THE TOWN WHERE we work doesn’t have too many people, and it feels like it has much less than the 28,000, which is around the size of a big barangay (a neighborhood) in old Manila.
You’ll never see a crowd anywhere, and everyone knows each other, it seems. And yet, I didn’t realize how much Timaru felt like just one big neighborhood since late last week, when five boys died in a single-car accident on the outskirts of town.
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A special dread shot up my spine when Mahal read out the accident report, at ___ Rd, where I commuted everyday. Not just that, but it was a deceptively busy area where it could be deserted at one moment, and chock full of cars on the intersection the next.
Whether or not it was a safe or dangerous place, the extreme nature of the accident was in direct proportion to the tragedy involved. Six passengers, five deaths. No other way to put it, the best way I could describe it was sending six kids to war, and only one of them returning.
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And they WERE kids. none of them over 17. Fifteen and sixteen, with only the driver, who will probably live with his mistake the rest of his life, a non-teenager at 20 years old.
I’d only been in this town six months, and I knew none of them, nor their families, much less been friends. But I felt, how devastating it would be to their families.
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Our random thoughts proved prophetic. Little did I know that practically all of the people I worked with had some sort of connection with the youths.
A member of my department went to school with and knew three of the six. My senior colleague’s son was a classmate to one of the boys. And my own shift partner’s classmate was a sister to another boy.
Such a senseless event, made more senseless by the fact that the boys were not even starting their lives. No finger pointing, but is it a rite of passage and a tradition of youth that we all do things that tempt fate and dance with danger to within an inch of our lives?
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The Sunday morning news that greeted us reported five deaths and one injured, but between the lines we saw the brother, the friend, the classmate. The son, the nephew and the grandson that will now live only in pictures and memories.
In Timaru, in Manila or anywhere else, we everywhere feel the loss. The pain is deep and to the bone. We can share it with all who are capable of love and emotion, but for now it is too great to bear.
Today we are all Timaruans.
