Oplan Hatid: A gathering of ‘angels’ driving strangers

‘ANGELSONWHEELS’ The volunteers who helped ferry the evacuees from Leyte province and Tacloban City to their relatives in MetroManila as part of OplanHatid are featured on the cover of the coffee table book launched during their recent reunion. The book is a collection of stories of random kindness and spontaneous generosity as recalled by the volunteers. The stories are humorous and touching. CONTRIBUTEDPHOTO

“Those kids stink,” a customer at a Pasig City gas station observed, eyeing two teens running for the washroom of the convenience store nearby.

“It made me angry,” 31-year-old business analyst Patrick Jay Parero recalled. Walking up to the stranger, he told him: “Those kids, and my other passengers, came from Tacloban.”

That one word explained everything.

Parero was one of the volunteers of Oplan Hatid, a citizen-led project that had motorists in Metro Manila transporting to their destinations the evacuees from Leyte and Samar provinces who had fled the devastation wrought by Supertyphoon “Yolanda.”

Most of the evacuees were shell-shocked and grieving, and had little or no money on them, only a piece of paper with the name and number of a relative in the city where they had hoped to find shelter.

The man gave Parero a pained smile as the volunteer explained this to him.

Relief

“Then he turned around, took out his wallet and bought food and drinks for our passengers. He talked to the store manager and asked [him to help out, too],” Parero recounted.

“Where are the relief goods?” the manager asked his staff, and the packed goods were handed out to Parero’s passengers.

The volunteer was teary-eyed. How easy it was to turn a hurtful word into an act of kindness!

Parero wrote about his experience in “Angels on Wheels,” a collection of heartwarming stories told by some of the 1,000 Oplan Hatid volunteers who ferried 20,000 Yolanda survivors to their families and friends in the course of 17 days.

On Nov. 5, the good Samaritans were reunited at the first Disaster Volunteer Summit called “A Gathering of Angels” at SM North Edsa Skydome.

No parking space

“We’d like to share important lessons learned and, hopefully, come up with a general plan that would allow us to work more effectively and efficiently in case another calamity such as the Big One happens,” said Oplan Hatid organizer Junep Ocampo, who also edited and published the 176-page coffee table book launched at the summit.

The book recalls how Oplan Hatid started when environmentalist Chips Guevara, who had volunteered his services for Yolanda victims, had trouble looking for parking space.

When a social worker told him they needed warm food for the volunteers and fare money for evacuees arriving at Villamor Air Base, Guevara thought, “My gosh, we have so many volunteers with cars. I couldn’t even park!”

“So I said, ‘Instead of money, how about a free ride?’” Guevara wrote, adding that he first cleared the idea with his boss, director Alice Bonoan, who gave him the go-ahead.

But his mood dampened when he approached some of his environmentalist friends who scoffed at the idea and at the carbon footprint that so many vehicles could create.

“I went home demoralized and thought that maybe it was a stupid idea,” Guevara said, until his wife, retired swimmer Akiko Thomson, prodded him to go work on his “great idea.”

“That night, I posted [the idea] on Facebook, still hoping that my friends would see the good that we were about to do,” Guevara said, adding that he managed to make two trips before he underwent an eye operation.

Life of its own

By then, however, his simple idea had begun to take on a life of its own.

Lawyer Golda Benjamin, who served as a coordinator for Oplan Hatid, posted on her Facebook page how much a free ride could help “a penniless family with nothing but a tattered sack filled with muddied clothes, their fears, and gratitude that they are alive.”

The contact number of a family member in Manila was often their last chance of survival after the storm, she added.

Benjamin also wrote of how survivors walked for two to three hours to the airport, not knowing if the planes were leaving for Cebu or Manila. “They just wanted to get out,” she said.

Her message and plea for help was shared on Facebook more than 2,000 times.

The spontaneous operation was chaotic at first until a system began to take shape.

Pinky Concha-Colmenares recalled how volunteers were given numbers while waiting “sometimes for 12 hours to drive strangers to their destinations.”

Bus fare

“There’s a group of eight for Quezon City,” a dispatcher would announce and the volunteers would raise the number they got. The lowest number—which was given to the volunteer who had come in earlier—got the passengers.

The next group would then be announced—“a group of five for Antipolo.”

When no one could drive the evacuees to a destination too far away, the dispatcher would announce the need for bus fare, Colmenares said.

“The most heartwarming moment was when P10,000 cash was [collected] for a group of survivors bound for Ilagan, Isabela, about 500 kilometers away. [The money was raised] in under a minute and no one asked for an accounting. Others even asked if more was needed,” she added.

Once, in jest, the dispatcher asked if anyone could bring a group to Cagayan de Oro City.

“A woman raised her hand, drove the survivors to Terminal 3, and purchased their plane tickets,” Colmenares said.

The stories were by turns humorous, touching and poignant.

Anne Mac Santos and her husband brought along their 5-year-old son in the hope of teaching him about compassion. “Our passengers were a father, a mother and a 5-year-old boy, who needed a ride to Payatas,” she recalled.

Along the way, Santos said her son almost had a “nosebleed” trying to speak Filipino to the boy named Glen. It was the first time he had a friend who spoke English, Glen said.

“The boys spoke different languages but seemed to understand each other,” Santos said. “They played ‘Bato, bato, pik’ and sang ‘Lupang Hinirang’ using different lyrics,” she added.

Feared for safety

Twenty-something Cecilia Ejercito recalled fearing for her safety when she volunteered for a group bound for Quezon City “without thinking.”

“They turned out to be a couple of young men, and I was afraid … I guess it’s cynicism (or fear) that comes with living in Manila and expecting the worst of people—especially strangers, especially men,” she said.

But Ejercito was put at ease when she saw the boy in her passenger seat making the sign of the cross just before they drove off.

Ocampo spoke of unexpected generosity from strangers, with one volunteer being so touched by the stories of his passengers that he ended up giving them all his money.

“When he drove to the tollgate, he realized he had no money left! But when he explained what happened to the cashier, the cashier said not to worry, he’d pay the toll instead,” Ocampo said.

Acts of kindness

People showed random acts of kindness, he added, recalling how a traffic enforcer overlook a seatbelt violation upon seeing the Oplan Hatid sign on a volunteer’s windshield. A water delivery boy happily took in three passengers and their heavy luggage for a free ride on his tricycle.

Genilou Jimena’s boyfriend was sick so she enlisted the help of her driver to drive a family of seven to Rosario, Pasig City. The family, who only had plastic bags of relief items from Villamor, were welcomed with hugs by their son’s friends, she recalled.

But the father seemed dazed, Jimena said. He had earlier mentioned that friends had arranged for a room they could rent, but he had no rent money yet. “I held his hand, slipping some bills to him,” Jimena said. Rent money, she added.

“His tears welled up. Mine too … We took photos and I gave them my number in case they needed anything. They haven’t contacted me yet, and I wonder how they’re doing,” she said.

Jimena’s driver expressed how thankful he was about Manila being spared. “Then unexpectedly he asked, when do we do this again, Doc?” They ended up driving two more families from Guian, Samar, that week.

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