For most Filipinos, the “cruelest” month of 2020 was not The Wasteland’s April but the month before it. It was in mid-March of 2020 when an unforgiving lockdown, described by an Asian Development Bank study as the second most stringent in the Asian region after Nepal was ordered by the national government to rein in the spread of Covid-19. The enhanced community quarantine, later to be known in our pandemic-era lexicon as ECQ, allowed very little mobility, commerce and trade.

“Shelter-in-place” in the hamlets of poverty in both urban and rural areas meant as many as a dozen people marooned in a windowless shanty topped by corrugated tin roof, stale breaths, sweating bodies, empty stomachs and all. The torture of confinement was, however, their minor problem. It was how to eke out basic survival, where to get the next meal, how to be in a state where even the basic freedom to do back-breaking, dehumanizing jobs for survival was not available as a lifeline. (Picking up somebody else’s trash for reselling to the junk shops was banned.)

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