When reading any disaster report, regardless of the magnitude of the devastation, it’s not difficult to keep the suffering at arm’s length. In fact, I find it surprisingly easy to lose myself in lists and numbers, especially when the casualties are higher than I can really comprehend. What does it actually feel like when a storm kills more than a thousand people in your hometown? When a raging river washes away an entire neighborhood in a single night? When a drowning person calls to you for help and you are not able to save them? These thoughts are too frightening. I have realized it is not something I can truly grasp, without having directly experienced it myself. I have been to Cagayan de Oro a few times now, a city in northern Mindanao that was badly hit by tropical storm Sendong in 2011. However, it was only on my last visit that we went to the Isla de Oro, one of the ‘ground zero’ neighborhoods. Two years after the storm, it was like a ghost town. Not a single other person