CJ Chanco is a freelance writer, photographer,
and research officer at the College Editors Guild of the Philippines. In late
January, he joined volunteer doctors from Balsa and Samahang Operasyong Sagip
as they made their way across Tacloban city and neighbouring barrios in a
five-day relief caravan.
Everything seems frozen in place. Every tree, branch, every root sticking out
from the ground, stretches out toward an unseen horizon as though reaching for
a sun that will never come, or shine as bright as it once did. The trees are twisted out of true, like the
bodies in the bags that used to occupy nearly every intersection of Tacloban
city, the ones the disaster’s first responders would have seen as they passed
along the way here (and would have seen, in their half-decomposed state, weeks
after the storm).
Rows
of coconut stand eerily in place, their graceful swaying brought to an abrupt
halt by gale-force winds that have forced their fronds to face permanently East
– or is it West? It’s impossible to say. The wind had come from every possible direction,
shifting as it did with the walls of saltwater that came with broken logs and
torn roofs of corrugated iron that brought low the homes of some five million
families, and tore Eastern Visayas away, for seven days that felt like eternity,
from the reckoning of the world and the local energy grid: leaving two
provinces in total darkness, as the days turned into weeks that turned into
months.
Tacloban
itself is a frozen photograph, a silent sentinel on the edge of Nightmare. Or a
portent of things to come. The city has
changed beyond recognition, at least physically, yet something beneath its
surface-facade seems unchanged, almost permanent. Its economic life, the social
conditions of its people, the rigid divisions of class and geography that
determine who lives and who dies – none of this has been altered in any profound
sense.
Not
even by the strongest typhoon to make land-fall in recorded history.
I’d come
on this journey with Balsa, an alliance of people’s organisations, churches,
progressive media outfits and individual volunteers from across the country. This
was its third or fourth major deployment in Eastern Visayas, a Caravan bringing
aid and relief to communities worst
affected by supertyphoon Yolanda (int’l.
Haiyan) that tore Tacloban apart last November.
Balsa
has been doing so for close to a decade now, responding to nearly every major
natural disaster to hit the country with a unique combination of grassroots mobilization
and long-term, community-led rehabilitation efforts. Despite its limited resources, Balsa has
banked on the power of collective action to match or even exceed in scope the
well-funded projects of some of the best aid agencies in the world. Encouraging
the full participation of people directly affected by tragedy has ensured its
efforts are deeply rooted with their needs on the ground.
In Leyte,
Balsa came not with an elite corps of engineers or disaster experts bearing
blueprints from on high, but with community organizers, religious missionaries,
teachers, volunteer scientists and
medics – “people’s doctors” – even farmers from Luzon and Mindanao who’d saved
seeds all year for just this purpose: to donate to fellow farmers in Visayas
who’ve lost their crops. These were people with little to share individually
but much to share at a collective level.
It
was with them that I saw clearest the difference between passive charity and an
active, community-driven response to tragedy; the gap between what governments promise and
what they deliver, and the need for
action from ‘below’ amid damning neglect from above. It was a glimpse into human vulnerability
that persists in the face of persistent poverty. It was also a portrait of
human resilience and will to life that will come to define Tacloban (and the
rest of the country) as the place where a people, levelled by countless storms,
rose again.
Day 1 – January 24 – Matnog
… Or
rather, Day 2. It’s taken us 7-8 hours by bus to reach
Sorsogon from Manila. It would take us another eight hours or so, more than
half a day, to get past the port of Matnog, the main entry point to Leyte.
So after
hours on the road, my legs are killing me. My friends and I get off for
breakfast and a brisk walk. At the port,
vendors sell us hot pandesal, fried
buns, sauteed veggies and tiny red native bananas that we eat with relish,
before settling for a meal of tomatoes and fish roasted over an open charcoal
fire.
There’s
little else to do but gorge ourselves, after all, and talk, as we wait for our
turn at the barge. The early morning sun
beats down on lush rice fields by the coast – it’s almost too warm, but in the
faces of the people we meet is a cold tension, which is easy to
miss until I approach one of them.
