Typhoon Haiyan 3 Months On: Then and Now

By Chris Weeks, Senior Media Officer, World Vision UK

These are hopeful times for Tacloban.

For visitors like me — who also came here soon after Haiyan when body bags lay in the street and smoke wafted eerily above a foul-smelling, tangled and absolute wreck of twisted humanity — these also seem the most upsetting times for its inhabitants. 

Why? Because, as desperation and immediacy give way to practicality and long-term planning, people start to share heart-rendering stories and feelings. Filipinos are, by nature, incredibly expressive and many speak perfect English. For visitors, there’s no translator to buffer the blow of their impact.

Raw emotion

This resourceful city is rising. Traffic – lots of it — has returned. Myriad businesses are springing up. 
Aid distributions which saved lives are morphing into longer-term projects, so children can continue learning and parents gain new skills to earn money. 

But, instead of the debris, raw emotion can now be found in every street.

Just after the typhoon, I realise now I didn't see a single tear. People were either in shock, denial, or busy with the immediate task of finding relatives, food or somewhere to live.

This historic storm robbed people in the central Philippines of everything — and, in some cases, everyone — they held dear. Many didn't have that much by our standards in the first place.

It’s the individual stories that grab you. A mother, now living in the shadow of a grounded cargo ship which was swept up by the storm surge and crashed through part of the city, recalls seeing the naked bodies of her relatives lying around the vessel.

Many children we meet are too young to understand what happened. Adults will explain to them, as they grow, the story of how their siblings’ or parents’ lives were claimed. And there are older children who desperately want to be normal teenagers and fulfil their ambitions, but simply cannot.

Under any circumstances

So it was for the last family we met, when a woman invited us to her tiny temporary home in a sprawling camp next to the city’s Astrodome. Perched on a small plank of wood – underneath the message ‘Home, Sweet Home’ written carefully on the plywood wall in felt tip pen – she told us they’d been without electricity since the typhoon, spending every night in darkness. They’d just collected a bright solar-powered lamp and phone charger from a World Vision distribution.

This steely woman, like so many here, gesticulated wildly as she described how their home near the airport was flattened, killing her mother who didn't evacuate in time.

As we all chatted in the late afternoon, her 16-year-old daughter came home from school. Like most 16-year-olds, she had a mobile phone, wore earrings, jeans and what I presume was a cool T-shirt. Upon asking a few questions, it turned out she was doing brilliantly at school and passionately told us how she wanted to complete a tourism/ hospitality degree.

But as she laid out her dreams and ambitions, this uncomplaining girl was overcome with emotion.
Her grandmother had just died in the typhoon, the family home had vanished, much of the city where she hoped to work in the tourism industry lay destroyed - and she was living in what was essentially a tiny plywood shed covered with a plastic sheet.

She knew it. We all knew it. And, despite her best efforts, the tears started to flow.

The girl announced to us resolutely that she was ditching her tourism course, chucking in her dreams and finding any job to earn enough money for the family.

This would be an entirely depressing scene, were it not for the mother-daughter argument which ensued – summing up the indomitable Filipino resilience and readiness to sacrifice. Her mum retorted that the rest of the family would continue living like this for as long as it took, and her daughter most certainly was going to college under any circumstances.

I will never know how things will pan out though for this family, though I hope - and suspect - that this girl will follow her wise mother's advice.

Time the healer

On Cebu Island the next day, on the way to the airport, I was subjected in the taxi – as usual - to an onslaught of slushy radio songs, ramped up a few notches with Valentine’s Day just around the corner. ‘For all the broken hearted out there,’ the female presenter faded down the music to remind her lovelorn Filipino listeners, ‘…time is the only healer’.

The ongoing aid effort, fuelled by extraordinary generosity from World Vision UK supporters, is helping hundreds of thousands of families get back on their feet.

As for the raw emotion which remains… the radio presenter is right, of course. We can only hope and pray that the time of healing will come sooner rather than later.