Many of us through modern forms of communication have witnessed after the fact the natural calamities that have beset our world in the last decade. The great tsunami of 2004 from Thailand to Sri Lanka, eventually reaching Africa via the coast of Somalia, recurs in memories of the TV images seen of this event. The tsunami that afflicted Japan’s Sendai coast sweeping away houses, farms, boats and infrastructure, and its consequences of nuclear radiation from the crippled nuclear power plant, are a fact that we have seen with their effects recurring over and over again. And fresh and overwhelming to our minds, far away from the Visayas as most of us were, was the earthquake in Bohol that damaged about two dozen heritage churches, followed by the typhoon devastation and storm surge that assaulted the Visayas again in November last year.

In all these catastrophic, uncontrolled and almost surreal events, human beings--who lived and loved, who went to school and worked, who ate and drank, traveled and dreamt, had families, loved ones, memories, ups and downs--were suddenly and unexpectedly removed, having disappeared into the calamity.

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