At a
bamboo stall next to our bus, a woman shelling mussels eyes us first with
trepidation, then sympathy, as she spots the truck behind our bus bearing
relief goods for Tacloban. It would be a long wait, she says. An endless line
of buses and trucks, some stamped in bold-faced letters, “Relief”, crawls its
way past us.
It
was, of course, a lot worse right after Yolanda. For weeks, a glut of good
intentions and aid from Luzon and abroad clogged up - for miles on end – the
only major thoroughfare to Leyte. There
was no other way to get to Tacloban unless you travelled by air (and even the
airport was down for some time). It was a logistical nightmare. With no transit fleet of its own, even the
government had to rent trucks, lorries and cargo ships from private contractors
to get goods to people on the ground.
In
Matnog, it opened up a separate route for relief caravans in an attempt to cut
traffic, but this actually slowed things down. Many of the trucks weren’t
carrying relief at all. It was commercial freight, scrambling for a quick
opening to drop off goods to sell in Visayas.
This
sort of thing has been happening more often since the calamity. In fact
everything we passed en route here, from overpriced bunk beds, to rising fuel
costs, to boiled eggs that cost Php 17-a-piece, to restroom visits at roadside
bus stops that cost Php 5 for a pee (Php 10 for a shower; another Php 10 for
something else) - seems an opportunity to squeeze the most out of the calamity’s
aftermath.
After
a few more hours, our boat, the Penafrancia, finally arrives. Boys as young as
four climb twelve feet above the deck, diving gracefully into the cerulean blue
sea to catch coins tossed by tourists with uncanny accuracy.
We get
on the barge and set sail for the Port of Allen. From there, we’d take another
bus ride to Tacloban city, arriving there by midnight.
Crossing
the narrow channel between Samar and Leyte, San Juanico Bridge is cloaked in
darkness, with only the lights from our bus guiding our way. Even in Tacloban city proper, rotating
black-outs are a fact of life and dozens of public hospitals, schools and
thousands of homes still depend on diesel generators for electricity at night,
months after Yolanda.
Despite
this, government reports insist electricity has been restored in at least 60%
of affected areas.
Day 2 – People’s Surge
A
boy, around 8, shifts his gaze from the aid trucks outside to the camera I have
in my hands. We’re by the window of the
school gym at Eastern Visayas State University (EVSU), where I strain to find a
scene, any scene, to latch on as I adjust my lens to just the right shutter
speed. The early morning sky filters
through the gym awning as we peer over the balcony at the courtyard.
I
soon find my scene.
Below
us, the first few hundred people gather for what would quickly grow into one of
the largest demonstrations I’ve ever been a part of: a “People’s Surge”,
including at least 12,000 marchers – young and old; families, farmers and
fisherfolk from at least two dozen towns and rural barrios from across Samar
and Leyte. They’d come for aid and relief, but above all for solidarity and a collective
sharing of grievances, in protest against the government’s scant relief efforts
post-Yolanda.
For
two days in this school auditorium with a portion of the roof still missing,
there had been singing and story-telling and shared meals of canned sardines
and rice wrapped in palm leaves, puson-style.
This
is what the boy’s family had come here for, assuming he still had one. The
boy’s otherwise stoic face contrasts deeply with his eyes, which have perhaps
seen too much, far more than his youth deserved.
He
looks straight into the lens of my camera, and not without some guilt, I snap a
shot. He doesn’t smile. Pity or shame tugs at me: was I taking
advantage of these people? These
“victims” of what is surely the worst natural calamity the country has faced in
a century? What if the boy had lost a
sibling in the storm? A cousin? A parent? His whole family?
It was a dilemma I would struggle with throughout
my trip. I’d been commissioned as a
photographer for the alternative media outfit, Kodao Productions, and I had no
clue where to begin. I never managed to get the boy’s name, or the names of some
of the others I would meet along the way. It felt rude, somehow, to intrude on their
grief, though it was this same grief that prompted many of them to tell their stories,
in minute-long chats that often drifted into night-long conversations.
