With a lot of rains coming in and out of my home country every year, and most people, including myself, are probably just cool about it because of the thought that it’s just rain, it’ll go away soon. It sucks… but it will go away. It is so unexpected that the rains that I thought of just some regular thing that comes and goes, would be this catastrophic.
Images grabbed from various emails and social networking sites.
Manila just turned into some kind of a huge body of muddy water. These are the streets that we pass by everyday… Nobody’s spared… Even the rich and the famous have to go up their roofs, and swam the muddy waters. 
I am thankful that my family is unharmed. I pray for those lives greatly affected, and the homes destroyed. I will continue praying for everything to get better.
As I search for explanations, and look for people to blame (the government, as usual), I stumbled upon this article at the Inquirer. It suddenly dawned on me that there is no one in specific to blame… Those words that I used to read, and then say, “uhm, ok”, but not act because I would always think that nobody does them anyway. But after this tragic story in my home country, about the Great Flood destroying the homes and lives of my kababayans, I should start acting now. In my own little way, there should be something else that needs to be done, maybe not in a spectacular way but still relatively important, to prevent this from happening again in the future.
I admit to not being an advocate of Environmental stuffs. I admire those people doing great things for Environment protection. But me… none. I realized that I never wanted something disastrous as this would come out for me to care for nature.
If only I paid more attention to my Science subjects in school, I could have understood it far better. This article made it clearer.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20090928-227246/Why-did-the-flood-rise-so-high-and-so-fast
The third factor is global warming, the name everybody has heard of but rarely understands. Simply put, global warming is caused by the carbon dioxide that is produced by vehicle exhausts, cooking and other forms of burning, exhausts from factory machines, etc. and which forms a veil, the so-called “greenhouse gases,” around the earth that prevent the sun’s rays from bouncing out. This heat trapped in the earth’s atmosphere heats the planet gradually. The extra heat melts the ice caps that hold a big part of the earth’s water. The melted water raises the level of the world’s oceans. The rising seas submerge low-lying islets and coastal areas.
The trapped heat also evaporates water from bodies of water and stores them in the clouds. Cooled, the clouds drop as rain. The rains that dropped on us two days ago could have come from these clouds caused by global warming.
Paradoxically, the global warming that causes too much rain to drop in some areas also causes droughts in other areas, so that agricultural produce, which is dependent on water, is diminished.
So if global warming is not stopped soon, the Philippines will cease to be a country of 7,000-plus islands. Many low-lying islets on the planet will disappear. Also, there will be widespread famine because of reduced harvests.
So everybody has to pitch in to stop, or lessen, global warming.
How do we stop it? By reducing the emission of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the product of any form of combustion—by vehicles, by cooking fires, by factories, by heavy use of electricity because power plants burn so much fossil fuels, and by many other innocent-looking actions that we assume are a part of modern living.
There are many ways we can reduce global warming. Read the newspapers, they will tell you how. Do not think that you are only one of billions of people on earth.
How can what I do make a difference? many ask. Yes, it will make a difference. Small acts, when repeated billions of times, can save the earth and us all. Every little bit counts.
The third factor is global warming, the name everybody has heard of but rarely understands. Simply put, global warming is caused by the carbon dioxide that is produced by vehicle exhausts, cooking and other forms of burning, exhausts from factory machines, etc. and which forms a veil, the so-called “greenhouse gases,” around the earth that prevent the sun’s rays from bouncing out. This heat trapped in the earth’s atmosphere heats the planet gradually. The extra heat melts the ice caps that hold a big part of the earth’s water. The melted water raises the level of the world’s oceans. The rising seas submerge low-lying islets and coastal areas.
The trapped heat also evaporates water from bodies of water and stores them in the clouds. Cooled, the clouds drop as rain. The rains that dropped on us two days ago could have come from these clouds caused by global warming.
Paradoxically, the global warming that causes too much rain to drop in some areas also causes droughts in other areas, so that agricultural produce, which is dependent on water, is diminished.
So if global warming is not stopped soon, the Philippines will cease to be a country of 7,000-plus islands. Many low-lying islets on the planet will disappear. Also, there will be widespread famine because of reduced harvests.
So everybody has to pitch in to stop, or lessen, global warming.
How do we stop it? By reducing the emission of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the product of any form of combustion—by vehicles, by cooking fires, by factories, by heavy use of electricity because power plants burn so much fossil fuels, and by many other innocent-looking actions that we assume are a part of modern living.
There are many ways we can reduce global warming. Read the newspapers, they will tell you how. Do not think that you are only one of billions of people on earth.
How can what I do make a difference? many ask. Yes, it will make a difference. Small acts, when repeated billions of times, can save the earth and us all. Every little bit counts.
). So it was quite sad when I felt her envy when I told her I’m going bowling with the officemates. She misses the game 
Clockwise from L-R: 1) Let the camwhoring begin!!; 2) My mercy shot; 3) O yan – this is a very special photo 
)
he said, she said, i said