What It's Like to Be in a Lockdown (in the Philippines)

A megaphone blares in the distance. I only catch snippets: "please...important...home...curfew." I can fill in the blanks. They're asking people to stay at home if they have nothing urgent to do outside. Curfew hours will be enforced. Whoever is behind the megaphone (or recording) is still polite. They're asking nicely. I wonder if they will sound more...brusque...tomorrow, just like the mayor's Facebook page that has slowly gotten sterner and sterner as the day progressed. Last time I checked a couple of hours ago, they've posted an update about apprehending a hundred people today for 'loitering' and will now be slapping people with a fine--PhP 500 (approximately US$10) on their second offense and PhP 1,000 (US$20) for a third offense. If you're wondering what happens to people who were caught for the FOURTH time, I'm wondering too.

My phone buzzes. It's a text message from a courier telling me that he has attempted to deliver my online purchase but that he wasn't allowed to pass through at the checkpoint that's 400 meters away from my house.
Please don't return it to the seller, I beg.
All packages are now being returned to sender, he replies.
Sigh. That was my ring light, one item in the long list of prerequisites I've convinced myself I would need to be able to make YouTube videos, which I was thinking I will finally have the time to do during this long lockdown. I feel so frustrated knowing that the ring light got within 400 meters of me then it was turned away. You know that scene in a movie when the actor has something almost within his grasp then it suddenly gets pulled away out of reach? It feels like that. Now I have another reason to procrastinate when it comes to making those YouTube videos.  

You may be wondering if I can go out. The answer is no. The barangays (the smallest unit of government in the Philippines, equal to a village or a district) are giving one quarantine pass to each household to allow only one member to go out and buy necessities. The person on my family's  quarantine pass would be my husband, not me, even though I always tell him his grocery shopping skills are not up to par. When I go to the supermarket, I check out the whole shelf to see which products offer the best value for money. He, in turn...picks out what amuses him or draws his fancy, which I think might characterize a typical male homo sapiens out on a grocery run. But I digress. 

Going back to this life under lockdown, my husband said the other day that I'm probably the type to enjoy it, seeing as I like my solitude and don't crave much for the company of others.  Am I enjoying this lockdown? Of course not. I may not be suffering from cabin fever as much as everybody else but I'm certainly anxious about being forced to stay indoors because of a serious health threat, and I am really concerned about the disastrous economic impact this lockdown will have on everybody else, including myself. I had been planning to hold a workshop on teaching English online but that has now been put on hold indefinitely. I don't really know when it will be possible to safely hold on-site gatherings and classes again. Just when I got inspired to network and reach out to other people, a pandemic comes and puts a stop to those plans.

Besides the impact of this pandemic on long-term goals, there's the impact on day-to-day life. Grocery runs have been utterly chaotic. Even though I can understand why the municipal government has imposed grocery schedules per area to prevent people from going out unnecessarily, it has actually kind of led to long queues just trying to get inside a supermarket. Because people can't shop for their needs everyday, it has led to a kind of stampede for a whole district every time it's their schedule to go out and buy--almost every household representative would be out there buying groceries. In addition to this, supermarkets are not allowed to just let everybody in. They limit how many people can go in at the same time. For example, only 100 people at a time are allowed to go in. The rest will have to wait outside in a queue. And when you get inside, some food items have already been sold out, such as particular cuts of chicken or pork, because our schedule is in the afternoon and the morning shoppers would already have carted away everything. Sigh. 

So we watch the news everyday. Or every hour. There is really no good news to be heard. We just keep seeing the numbers going up all around the world. And then we see more news about people asking for help because they are on the verge of starving. This is truly poverty at its most stark moments, and make no mistake, 21% of the population in the Philippines is living below the poverty line. That would be more than 21 million people from our population of more than 100 million. 

So at the end of the day, we still count our blessings. We are not sick and we are not starving. Sure, we have had to plan our meals in between grocery runs but we always have enough to tide us over till the next grocery day. It could be much worse.