Maybe I was being melodramatic. At any rate, the
simple fact of having survived Yolanda has brought people together, making all such
social formalities irrelevant. I stop
for coffee or a boiled egg at a road-side stall, and random strangers, spotting
my press pass, would break into instant conversation, first in Waray-waray or
Bisaya, then in Tagalog, once they learn I’m from Manila.
A volunteer
sounds the call for breakfast and the boy rushes past me. I exit the classroom
we were in, and make my way through the crowded corridors - dark, dank, and in
some places filled up to the ceiling with balikbayan boxes, long since been
emptied of used clothes, canned goods and medical supplies.
In
the next building is the gym we’d slept in the night before, and here too
hundreds of people lay crammed on the upper benches or shuffle to and fro the
courtyard below. Elderly couples sip
coffee, their grandchildren play basketball; one mother nurses her daughter,
only days-old. A nun thumbs the beads of her rosary.
All
are waiting for their cue for the march to begin.
By the university entrance is a blue tent, put
up there by the doctors I arrived here with, from Samahang Operasyong Sagip and Health Alliance for Democracy. For a
couple of days now they’ve giving free check-ups and medicines to a long line
of people that now stretches past the gate to the next block, probably more
than half a kilometre away.
Many
of the patients – one man crippled from the waist down, one woman blinded by
cataracts– are joining the march.
Renato
Reyes of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan sounds the call. The march begins.
My
camera ranges overhead.
The
sun approaches noon and beats down hard on groups of protesters that converge
in an intersection just past the university gate. It’s stifling. For most of
the year, Tacloban city is one of the hottest parts of the country, regularly
making it to the top of Kuya Kim’s temperature charts. Even after Yolanda.
I
zoom in. On the faces of the protesters is a flood of emotions, from suspicion
to curiosity to excitement. On my own face is sweat, lots of it, pouring down
in steady streams.
Dust
from thousands of marching feet form a cloud that rises above us and descends
on the city, adding to the surreal scene. I knew there’d be a lot of people, but not
this many. How many were we? A thousand?
8,000? 12,000?
This
was a surge. A surge of humanity on
the edge of despair; a surge of relief in a desert flooded by a supertyphoon, a
wave of well-meaning if short-lived aid, and months of government neglect. Each
one in turn.
I stand
on tip-toe. There seems no end to the march. I take my first few, tentative
shots.
Many
think I’m from the media, and break into hasty, shy smiles. Others doubt my
motives. Soldiers, government officials or policemen in civilian clothes have
been known to take photos of the scattered protests which have been taking
place here with increasing regularity.
The
distrust was understandable: Eastern Visayas had long been the playground of
Jovito Palparan, a general held responsible for commanding the torture and
arrest of hundreds of activists, and for a suite of other human rights
violations, in the early years of the former Arroyo administration. It was during this period that sections of the
military turned into a de facto mercenary defence force for hacienda owners,
commercial plantations, and large-scale mines that were pit against communist
rebels.
When
hundreds of soldiers arrived in Leyte in the weeks following Yolanda – in fact,
they arrived before government relief, to ensure security by cracking
down on “looters” – they arrived, bringing back memories of fear, dispossession
and landlessness that have made their mark on a region that is one of the poorest
in the country.
***
In
the crowd something catches my eye. Among the marchers is a woman, in front of
me, ambling slowly under the noon-day sun. She’s clutching her son’s arm. A small towel, stained with the sweat and
grime of work on the fields, is the only protection the two have from the glare
of the sun.
The
woman, Teresa, is well into her eighties and has lost sight in both eyes. She
was the same woman we’d given a medical check-up this morning. Her middle-aged son is a fisherman, like many
of the marchers – farmers and fisher-folk from rural villages across Leyte and
Samar. Some had come from as far away as Luzon or Mindanao, just to march, donate
seeds to fellow farmers, or help out with relief efforts.
Mother
and son inch forward with the marchers. Eventually I lose sight of them, with people cramming
the road from end to end. We turn a corner and spot Gaisano grocery store, the
main target of ‘looting’ binges in the days after the storm. Few of the looters,
of course, were the ‘professional criminals’ commonly portrayed by the cops.
