Help In Real Time

      A smile on the survivors’ faces

How many of the Yolanda disaster victims pinned under the debris or fragments of home could still have been saved by rescue? No one knows. Had help gotten there on time, we would have known.

Up to now, many survivors cannot categorically say if one of those thousands of body bags transported to mass graves at Barangay Basper and Suhi contained a missed family member. The time for positive identification based on intact physical appearance has been lost.

On many instances, the underlying factor why the Yolanda tragedy became more tragic was not being able to deal with the critical situation in real time.

Stores may not have been looted if panicky residents were not sent into frenzy by the thought that they may have survived the wind’s fury and the water’s surge, but not hunger. It was the moment right after the calamity when the need for relief was critical and it did not come.

Time is of the essence. True then in the immediate aftermath of the supertyphoon, true still in the rehabilitation effort of the areas torn by it, time would have made the difference.

Two and a half months after Yolanda, help in recovery and rebuilding must already be up and running or it may be too late again.

The scourge of Yolanda continues. Its victims still reel under the agony and hardships brought by it. The unending queues on stores in the city’s center, pharmacies, banks, wet markets, make one wonders: Is this yet what it is to live in the 21^st century, to be so downed and made helpless by a calamity?

On a long file at the BPI automated teller machine, someone remarked, “Waray pa gud katatapos it at sakripisyo kan Yolanda.” (Our sacrifice from Yolanda has not ended.)

Sacrifice is one aspect, fear is another.

The threat of foodless days nags. Warmer and unlit homes and nothing to do because there is no electricity fuel uncertainty. Realizing with alarm that this could go on for months and years makes one go bonkers. The scenario of having no food and electricity is panicky.

Hostile weather aggravates the already harsh cold and heat. Still in a state of trauma from the Yolanda rampage, folks instantly become jittery over news of another low-pressure-area with the potential to evolve into a monster, like the ferocious visitor on November 8.

Agony, uncertainty, trauma and nervousness mix up into a volatile state of affairs.

Along the Eastern Visayas Region’s Pacific Coast and Leyte Gulf area, are numerous villages flattened by Yolanda. Many of them are now sprawls of tent and makeshift-shelter communities, propped by aid. There, most folks have been reduced to reliance on lifelines from outside.

They urgently need to rise from the ruin and rubble as much as they needed to survive Yolanda.

The maligned bunkhouses are only tiny island specks in this vast sea of dehumanized refugee humanity. If folks can be too hot on those controversial structures, this one is really much too hot.

Those suffering may no longer take the time, as in the days following Yolanda, to paint on pavements the words, PLEASE HELP US. Their plight has been made known throughout the world. They have undergone how it is to beg and join the long queue under rain and sun for five kilos of rice, canned sardines and noodles.

To survive on donations, to rise on somebody else’s helping hand, to be plucked out of one’s proud being by the posturing of aid as if this was all that mattered in the situation, are no small concessions to given assistance.

Government and the international community have announced billions of dollars for recovery and rebuilding. The earmarking by the administration of P360.9 billion for Recovery Assistance on Yolanda (RAY) has gotten into headline and primetime news.

But folks in the flattened communities are not jumping with joy. Why?

No victim of Yolanda has said help is not needed. But the help that is needed is the real thing, not the news. It is what goes to improve the situation on the ground, not what hogs the headlines.

Until now, nothing of that has come, or shows to be coming.

The people cannot even finish counting in their lifetimes the huge assistance promised. But humbly small or boastfully big, they really don’t mind. They just ask: When and How?

Any definite answer to that would already put a smile on the survivors' faces.