Pubmat by Hailey Buendia
by Sasha Toribio
Rain is never just rain anymore. For some, the idea of rain may feel like a cozy afternoon, holed up at home, listening to the downpour outside from the safety of their homes. For others, rain can feel like a problem to overcome: a flooded road, a day of lost income, a school day thrown into uncertainty.
Yet, as familiar as the rain has become for our country, its unpredictability becomes harder to ignore. Classes are suspended, commutes are disrupted, and plans are being pushed aside with little to no warning. Every Filipino — young and old — anticipates the rain with bated breath, not knowing what they must endure next. What once was a normal occurrence of nature has now turned into our country’s biggest obstacle.
But rain does not fall on a country of isolated lives. A student might see rain and immediately question if classes are cancelled. Meanwhile, a farmer, whose livelihood depends on the quality of his crops, might see the rain and worry about its effects on his harvest. He may wonder if months of hard work could be lost. Though these two situations may seem worlds apart at first glance, they exist within the same environment — one where our actions, choices, and consequences are more connected than we often realize.
It is this connection between people, their livelihoods, and the world around them that Pope Francis calls on us to recognize in “Laudato Si’.” In describing the earth as our “common home,” the encyclical reminds us that environmental problems do not remain confined to the environment. When humans forget to take care of our common home, that causes environmental issues like climate change, which continues to ripple outward, causing grief and hardship, especially for the most unfortunate of our community. To care for creation, then, is to also care for the people whose lives are intertwined with it, and vice versa.
And perhaps to understand what caring for our common home means, we must begin by looking at something as ordinary and quotidian as the rain.
“Are Classes Suspended?”
At around 5:30 in the morning, Miguel Romana wakes up to get ready for school. He is a senior high school student, currently studying in Ateneo De Manila University, with a passion for serving the Lord and a heart made for understanding all walks of life.
His morning starts out as usual — wake up, take a bath, eat breakfast. For a moment, he takes a glance out the window and notices the sky. The sun is barely peeking through the horizon, and yet, dark clouds seem to have started to form. A hint of drizzle starts to patter on the roofs of neighboring houses. At the sight of this, Romana takes out his phone to check Facebook, thinking, “are classes suspended?”
Within the confines of Ateneo, students also stand to lose something from the frequent cancellations. Romana remembers the most stressful part of his August and September to be the making of his class’s bandegrasya. Countless work put into a devotion for their class’s Birheng Maria, only for it to be rescheduled multiple times. “The original due date for the bandegrasya was August 18th, but there was, like, one whole week where face-to-face classes were suspended.” he remembered with a sheepish smile, as if reliving those anxiety-filled minutes once more.
Romana worries not just for the possibility of class cancellation, but also for the implications that come with it. Because while a cancelled school day may seem like good news to some students, Romana finds himself thinking about the losses to come from it. He urged, “you will see how the homeless really have no homes, sila talaga naaapektuhan. You will see how the jeepney drivers, how there are less — because walang pasok — students who ride the jeepneys.”
The rain does not remain a force of nature separate from the problems and distress of humans. With the strengthening storms comes the consequences that come with it. Just as Romana had seen through his days commuting to and from Ateneo, those without homes have much to suffer from these increasingly unpredictable typhoons. They, too, are a part of our common home, and when that home is neglected, it is often those with the least that bear its consequences.
The unpredictability of the weather makes planning difficult. However, what happens to Romana on a rainy morning is only one part of a much larger web of consequences. This is the interconnectedness that Laudato Si’ implores us to recognize: environmental change affects lives in society. For a student, this unpredictability may mean an inconvenience in daily life, but for a farmer, the stakes become much higher when it turns into a gamble that might affect their resulting income.
While Romana begins his day at 5:30 in the morning with the thought of rescheduled assignments and the yearning memory to see his classmates again, another Filipino begins his morning at the same hour, thrumming with a perennial passion, yet faced with a question of his own: is it time to plant yet?
“Is it Time to Plant Yet?”
At around 5:30 in the morning, Eduardo Tolentino is already up and ready to start his work in the fields. He has been alive for seventy years, most of which has been dedicated to working as a farmer in the fields of his home town. Once he arrives, he takes a moment to soak it all in — the fresh early morning smell, the relaxing quiet of the plains, and the familiar sight of the crops he had spent months tending to. Then his attention turns to the work ahead as he surveys the field and decides where to begin.
A normal day of farm work looks like this for Tolentino. But on some days, the weather can become unpredictable. Even as Tolentino checks online platforms for weather reports, or news outlets for the week’s weather forecast, there is no guarantee that the conditions will turn out exactly as reported — no telling how heavy the rain will be or how long it will last.
The uncertainty reminds Tolentino of when he was younger, years back, when the rain was less unpredictable. He remembers the time when the rain gave farmers a rhythm to follow. “Sa totoo, malaki ang pagkakaiba noong panahon na ako ay nagsimula magsaka hanggang sa ngayon. Kasi nga noon, tumatama ang panahon ng pagsasaka. Pagdating ng June, umuulan na,” he said earnestly.
Tolentino’s experience with the rain used to help him in his work with the fields. When the rain was predictable in a way where farmers like him could pre-plan where and how much they could plant in preparation for the harvest to come afterwards, it would be a tool of nature rather than a hindrance to livelihood.
Hanzel Anchieta offers another experience with the rain. For Anchieta, the fields have been familiar since childhood, carrying with them memories of a simpler life watching his family’s farm. Although he now works as a prosecutor, he never forgot his roots in the fields, and continues to tend to the land his family still owns.
“Farming is dependent on the weather,” Anchieta stated, “unlike before, farming was very predictable. The weather was easy to predict. Now, it’s very hard, ngayon kasi there is no more rainy season eh. Back in the day, there was rainy season and dry season. […] Now, you cannot call it a rainy season because it only rains when there is a typhoon or when there is a low pressure area.”