The victims of the Manila-based media’s smear campaign were in reality families
just scrambling to survive (among their ranks: the wife of the mayor, who managed
to snag a pair of jeans from a looted department store).
We
cross a few more blocs and reach a small clearing by the coast. A small
stage in the middle of the road – built with a few crates and an old pick-up
truck - rises above a few market stalls.
The first thing that catches my attention are
the streamers, banners and placards. They’re everywhere.
Ipadayonan Relief tubtob kina hanglan sa
mga Biktima! Speed
up relief efforts – aid to the victims!
Ipakigbisog an Pagkaon, Pabalay,
Pakabuhi ngan Serbisyo Sosyal! Fight for the Right to Food, Housing, Jobs and Social
Services!
40K Subsidiyo, ihatag ha kada Pamilya! Php 40K Subsidy for every
family! (the estimated amount, in goods or direct cash, needed by every family hit by Yolanda)
NO-BUILD ZONE: Kontra-mamamayan, Land-grabbing! The government has prevented
thousands of displaced families from rebuilding on lands
they were originally on, claiming they’re far too dangerous for residential
occupation. The catch: despite the alleged risks, many of these neighbourhoods
are on public land bought up by private real-estate developers a few years
ago. The survivors will have to be
relocated to temporary bunk-houses built out of flimsy plywood and corrugated
iron, long since criticised by Architect Felinio Palafox and the United Nations
for failing to meet international standards for basic safety.
***
Then
I hear the voices. Each one – from farmers, community organisers, a student who
lost her father in the storm - builds up to a poignant crescendo. Each one
speaks of promised aid from the government that simply would not arrive in
time, if it would arrive at all.
Each
one speaks of death, destruction and loss, but also of hope, resilience and
rebuilding, stressing clearly the difference between victim and survivor.
Days 3-4 – Beyond Tacloban
We
spend another night at the University of the Philippines-Tacloban, before
making our way through the coastal suburbs of Tacloban to the municipality of
Alangalang, further inland.
Our
rented jeepney drives us through endless fields of rice: many only now throwing
up the first tentative shoots of new life after months of. Nearly all the
coconut trees that pass us by face East, as though bowing, prostrate, before a
distant Mecca.
After
a brief stop-over at Palo, our caravan reaches Sitio Bigaa. a small cluster of
homes on the outskirts of Barangay Langit, Alang-alang. We manage to hand over relief goods – clothes,
food, medicines, cooking utensils, construction materials - to some two hundred
families from Bigaa and neighbouring barangays, but on the way out, our aid
truck gets stuck in a mud pit.
Jerry,
a local kagawad overseeing local
relief operations, rushes to my side. We watch helplessly as more than a dozen
villagers push the truck, unloading and reloading goods to lighten the load.
The engine shifts to high gear to no avail. It takes us another two hours of
heaving and hauling to shake it free.
It
reminds Jerry of the days after Yolanda, but this was a minor trouble compared
to the horrors they’d suffered in its aftermath. At the time, roads were
blocked and helicopters would fly overhead, as crates of relief parachuted down
to a desperately hungry crowd, floating past the traumatized faces of people
scrambling for crumbs.
Still,
Jerry considers himself lucky. He and most of his relatives escaped the storm
relatively unscathed, apart from a few scratches here and there – and a home
completely destroyed. While his family huddled in their tiny bathroom, a
single, strong gust of wind tore off their roof and sent it flying to the next
barangay. They waited for days before the first signs of contact arrived from
Tacloban city. They ate wet palay, inedible
under most circumstances, picking through the remains of their crops to
survive.
Then
the days stretched into weeks, and relief goods came pouring in from people in
Manila and around the world eager to reach out… but today aid has
slowed down to a trickle, even in the city proper.
The World Food Programme still distributes
about a sack of rice per family each week (around two kilos or more for every
child) - and a handful of charities still visit them on occasion - but aid from
the government itself has been sorely lacking.
