sleepless nights

When you wake up in the night in the midst of total darkness, no matter how brave you can be, you will be enveloped with fears. Now that I live alone again by myself, I always find myself frightened at nights with so many thoughts that cross my imagination. Of course I do lived in a secure place so to speak but knowing that you are alone in a house can be upsetting especially for a girl like me. I know that I am having sleepless nights because pimples starts to show in my usually pimple free face.

I start to recall my childhood days when I was just about ten years old when for months we didn’t had a good sleep. Bicol had always the insurgency problem and my childhood was a witness of how really it did cause a trouble in our community. I grow up seeing rebels playing hide and seek with the military personnel. I saw them with their guns and ammunitions kept in sacks. Of course no one from my family was a member of rebel groups but it just became an ordinary scene of them frequently visiting our house. During those times, you just have to keep mum if they enter your house.

Then one Saturday afternoon as I came from my scholarship class, I just saw helicopters flying to and from the military camp two barangays away from us. We could hear the exchange of fire. And after that we just hear the news that a family had been massacred. To say that I am scared was an understatement especially that during the victims wake in the parish church which is stone’s throw from our house, we could hear crying everyday.

What started our sleepless nights was when someone told my family that we are the next target of a military attack. So every night after our dinner we would leave our house and sleep in my Lola’s house. That went on for many weeks until one day the rebels who frequented our house began to stop visiting. My mother succeeded in sending them away. What we did was we will leave our house every time they came and bring along our food and leave them with nothing to eat.

When our problems about that were finally resolved, another dilemma cause again our sleepless nights. Robbery incidents had become rampant that my mother would tell us to be always alert at night. She was up most of the time at night. My father was rarely with us at night since his work was on evening shifts.

I was just so glad that when I reach my teenage years, our community had become peaceful and we had great time staying late at night but already outside chatting with our neighbors. And of course my siblings and I had more than ten hours of sleep most of the time. We could sleep then to our hearts content.

But a month ago when I went home for a vacation I did feel the tension again. There were robbers attacking the neighborhood. In fact our house became a victim twice of these criminals. They took groceries, cell phones, and luckily they couldn’t carry the TV so they leave it behind after their attempt to run away with it. And for once my mom again is having her sleepless nights. Though suspects are already known, they don’t have strong evidence to support it yet.

Well to sum it all, I just wish that for once we can all live in a community where we will all be safe at night. I could imagine just how it is if I would have been raise in Basilan.

 Until now when I hear helicopters I still associate it with rift between rebels and soldiers even if I am comfortably sitting in the office. I would imagine death every time I saw an armored car. I think we all deserve especially the children to live a worry free life, and it is just so unfair to be caught in the middle of war just because older people are in discord. We will never be young again and to be deprived of a happy childhood is to be taken away half of a lifetime

For everything there is a season,

And a time for every matter under heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die;

A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal;

A time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to throw away stones, And a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to seek, and a time to lose;

A time to keep, and a time to throw away;

A time to tear, and a time to sew;

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate,

A time for war, and a time for peace.

--Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8