Floods, Fires, Ballots, and a Pope in Beirut

Today we were everywhere at once. Our hands were in muddy floodwater in Sri Lanka, on ballot papers in Honduras, on rosaries and protest placards in Manila, on airport handrails at O’Hare, on the cold metal of stretchers in Hong Kong and Stockton, and folded together in prayer in Beirut.

In Sri Lanka, Cyclone Ditwah would not let go of us. Rain pounded our 25 districts, flooding towns and tearing down hillsides. By now, we’ve counted hundreds of our own dead and missing and close to a million people affected by floods and landslides, with families crammed into state shelters and schools pressed into service as emergency housing. We watched soldiers ferry some of us out by boat and helicopter while others stayed behind, shoveling mud out of ruined homes and searching for family under broken earth. Children clutched schoolbooks that had turned into pulp. We did this to ourselves too — climate made hotter, defenses neglected, warnings ignored.

We listened as agencies tried to comfort us with numbers: more than 275,000 of our children affected, 1.1 million of us displaced across South Asia by flooding, called one of the worst disasters in decades. We stacked those numbers next to ruined rice fields, washed-out roads, and the quiet dread of parents who know the next meal is no longer guaranteed.

In Gaza, we stared into the dark. In Rafah, our soldiers announced they had killed more than 40 Hamas fighters inside and around tunnel networks over the past week, claiming they caught them as they tried to emerge from underground east of the city. Above those tunnels, in Gaza City, some of us — displaced families — stood beside small fires by our tents, surrounded by smashed concrete and twisted rebar, trying to stay warm while cameras clicked.

We spoke different languages about the same day: successful operation, terrorists neutralized, martyrs, civilians trapped, another violation. But behind the words, our bodies were the same — hungry, exhausted, afraid, and wishing our children could sleep without the sound of jets and drones.

Far to the north, the night over Kyiv shattered again. Before dawn, a Russian strike hit our city, killing one person and injuring nineteen more. We woke up in dark apartments to broken glass and sirens, carrying our grandparents down stairwells filled with plaster dust and smoke, checking each other’s faces in the stairwell light: are you bleeding, can you walk?

And in Badakhshan, Afghanistan, one more hidden war flared. The Afghanistan Freedom Front said our fighters launched rockets at a Taliban position, killing three and wounding two. We switched between words like resistance, insurgency, terrorism, freedom, and revenge, knowing that whichever one we chose, someone else would spit it back at us.

In Hong Kong, we smelled smoke even through our masks. At Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po, we watched emergency crews carry what looked like body bags out of a high-rise complex wrapped in bamboo scaffolding and flammable netting.

By now, we know well over 150 of us have died there — from a one-year-old baby to a ninety-seven-year-old elder — in the deadliest blaze the city has seen in decades, with dozens more still missing and thousands displaced. We learned that, during renovation, some of us turned off fire alarms and wrapped our homes in cheap plastic and foam, trading safety for profit and speed, and today we paid for that choice in stairwells filled with smoke and locked doors that would not open.

On the other side of the Pacific, in Stockton, California, we lost four more of us at a child’s birthday party. Inside a banquet hall where at least a hundred of us had gathered, someone opened fire; by the time the echoes faded, three children — ages eight, nine, and fourteen — and a twenty-one-year-old were dead, and around ten more of us were wounded.

On this Sunday, investigators begged us for phone videos, rumors, anything that might turn into a lead, while parents walked out of the hall carrying balloons and crime-scene tape wrapped around their wrists like accidental bracelets.

Farther east and north, the storm hit our travel plans and our roofs at the same time. Over the Great Lakes and Midwest, a post-Thanksgiving winter storm dropped 8.4 inches of snow at Chicago’s O’Hare, the heaviest single November fall there since 1951.

By evening, about 300 flights were canceled and 1,600 delayed at O’Hare alone; some of us slept on the floor, watching the departure boards flip from delayed to canceled. Elsewhere near Lake Michigan, more than a foot of snow buried neighborhoods, and in Fort Dodge, Iowa, over sixteen inches fell while crews in Wisconsin tried to restore power to thousands of us sitting in the dark.

We grumbled about missed connections and cold toes, knowing that on another part of the same planet, entire houses had been carried away by water.

In Manila, we raised our voices instead of our guns. Thousands of us — students, priests, workers, parishioners — stood under the sun at the People Power Monument and Luneta, some of us smashing an effigy of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., demanding justice for a sprawling corruption scandal over flood-control projects that existed mostly on paper.

We chanted for the return of stolen money: about twelve billion pesos in frozen assets, kickbacks from ghost projects that were supposed to keep real floodwater away from our homes. One former engineer has already handed back 110 million pesos; we want more than refunds — we want accountability, and for the next storm not to drown our poorest neighborhoods first.

Police ringed us with riot shields and barbed wire, but the loudest thing on the highway was our insistence that stealing from flood defenses is not just graft, it is manslaughter.

In Honduras, we tried to choose our future with ink instead of blood. All day, we lined up outside schools and community centers to vote in a presidential election that everyone called too close to call and already tainted.

We stepped into booths carrying not just ID cards, but also the weight of poverty, gangs, migration routes, and the memory of past coups. Over our heads, another story ran: U.S. President Donald Trump had loudly endorsed conservative candidate Nasry Asfura and pardoned former President Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted in the United States for drug-trafficking-related crimes.

Some of us shrugged and said we had made up our minds weeks ago; others whispered that when foreign leaders play with our politics like chess pieces, the ones who get knocked off the board are always the poor.

In Beirut, we tried to listen for something softer. This afternoon, Pope Leo XIV landed in Lebanon — his first visit there, after days spent in Turkey — and told our leaders they must become true peacemakers, not just slogan writers.

As evening fell, he spoke to us about Lebanon as a place where Christians and Muslims have proved coexistence is possible, even if imperfect, and he insisted again that for Palestine, two states remain the only just solution — words that some of us cheered and others quietly resented.

Still, in Martyrs’ Square and on the Beirut waterfront, thousands of us — Maronite, Sunni, Shia, Druze, atheist — stood shoulder to shoulder, if only for a night, just to hear someone say hope without being laughed off the stage.

So this is what we did with our one day, 30 November 2025. We buried our dead from fires and floods and airstrikes. We stood in passport lines, protest lines, and polling lines. We canceled flights and dug through mud and refreshed election websites that kept crashing.

We carried body bags down Hong Kong stairwells and birthday cakes out of a blood-stained banquet hall. We lifted banners against corruption in Manila and lifted host wafers in Beirut. We are capable of all of it — the negligence that lets scaffolding burn, the greed that hollows out flood defenses, the courage that pulls strangers from rivers, the stubbornness that keeps us voting and marching and praying even when it feels pointless.

Dear diary, today we hurt ourselves again. But we also showed up for each other, in boats and ballot boxes, in donation queues and airport lounges and muddy streets.

We are humanity, and we are still trying to learn how to be worthy of that name.