A few weeks ago, representatives from the Department of Social Welfare
and Development arrived in Bigaa, asking hundreds of families to move to temporary
bunkhouses that are as distant from their livelihoods as they are unsafe.
The plywood
shacks on offer have sagging floors and flood after barely half an hour of rain.
And rain has been pouring down constantly since Yolanda, like aftershocks from
a big quake.
Jerry and his family, among hundreds of
others, rejected the offer. People would rather build their own homes near
lands they have cultivated for decades. Give them the resources needed to rebuild, he
says, and communities will recover. What
people need here more than ever is long-term support, and above all cash, jobs
and tools for reconstruction.
Bigaa
suffered fewer casualties, he tells me, than those in communities along the
coast. Yolanda’s impact on local
agriculture, however, has been devastating, wiping out vast tracts of coconut
groves and rice fields literally overnight. This has been especially difficult
for the majority of small farmers who don’t own the lands they till. Already in
debt before the storm, many have taken on even more loans to rebuild their
homes and replant their fields.
In
Carigara, the next town we visit, Edwardo Bastol and Melecio Llagas, tell me a
similar story.
Melecio
is Edwardo’s uncle, pushing into his late fifties. Both of their homes were
levelled by Yolanda, which saw a whole river redirected from East to West, flooding
hundreds of acres of crops.
When
I visit them in their half-built home near Carigara elementary school (its roof
still plastered with donated UN tarpaulins), Melecio is balancing himself on a
single wooden plank, hammering away and eager to share their tale.
Construction
materials promised them had not arrived in time. In fact they received nothing
in any kind of aid, apart from food. Barangay officials assured them there was
no need. They had already begun to rebuild their home, after all, and thousands
were in.
There’s
the catch. Edwardo has indeed managed to carve out a small but sturdy cement
shack for his wife, two children, and his uncle who has since moved in with him
– but only after taking out a hefty loan from his employer, a local vulcanizing
shop owner.
Without
it, it would have been impossible to rebuild. Thousands like Edwardo have dug
themselves deeper in debt as a result.
Food,
seeds, electricity, fuel, clothes, school supplies for their children, yero - corrugated iron roofs - are
expensive. Post-disaster inflation, brought on partly by the difficulty of
shipping goods to Leyte and the lack of proper public subsidies, has sent
prices soaring.
***
I arrive
at a small grove a few blocks away, hidden by coco palms. I look around me, and note in passing the
austere, almost deceitful, beauty of the place, perhaps concealing more than it
reveals. A mountain on the other side, after
all, used to be covered entirely with coconut trees and green shrubs, locals
tell us. Now green is the exception, appearing only in isolated patches between
emptied-out fields slicked in mud after the storm.
I
stumble on a ruined shack. Tattered
curtains are draped on a few walls still standing. Bits and pieces of chicken wire
lay scattered about. At first I mistake it for a chicken coop, then realise it’s
someone’s home – or used to be. Torn clothes, some still damp, lay, as if to
dry, on a bamboo pole.
Sunlight
pours in from the emptied-out frame of the roof, like a wooden skeleton.
The
place looks abandoned, so I turn to leave, before a woman approaches me from a
corner, shyly, cradling a boy in her arms.
Estelita
Garantinao is in her sixties and lives alone, with her husband and three-year-old
grandson. Like most other families, the child’s parents have moved to Manila,
hoping to send money back home.
Her
husband is paralysed from the waist down. He would have died in the storm had
she not pushed him away in time as the wind heaved a tree from its roots – a kind
of pillar in the middle of their nipa hut that had been its foundation – and
hurled it down in front of them.
It
was a caimito tree that had weathered
countless storms for over twenty years – until Yolanda.
It
crushed everything from their bedroom to their tiny kitchen.
Estelita
has no money to spare to rebuild or even clean up. She washes clothes for her
neighbours, and earns just enough for her family to eat. She’s too weak now to rebuild
from scratch, all by herself.
So three
months after the storm, their tiny home is in shambles. They live in a
temporary shack, even smaller than the first, built by her brother next to the
ruins.
