francis had been invited to visit the Philippines for one reason or another, for various excuses and reasons, by the Cardinal Archbishop of Manila and by the Bishops’ Conferences. But he was noncommittal, understandably, given his newness in office, his urgent agenda items for the whole church with so limited a timeframe in each passing day.
But when Yolanda struck Leyte Gulf and Pope Francis saw the cataclysmic damage in life and the means to life, he immediately wanted to go and be with his suffering brothers and sisters. No, he did not say he wanted to visit the Philippines, not immediately. What he most wanted was to land in Leyte and embrace the victims and their loved ones – his loved ones all.
On January 17th 2015, only a little more than a year from the Third Landing, Leyte once again experienced a historic arrival. Although it had been sufficiently announced for almost a year, still when the day came there were doubts that it would happen. A moderately strong typhoon, packing 130-kilometer-per-hour winds, was not about to change course. Local church and state officials conferred with the Gardener as to the possibility of switching schedules for the Pope: Manila on the 17th and Leyte on the 18th – a real logistical nightmare if ever there was one. The idea remained in the realm of perpetual possibility when the Gardener remarked, “Tell that to the Pope!”
In the event, the Pope did land, the typhoons increased in strength, the rains refused to stop, the puddles started to become floods in many areas where almost a hundred thousand pilgrims ignored rain and wind and soaking wet shoes to hear the unbelievable Arrival speak in clearest Spanish and accurate English translation to the loud speakers across kilometers of people crying for purest joy and rediscovery of their spiritual essence.
He said: “I’d like to tell you something close to my heart. When I saw from Rome that catastrophe, I had to be here. And on those very days I decided to come here. I am here to be with you – a little bit late, but I’m here.”
The Gardener was saying to himself: this is not Magellan, this is not MacArthur, this is not Yolanda – this is the Fourth arrival, this is Pope Francis.
He continued: “I have come to tell you that Jesus is Lord. And he never lets us down. ‘Father,’ you might say to me, ‘I was let down because I have lost so many things, my house, my livelihood.’ It’s true if you say that and I respect those sentiments.”
“But Jesus is there,” he continued, pointing to the cross: “nailed to the cross and from there he does not let us down. He was consecrated as Lord on that throne and there he experienced all the calamities that we experience. Jesus is Lord. And the Lord from the cross is there for you. In everything the same as us. That is why we have a Lord who cries with us and walks with us in the most difficult moments of life.”
Did anyone among the tens of thousands mind the rain and the winds? The Gardener saw none and he did look around a lot seeing so many friends and familiar faces, himself having lost so many close relatives and friends but with so many survivors he had also known, including immediate family, who were all here now – all collectively thinking that this must be, this had to be, the reason why they survived, why they were given a new lease in life – TO BE HERE NOW.
“So many of you have lost everything. I don’t know what to say to you. But the Lord does know what to say to you. Some of you have lost part of your families. All I can do is keep silence and walk with you all with my silent heart.
“Many of you have asked the Lord – why lord? And to each of you, to your heart, Christ responds with his heart from the cross. I have no more words for you.
“Let us look to Christ. He is the lord.
“He understands us because he underwent all the trials that we, that you, have experienced. And beside the cross was his Mother. We are like a little child in the moments when we have so much pain and no longer understand anything. All we can do is grab hold of her hand firmly and say ‘Mommy’– like a child does when it is afraid. It is perhaps the only words we can say in difficult times – ‘Mommy’.”
In joy, in pain, in tears, with the rains incessantly falling and the winds accelerating from 120 to 130 Kph, the people were now experiencing this unity of being; he and they were one. They looked at him again and heard the fatherly-motherly-brotherly-sisterly voice caressing and penetrating the very core of one’s essential nature, comforting, strengthening, understanding:
“Let us respect a moment of silence together and look to Christ on the cross. He understands us because he endured everything. Let us look to our Mother and, like a little child, let us hold onto her mantle and with a true heart say – ‘Mother’.
“In silence, tell your Mother what you feel in your heart.
“Let us know that we have a Mother, Mary, and a great Brother, Jesus.
“We are not alone. We also have many brothers who in this moment of catastrophe came to help. And we too, because of this, we feel more like brothers and sisters because we helped each other.
“This is what comes from my heart. Forgive me if I have no other words to express myself. Please know that Jesus never lets you down. Know that the tenderness of Mary never lets you down. And holding onto her mantle and with the power that comes from Jesus’ love on the cross, let us move forward and walk together as brothers and sisters in the Lord.” FINIS