Instead of bouts of rain, brought about by the rainy season of the Philippines to help water the crops of farmers, the same rain now only comes accompanied by strong, destructive winds and floods. Therefore, Filipino farmers are forced to adjust their methods of farming too.
“So how do we adjust to the unpredictability of the weather? Number one, on my part, and for most of the farmers, is the mode of planting the rice. […] So, from transplanting, marami na ang nag-shift sa sabog tanim or direct seeding,” Anchieta detailed.
He went on to talk about how farmers changed the way they planted seeds or grains in the field in order to fit the ever changing time. Most farmers previously used transplanting in their farming process, but over time, it became more labor-extensive and costly. Instead, another process — sabog tanim or direct seeding — was used in favor of its efficiency, even when the farmers could not predict the future weather. Think of it as farmers preferring to scatter a bunch of grass seeds into the lawn rather than planting each blade individually.
Farmers like Anchieta did this to adapt, because if they did not, the weather would tarnish their crops. If their crops were less satisfactory, the market value would surge downwards. Anchieta revealed, “when there is wind and the wind is low-lying, the tendency for the palay is matutumba. Pagnatumba ‘yan at nalubog sa putik, magiging class B na ‘yan — mas mababa na ang presyo niya.”
For farmers such as Tolentino and Anchieta, adapting to the weather has become part of adapting to farming itself. The methods they use, the timing of their planting, and even their decisions about whether to plant at all can depend on conditions they cannot control. What begins in the field, however, does not remain there. When crops and livelihood are affected, the consequences eventually reach the communities that depend on them, like a domino effect where everything is interconnected. These changes in the weather point to something beyond farming, to an environmental and social problem that extends to more than just the people of the land and the students of our country — climate change.
What Tolentino and Anchieta experienced is the heart of Laudato Si’, where environmental degradation is not seen as a problem limited to nature, but one that affects human dignity and livelihoods. The condition of our home is tied to the condition of the people caring for it.
“Can We Learn to See?”
“Usually when we talk about climate change, we talk about how icebergs are melting in the south, or how many of the rivers and seas are being polluted in other countries. But here in the Philippines, I feel like the climate change paradigm has been rarely talked about,” Romana shared.
Climate change is often discussed through numbers, rising temperatures, or increasingly severe weather events. But that is not always the case, because for farmers in the Philippines, climate change can be seen in a rainy season that no longer arrives when expected, a field that cannot be planted on time, or crops disrupted before it even gets the chance to be harvested. Yet, even with all the odds stacked against them, why do Tolentino and Anchieta continue their work in the fields?
Even years later, Tolentino will never forget the reason why he continues to work in the field, the goal and promise he made when he was younger. “Masaya na mahirap. Pero kailangan gawin. Bawal pabayaan ang bukid,” Tolentino said thoughtfully, “Nag-iwan si Lolo Pemyo [speaker’s father] bago siya kunin ni Lord. Bumili siya ng lupa. […] Bago siya bawian ng buhay, kinausap niya ako, kinausap ako ng mga kapatid at tsaka sinabi niya na, kung pwede, alagaan ko ang bukid. Kaya nga kahit na medyo pagod na, at pilit na kinakaya, kakayanin pa rin,” Tolentino professed.
As for Anchieta, farm life has always been his life. It is less about a promise and more about the dedication and love for the craft he has always known. “I am a farmer at heart. […] I enjoy it [farming] because, diba nasa opisina kami, pagpumunta ako rito sa planting dito sa farm, ibang mga tao, so iba yung usapan. So, masaya, simplicity of life. Dito naman ako lumaki dati eh, so it brings back memories when I was a child.” Anchieta remembered fondly.
For both farmers, the land is more than a source of income. It is memory, responsibility, belonging — a home with countless history laid upon the grounds they work on every day. And this is where Romana’s understanding of Laudato Si’ begins.
For Romana, Pope Francis’ call to care for our “common home” is not simply a reminder to throw our trash properly or to plant more trees. The encyclical invites us, Ateneans and youths of the country alike, to recognize that the environment is not something separate from us. Environmental issues continue to plague our country, and yet very few seem to realize that these issues will branch out and affect not just their life, but the life of others in the present and future. With the rain, for example, which has strengthened and grown in unpredictable ways due to ecological degradation, the worse it gets, the harder it will be on the lives of every living creature on this planet.
The way we move through our communities, consume resources excessively, or care for the spaces and people around us can have consequences far beyond ourselves. From the flooded roads in the city, to the ruined crops of provincial and rural areas, what happens in one part of our common home will eventually reach another.
With the knowledge provided to us from the Laudato Si’, we must take care of our home not just because it is ours, but because it is the home of all creatures of the earth. In order to do that, Romana understands that our responsibility begins with learning to see. “We must learn to see. We must learn how to love. Because what we have heard should move our hearts and push our hands.”
“What Comes After Seeing”
The rain will come again. It might come when a student is on their way to school, when a vendor is just about to open shop, or when a farmer has just taken their first breath of the morning fresh air in the fields. For each of them, the first droplet on their skin will mean something different. Yet whatever they do next, they remain connected by the same land, the same weather, and the same home — our home.
Tolentino and Anchieta will continue to work on their fields and adjust to the changing climate to the best of their abilities, for it is where they come from and where they find a sense of belonging. Meanwhile, Romana will continue his daily life in Ateneo, carrying the teachings of Laudato Si’ close to his heart, and, hopefully, inspiring others to do the same.
Rain is never just rain anymore. It is a reminder that wherever we are in the country, our actions are interconnected. None of us exist apart from the world around us. And to care for our common home, we must first learn to see it, love it, and act for it.