Estelita
stops talking. I realise she opened up to me before she even got my name,
before I even got to say a few words in reply. I tell her I’m from the relief
caravan and she thanks us for our help. At this I feel more shame than pride.
Had I really helped? Had I done any more than report on their grief? What did we from Manila really know about
their plight?
And
did I interview the others, she asks? The boy who lost his whole family in the
storm; the pregnant young mother, her husband a jeepney barker in Manila?
There
were stories. Hundreds of them. But there was simply no time to hear them all. We would leave for Palo the next morning.
Day 5 – Palo and Back to Manila
It was
like a scene from Titanic. Walls of
water rush in as floors give way to a seething ocean. People clamber onto their
roofs, and grab anything they can find as the tide surges forth, enveloping
everything in its path. Class
D passengers, women and children included, drown in the cabins below, while the
aristocrats of the upper decks escape unscathed. The homes of the poor are
wiped out. Schools are forced shut. The mansions are left standing, empty for
now, their distant occupants safe in Manila.
This
is how survivors remember Yolanda at its height, those harrowing moments during
the storm. What unfolded in its aftermath is described in terms no less
disturbing:
Relief
goods bought and paid for, or stolen outright by local officials who have divided
the spoils between themselves and their voters.
A ravaged local economy, leaving one of the poorest and most unequal
parts of the country with a population even more vulnerable, post-Yolanda. Rehabilitation efforts being given over to Big
Business, courtesy of Panfilo Lacson, the region’s “rehab czar”, who has officially
declared his support for a private-sector led initiative.
Already,
real estate, construction and commercial investors that run the gamut from
Consunji to Ayala to Pangilinan have sunk their teeth into juicy contracts included
in the government’s rebuilding and rehousing programmes. Homes for the survivors of Yolanda will be
built by the builders of Manila condominiums, at nearly the same price.
Thousands will never be able to afford them. Tens of thousands more will remain
homeless, landless, and jobless in a region that will surely take more than a
decade to recover even half of what it has lost, in money and in human life.
But some
scenes of recovery are visible.
Communities
are picking themselves up from the
ruins, mostly thanks to people’s own efforts
in the absence of government support. Palo regional hospital is being rebuilt, courtesy of the South
Korean military. Crime rates are
fairly low, despite sensationalised reports of “mass looting” in the days after
Yolanda. Donations are trickling in, thanks to scattered charity drives that can only
do so much without a more comprehensive, pro-active role in the rehab efforts
by the state.
And
the corpses are gone.
Many,
of course, are still missing; others were buried after more than a month in an
advanced state of decay. As of late
January, new bodies are being discovered, at a rate of one per day, calling
into question the government’s modest estimates of more than 6,700 dead.
***
In
Palo, roofless buildings are perhaps the second most common sight one sees
across the town. The first most common?
Smiling children.
From
day one, children would huddle around me and my camera – something I would get used to after a week in
Leyte. One of them, in fact, was on the
bus on my way back to Manila, and even asked me to take a picture of us
together.
Indeed,
raising the camera to my face to take a shot seemed a cue for someone to smile.
And smile people did, with broad grins that stretched up to the wrinkles of
their eyes.
What
made them smile wasn’t innocence. They had all seen too much for that.
It
would be another 24-hour journey before I could finally reach home. In Eastern
Visayas, some 15 million people have a much longer journey ahead of them.
It’s
difficult for the casual observer to connect any of the horrors its people have
faced with the beaming faces you meet in this society of contradictions. It’s easy to be misled. Sometimes suffering can be too deeply etched
on a person’s face that the sheer weight of their troubles erases all external
signs of sorrow or despair, because succumbing to despair is useless when your
life is at stake, and you have a family of five to care for.
Whether
or not this is a sign of genuine happiness or isolated glimpses of joy –
temporary breaks in an otherwise painful existence – is another matter. What comes out as resilience can be hidden
sorrow or anger, long repressed. To the greatest tragedies, there are only
ever two ways humanity can respond.
Resignation
– or rage.
PHOTOS:
En route to Leyte
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