TRAGEDY has struck my country once again. The toll of the destruction wrought by 'Typhoon Frank' the weekend of June 21-22 has already reached more than US$270 million. The toll in human lives has also been high -- there are over a thousand dead or still missing.

This recent tragedy evokes the memory of the weeks a fellow psychologist and I spent in Quezon province after disaster struck on November 29, 2004 and the resilience and great faith that my countrymen showed in the wake of such overwhelming grief and sorrow.

The Christian Children's Fund (CCF) had engaged our services to help provide psychosocial support through early childhood education for 3-6 year olds and educational and recreational activities for school-age children in the towns of Real, Infanta and General Nakar. These were the towns most badly affected by the floods and landslides. We were to work with parents, daycare workers and public school teachers.

This was my first time to visit these three towns and what I saw -- two months after disaster struck -- was totally depressing. The first town you get to is Real and it must have been a beautiful coastal town once because there were a number of resorts along the beach. But all I saw now were resorts empty of visitors with logs strewn on their grounds and boulders and thick mounds of earth blocking one’s view of them from the road. We could see the scarred mountainsides above us, hear the deafening sound of power saws converting the fallen logs into lumber, inhale the ever-present dust, and practically choke from the smoke caused by the charcoal-making. Two months after the disaster, road clearing was still going on.

The first place we visited was the Tignoan Elementary School in the town of Real. We were introduced to Jonalyn -- a CCF volunteer in her mid-20s who was helping out the Grade 1 teacher by taking over the class for an hour and engaging the children in fun activities. Jonalyn was high on adrenaline -- introducing other volunteers to us, showing us around the school, ushering us to a daycare class of 3-6-year-olds, most of whom never put down their backpacks while in class. Always be prepared to leave, they seemed to tell us. I mention Jonalyn because I met her a week after -- at a debriefing session -- and I was floored by the story she shared.

Jonalyn and her husband had two small fishing bancas and they lost one of them the night of November 29. But that was not their major loss. At the height of the floods, her sister-in-law and three of her four children -- the eldest son and two younger daughters -- had gone to the Repador building with more than a hundred other people to seek refuge from the rising waters. This woman was afraid their house would not be strong enough to withstand the floodwaters. Her husband and their younger son were left behind to save the few pigs that they were raising.

Unfortunately, the Repador building collapsed and most of the people in it perished. On December 5, about a week after the building collapsed, Jonalyn’s brother-in-law was told that the body of his eldest son had been found. He could not recognize the body and he had doubts that this was his son but he gave the boy a decent burial.

On December 9, rescue teams at the Repador site found four survivors -- according to the papers, a grandmother, Maria Tavares, and her 3-year-old granddaughter and two 14-year-old boys whose names were not mentioned. One of the teenage boys turned out to be Ian Carl, Jonalyn’s nephew, the one whom they thought they had buried. Two weeks after the building collapsed, rescuers finally dug up the body of Ian Carl’s mother and his two sisters. Ian Carl survived, as well as his father and his younger brother, but they now had to be gently coaxed from the depression and numbness that enveloped them. The irony of it is that their house was untouched by the typhoon.

We also met the principal of Tignoan Elementary School -- Maam Gloria -- that first day. She was gracious and welcoming as she showed us the damage that her school had suffered -- but at the debriefing session the following day, she appeared sad and wistful as she made a drawing entitled “Pasan Ko Ang Mundo” (I Bear the Burden of the World). She spoke of the distress she experienced from her multiple roles -- taking care of her immediate family, directing the rehabilitation work on the school, and now worried over a sister who had suffered a second nervous breakdown. Her sister had to be brought to the National Mental Hospital because the floods had brought back memories of an earlier disaster, when their mother had drowned in a flood.

Betty, a teacher from Infanta and Doris, a teacher from General Nakar, had identical laments. Betty was married to a seaman; Doris to an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) who had worked in the Middle East for more than 10 years. Both husbands had just come back and decided to settle down in Quezon after being away from their families for many years. The floodwaters took away whatever small businesses they had started and although both wives were grateful that their lives and those of their families were spared -- they talked of the depression their husbands felt at the thought that they would have to try to get an overseas job again, that they were back to zero.

The stories of Jonalyn, Maam Gloria, Betty and Doris were only four of more than a hundred stories we heard during the first two of the six weeks we spent in Quezon. We realized that in disasters of any magnitude, the statistics do not tell half the story, do not tell a tenth of the story. Every survivor suffers his unique pain, mourns his particular loss, and has his own tragic tale to tell.

