Five Years After Yolanda

Five Years After Yolanda

By Allos Abis

It has been fiver years since Typhoon Yolanda (international name Haiyan) have ravaged Eastern Visayas, survivors are still fighting to recover from one of the strongest typhoons ever recorded in modern history.

It was the morning of November 8, 2013, when Yolanda made landfall in Eastern Samar. You must remember how the international community mourned and came together to raise funds. Even Facebook had a button where you can send directly to Red Cross to fund recovery efforts. The Canadian government sent soldiers, firefighters and international NGOs. CNN reporter Anderson Cooper, flew immediately to Tacloban and blamed the Philippine government. And there was Korina Sanchez, defending her husband Mar Roxas, then Interior Secretary under Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III administration.

We all know this, the Philippines is not a stranger to strong typhoons. Eastern Visayas is in fact home to innovative Disaster Preparedness initiatives. Led by locals who collaborate with with farmers associations, they consistently build the community’s capacity to identify pending disasters ahead of time, as well as create community safety plans in case of an evacuation. It been proven that community-based disaster preparation saves lives, crops and infrastructure.

For Disaster Recovery Workers in Leyte Centre for Development and Education (LCDe), natural phenomema like typhoons do not necessarily equate disaster. “We have a formula for that! Risk with high vulnerability plus low capacity equals disaster. If the vulnerability is high, and [the community] has a low capacity to rise, that’s a disaster. But if [a typhoon] will strike a community that has high capacity, then there would be no disaster,” said one of the staff of LCDe when I visited Leyte in 2016.

And Yolanda became a disaster. Survivors believe that the real death count is 18,000, not the government’s official of 12,000.

But remember that the death toll started even before Yolanda. The region was known in early 2000’s to be a ‘killing field’ for the now imprisoned war criminal, Jovito ‘The Butcher’ Palaparan. Many members of farmer associations were “red-tagged” and became victims of extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances. Palparan has forced many to stop organizing, hide or lie low.

Eastern Visayas was already the poorest region in the Philippines before Yolanda. With disaster preparedness and recovery efforts stifled by the government’s obsession with killing civilians, it has left the region vulnerable and the population lacking capacity to face the wrath of Yolanda. Many residents didn’t even know what a ‘storm surge’ was, only realizing what it was after losing their homes and loved ones.

Post-Yolanda, Disaster Workers were targeted themselves. One of them was Jefferson Custodio, a 25-year old volunteer of Leyte Centre for Development and Education was murdered in August 22, 2014. Custodio was a bantay [guard] of the warehouse where relief goods were stored, shot dead by military elements of 19th Infantry Battalion while he was delivering donated farm tools to upland communities in Carigara.

Millions of dollars where sent as aid to the region, pocketed by corrupt politicians from large landowning families. By the time I visited in March 2016, many of the International NGOs have packed up and left, leaving huge USAID convenient store signs, OXFAM on water tanks, UNICEF tarpaulins, European Union tents. I heard one of the NGO workers say, “palakihan sila ng mga sign” [they tried to outplay each other over the size of their signs].

But another surge happened, a stronger one. Disaster survivors organized an alliance and called themselves “People’s Surge.” Thousands of them, some living in so-called permanent shelters structurally incomplete and far from their sources of livelihood. Now under the Duterte administration, thousands of hungry and displaced are still waiting for the promised P5,000 Presidential Financial Assistance.

To elevate the fight, People’s Surge has filed their candidacy to run as an official Party-list for the May 2019 elections. It is also organizing a week long of events to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the typhoon with the theme “Our survival is non-negotiable, we surge against hunger, poverty and militarization.”

“If a country is not industrialized, that country is prone to disasters. Disasters are caused by poverty. It is not an act of God,” says Marissa Cabaljao, chairperson of People’s Surge. “What we want is for the development of the Philippines and its citizens, so at the times of calamity, we are able to support the ones affected.”

—————————-

Allos Abis is a community worker and a youth arts educator with Anakbayan Toronto. He earned a Master’s degree in Environmental Studies from York University, examining how social movements build local capacity to effectively conduct disaster recovery work.