Beijing fair features disaster photo exhibit
Project benefits Typhoon Yolanda survivors
SUPER Typhoon Yolanda (international name Haiyan), the world’s strongest typhoon that ever hit land, ravaged areas in central Philippines — particularly Tacloban City and the rest of the provinces of Leyte and Samar — on November 8, 2013. Its onslaught left at least 6,300 people dead.
It’s been almost half a decade since the typhoon’s landfall, yet thousands of displaced families remain in temporary settlements, waiting for the permanent shelters the government promised to build for them.
Filipinos and foreign donors from all over the globe continue sharing their lot to alleviate the plight of the survivors. One such community is a non-profit Filipino group based in Beijing, China called Kusina ni Kabayan (KnK).
Today, September 16, Filipinos in the Chinese capital gather at the Shuangjing District from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in celebration of “Pamilyang Pinoy Autumn Day.” The event promises to bring Filipino cuisine and culture closer to the local and expat communities in Beijing through a food bazaar, storytelling for kids, and traditional Filipino games.
“Postcards From Disasters” (PFD), a collaborative documentary photography project between journalists and Yolanda survivors who have extensively documented a community of displaced citizens in Tacloban since 2016.
Photos from the project were exhibited at TriNoma Mall in Quezon City last year. The same set of photos are exhibited in the Beijing event.
“This is our way of bringing back the discourse. What makes these photos and stories compelling is the fact that they were captured and told from the perspective of a displaced person. They, who have gone through all the hardships after Yolanda, are the ones who shape our narrative,” project co-founder and CNN Philippines correspondent Makoi Popioco shared to disasters that hit the county in the last10 years, including Typhoon Pablo in 2012, the Zamboanga City crisis, and the 7.2 magnitude earthquake that jolted Central Visayas in 2013.
In 2015, Popioco was named the
in the program, of the National Endowment for Democracy in the US. During his five-month fellowship, he spoke about human rights and internally displaced peoples in the Philippines before numerous institutions like the Google Ideas at the Google Headquarters in
New York City, and Microsoft Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
Popioco co-founded the project in 2015 with former ABS-CBN Current Affairs segment producer Julie Nealega, who like him has extensively documented the aftermath of Yolanda. Their immersions in the community inspired the project.
“This project has been life-changing for me. This is like my own trauma debriefing from what I have gone through documenting Yolanda for almost two years,” Popioco said.
“For me, our job as journalists did not stop when the interest on Yolanda died down. All the more that we have to retell their stories years after because thousands of families remain in temporary shelters. More than 80,000 housing units are still pending.”
The photos are also posted on the project’s social media accounts, namely Facebook and Instagram.
“We made them available on social media to raise awareness on the survivors’ plight, and inspire citizen engagement and action. This year, we will start our work on policylobbying. Through our extensive documentation of the internally displaced peoples in Tacloban, we hope
Proceeds from the Pamilyang Pinoy Autumn Family Day event will help fund the project’s exhibit in Cebu in November, -
sary of Yolanda’s ravaging landfall.
It’s impossible for him to be in Beijing today but said his friends there would take care of everything.
“We do all the work. Kami rin ang nagbubuhat ng lahat ng exhibit panels. That’s how committed everyone is, whether here or in Beijing,” Popioco noted to