A bit late & on a throwaway for privacy, but it still haunts me. I’ve never actually shared this with anyone who wasn’t involved at the time.
Throughout high school, I was involved in several missionary/humanitarian trips to the Philippines I wax alongside my Dad and other members of my close church family, including several I’d known aince infancy. It was a yearly tradition from 2010 onwards at this point, every year during the October school holidays we would head over to Tacloban City, the capital of one of the poorest islands in the country, and build houses, feed children & meet as many people we could for 2-3 weeks.
Filipino people are lovely, but I developed a seriously close relationship to the daughter of the Pastor who was accomodating us. She was beautiful, smart, generous, humble and just an all-round gem of a human being. We did feeding programs together, taught sunday school, etc etc over the years & had formed a bond. Its kinda hard to explain what that culture does to you if you havent experienced it yourself. She sang in the worship services too, and geez, what a voice she had!
Because Tacloban doesnt have the greatest university education opportunities, she decided to relocate to Manila to start Uni in 2013. Prior to our 2013 trip, we’d been exchanging messages back & forth pretty frequently, and I contributed significantly the fundraiser for her airfare home so she could see her family for the first time in ~6 months, and see us as well in the meantime, and head back 2 weeks after we left.
All is well, have great time, and leave for home again.
A week & a half later. Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) makes landfall, the strongest to ever make landfall, 10k dead. The rest of the family survive, but she gets swept away. I’ve never asked about the specifics, never really had the heart to do so. Seeing as I was the one who opened the door & contributed heavily to her coming home. I still haven’t really gotten over it.
I lost a few close friends over that week, their joy & hapiness having none of the opportunities I’ll ever have as a citizen of the Western world still moves me deeply to this day, & being only able to follow it by delayed news broadcasts made me scream & cry into my pillow night after night. But fuck man, I still blame myself for what happened to her. I’ve been back twice since, but that cloud will probably hang over me for a long time. A life gone that had the potential to change so many others.