Ondoy and More on 9/30/2009

It’s early morning and I sit on a high floor of a condominium building in the center of Metro Manila’s business and banking district and look out towards a distant, but discernable through the morning, haze Manila Bay. A much different setting than a mere 48 hours ago when I was beginning to feel like Idaho Smith, the unlucky, calamity prone, distant cousin on his mother’s side of Indiana Jones.

The flood waters have yet to subside sufficiently for us to retrieve the rest of our luggage-we will try again later today-so we still bear the honest tag of “refugee,” albeit we are in much better straights than the one’s who were hit the hardest. The death toll is now conservatively listed as 246 in the papers but old Asia hands know that there are probably half-again that number but the bodies haven’t yet been, or may never be, recovered and found. Such is the reality when there are large groups of squatters living in mean circumstances with little or no local government controls.

Also this morning the newspapers feature above the fold, color photos of U.S. Navy Seals working to rescue victims in areas of Cainta, Rizal Province, not far from where we were rescued/evacuated. The American willingness to help those in need is recognized and appreciated everywhere, it seems, except the Oval Office.

Sadly the newspapers also headline the death of two US Navy Seabees who had been out inspecting a school project in Sulu. They, along with a Filipino Marine were killed when an IED went off as their vehicle passed. My heart goes out for the families of those brave men.

The use of IEDs as a roadside killing device is a deadly new development in the southern Philippines and underscores the reality that the war on terror is a world wide war in the truest sense but one that is most obviously not recognized as such by the current administration. If only the Democrats would voluntarily take this war as seriously as the victims must.