Final numbers

Twenty-four hours later, the numbers are out.  Twenty-four hours after scores of Stand Up and Speak Out events were held across the globe to mark World Poverty Day, which saw multitudes of people stand up on streets, paved and unpaved, posh hotel ballrooms, sports coliseums and town squares, schools and offices, marketplaces and hill tops, the final numbers were revealed. Over 38.7 million people in 111 countries have stood up and spoken against poverty. We have broken the Guinness World Record for the largest number of people to “stand up against poverty in 24 hours,” which we ourselves set last year at 23.5 million.

Yet, twenty-four hours after this triumphant announcement, new numbers were coming in: 11 dead and more than a hundred wounded in an explosion that ripped through the Glorietta 2 shopping mall in Makati City in Manila, Philippines early Friday afternoon; 126 dead and 248 wounded in Karachi Friday evening after a suicide bombing believed to be the deadliest bomb attack in Pakistan's history.

I hear the news and I bite my left thumb nail reflexively, numbers running through my head. More than 38.7 million people around the world. 111 countries. 24 hours.  27.6 million in Asia. The highest number delivered by a region. That’s nearly three-fourths of the total number. Of these, the Philippines total was 7.1 million, which is 18% of the total. And if my math is correct, that’s one Filipino for every five individuals that stood up on Oct 17. Pakistan, which held an unprecedented Stand Up and Speak Out event that unfurled a 10-km long banner, the longest in the world, signed by one million people, delivered a total of 2.3 million.  

I bite my nail some more and, for some reason, I remember that Friday morning’s featured cab music: a Nickelback song that goes, “something's gotta go wrong, coz I'm feelin' way too damn good.”  There’s no way this is a presentiment, of course.  Sometimes some things just don’t make sense. Sometimes things happen and you find yourself unable to react or think of something. Your mind is just vacant of any thought and you fumble about for something to say or think amid the apparent senselessness. Because there was one day when dense crowds materialized in public spaces, dense crowds of people from all walks of life that stood together, shoulder to shoulder, basking in shared aims and camaraderie. Because the next day, hard explosives ripped through dense crowds of people who were having lunch on an ordinary Friday or hanging out with friends and family or standing shoulder to shoulder during a slow, celebratory procession to welcome a leader who was back after eight years in exile.  

On my way home that Friday night, numbers were still running through my head, numbers I couldn’t count: the number of people who feels outrage at these latest brutalities, the number of families who have lost a son, daughter, father, mother, friend, the number of times I left my son in a book shop at the mall to browse for an hour or two while I went to get a haircut or pay the bills or shop.  “One-two-four,” the cab driver barks.  I realize he was pointing at the gate of my house.  Then he adds, “Seventy.” I give him a hundred pesos. He gives me a change of twenty. Fine, I tell myself.  Christmas is more or less ten weeks away. # 

lani villanueva