We were touched by the painful stories that the people shared, but we were even more moved by the resilience and courage that they showed. They taught us four valuable lessons.

Lesson 1. The people of Quezon reminded us how fragile life is. They forced us to rethink our priorities. What matters to us really? They spoke of the importance of family love and unity, the irrelevance of many material objects, the gift of a second life.

The weekend after I got back from Quezon, I looked around our house at my beloved books, my husband’s love letters, my granddaughter’s many pictures and I wondered what I would miss if all of it disappeared in an instant. I could not bear to think of what I would feel if any of the people I loved were lost. I remembered Jackie, a young volunteer and her anguish as she cried and said over and over again the words she had heard while the waters rose -- “Si Ayet, si Ayet... nabitawan ko si Ayet.” (Ayet, Ayet... I have lost my hold on Ayet.")

Lesson 2. Although we are painfully reminded about how powerless we are in the face of Mother Nature’s awesome force, we also discover how resilient and powerful we can be.

Aling Rosalina, a 60-year-old Grade 1 teacher from General Nakar who lived along the coast, spoke softly of how she helped a woman swept onto her backyard who had been in the water for seven hours. She had at first thought that the woman was dead but when she saw that she was still breathing, she warmed her stomach with a hot water bottle and was able to revive her.

Minerva, a wisp of a girl in Infanta, carried to their rooftop her much heavier brother sick of hydrocephalus when the waters reached their second floor.

Revel, a young man from Real, saved three young nieces struggling through the mud from their submerged house to bring them, one by one, to the safety of a tricycle parked on the street above.

Lesson 3. Disasters teach us that to survive, we can find, we must find meaning in our losses and adversities. Our saving grace as Filipinos is our spirituality. Most of the people we met in Quezon were just so grateful to be alive and considered the tragedy just another test that the Lord had sent them.

One woman in General Nakar said the event made her realize just how materialistic she was, that she actually needed very few material things in life. This from a woman whose house was “totally washed out” and whose entire wardrobe was now made up of second-hand clothes.

Those who had yet to find meaning in their misfortune could at least -- on hindsight -- find humor in the ways they coped with their drastically changed lives.

Lola Olga, another 60-year-old, dressed in a shocking yellow dress which she said all ukay-ukay (second-hand clothes) stalls must have rejected, provided the comic relief in a debriefing session we did in Infanta. She said her worst memory of the disaster was being unable to change her underwear for four days! She was sorry she had lost her make-up kit because now she could not fix her faded tattoed eyebrows. “Hindi na ako makapagpa-tattoo ulit kasi ako ay diabetic,” (I can no longer have my eyebrows re-tattooed because I am diabetic.) she said. The first thing she did when the waters subsided was to ask her son-in-law to dig up their yard and look for a plastic bag filled with her treasured costume jewelry -- the ones her relatives in the US had sent her. Then when her daughter gave her some money -- she went to the Big City (Lucena), had herself manicured and pedicured and bought herself a pair of earrings worth fifty pesos.

“Ang babaw ng kaligayahan ko, ano?” (It takes so little to make me happy, doesn't it?) she laughingly told us. But her co-teachers told us not to be misled. She is actually the activist in the group, the one who has eloquently castigated the illegal loggers for causing the floods..

Lesson 4. Disasters teach us that we are not alone, that we are one, that we can find our salvation and recovery in community.

We heard of people inviting complete strangers into their homes, sharing their food with them, giving them dry clothes to wear.

Betty, a widow from Infanta who lived by herself because all her children were grown and living elsewhere credited her neighbors for her being still alive. She had just gotten her bonus on the day the rains came and had bought herself a new VCD player and a stand for her TV set. Of course, she never got the chance to enjoy her purchases. Exhausted by her shopping spree, she had gone to bed early the night of the big flood. If her neighbors had not roused her from her sleep, she believed she would have perished.

I could go on sharing with you the stories I heard in Quezon -- but you get the point. These people needed material help, for sure, but they needed us even more to listen to the stories they had to tell, to feel traumatized over what had happened to them and their communities, and to cheer them on to a new day. For our part, we definitely needed to feel that we were one with them, that we could empathize with their pain, and that we could appreciate and learn fully from the lessons that they were teaching us.