Still in the grip of Yolanda

The Red Cross distributes relief in Bgy. Hinulogan, Dagami, Leyte.

 It is made to sound like a magical period of time. But no miracle happened to the suffering victims of Yolanda 100 days after the calamity struck. They are still in the grip of disaster.

I recently visited some of the ravaged areas in Tanauan, Dagami, Burauen and Julita in Leyte. The people I talked to are one in saying that the situation in their barangays may not get better. It could get worse.

Local officials and ordinary citizens share the same observation. If relief by the government and other humanitarian organizations stop, hunger and terrible hardship will hit them. As a consequence, criminality will rise and chaos will be the order of the day.

“There is no problem with food as of now. We are supplied,” Ceasar Arguilles of Barangay San Miguel, Tanauan says. “But almost all of us have no livelihood anymore, if relief ends there will be big trouble,” he adds.

Immediately after the supertyphoon struck, various agencies swooped into their localities. Since then, they have constantly doled out food rations, hygiene kits, pails and construction materials.

The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has led in the effort. But other foreign and private aid organizations have also been helping. They are Oxfam, the Samaritan Purse, Red Cross, World Vision, Plan International and the Catholic Relief Service.

A Buddhist organization, the Tzu Chi Foundation, gave cash from P8,000 to P15,000 per recipient.

But still, 99 percent of the survivors have no means of earning to tide up each family in the near future. Agriculture is down. After Typhoon Pablo hit Mindanao, Leyte and Samar became the country’s biggest producer of copra with two thirds of their agricultural lands planted to coconuts. However, the trees have been decimated by Yolanda.

Folks waiting for relief  on  trees felled by Yolanda.

I came to Bgy. Hinulogan, Dagami in time to see the distribution of food and other relief items by the Red Cross. I took photos and asked around as almost the whole village queued alongside the vans. 

“We will survive while this goes on,” Francisco Crebillo, a resident, says. “But they are only up to March, the officials told us. Once the giving stops, our barangay will plunge into darkness.”

The whole village was flattened, with 90 percent of homes totally damaged. As early as two weeks after Yolanda devastated it, the residents began salvaging materials from their ruined houses and erecting makeshift shelters. But indeed, there seems to be no end to the need for outside help. Dependency on aid is the other tragedy that the local folks are now stuck on.

Most of the houses in Bgy. Balorinay, Burauen have been demolished by the supertyphoon. The folks are living under flimsy canopies from the canvasses or tarpaulins donated by the DSWD and other aid groups. Exposed to the extremes of weather, seemingly in a furnace during hot days, and in a freezer during cold nights, they have still to hear of any government move to help them out of these conditions.

Homes down to ground zero in Balorinay, Burauen, Leyte.

The main source of livelihood of the village was tuba and vinegar making from the coconut flower’s sap. This is gone, and will not be back for at least seven years.

The locals at Bgy. Cuyae, Julita were lucky to be reached by relief with an additional feature, cash for work. They have recently gone through a week-long cash-for-work assistance by the United Nations. But the one thing that happened under the local government unit of their municipality has not paid yet. They joke of it being instead credit-for-work.

Less than 10 percent of the houses here remained standing after Yolanda. The rest were all brought down into heaps of rubble and debris. The local folks struggled to get shelters up with tarpaulin and canvass from the aid agencies. But they could not get food production and income generation back, because their lands are still littered with fallen trees and could not be plowed.

The same dire situation goes on in most of the areas devastated by the supertyphoon in November, last year. The whole prescriptive period for them to recover and pick up the pieces seems to be getting long. But the act can be now or never.

More than three months since, lives, homes, economies and communities are yet far from the condition of really building back after the devastation wrought by Yolanda. Aside from getting desperate, folks are in a situation that can rapidly deteriorate to a point of no return. 

A social and economic collapse may be far off in the minds of government responders at the top. But to the folks on ground zero, the likelihood of this scenario has loomed even much larger than in the first weeks after the disaster.

In December, the government talked of a price tag for Recovery Assistance on Yolanda to the tune of PhP360.9 billion, out of which 50.79% or P183.3 billion was for the reconstruction of homes alone. I estimate that the 1,500 barangays in Leyte - granting that all of them have been razed to the ground, may need only around P4 billion to get more durable shelters up in due time.

First off, where are the talked about billions? The promise of assistance is urgently needed on ground zero to materialize. It must begin to roll now, before it becomes too late. Aanhin pa ang damo kung patay na ang kabayo? (What is the grass for if the horse is already dead?)