From ruins of typhoon, Filipinos find new hope
Bound by cruel loss 4 years ago, survivors learn to work together
Yolanda Colbe’s life on her small family farm in nearby Carigara used to be routine. She spent mornings doing housework and taking care of her six children. Every afternoon, she went to the bingo hall.
Then, nearly four years ago, Haiyan — one of the most intense tropical cyclones on record — slammed into Southeast Asia and devastated this city, 360 miles southeast of the capital, Manila. It left 6,300 people dead, more than 4 million homeless and Colbe’s calm life shattered.
Colbe, 50, and her family narrowly escaped when a coconut tree crashed on their roof. Then they watched as winds up to 195 mph picked up their house and blew it away like a toy.
Many in the region are still trying to recover from the supertyphoon of November 2013. Only this year did Colbe’s family cobble together a permanent structure to their temporary shelter.
One benefit of the disaster is that Colbe and her neighbors have started working together in ways they never had before, having realized they could rebuild their lives more quickly by banding together.
At first, the farmers in Carigara organized to demand benefits they hadn’t received more than a year after Haiyan.
“Before Haiyan, we didn’t care about each other,” Colbe said. “It was like, mind your own business, mind your own life. But after Haiyan, that’s where we realized — you know, we’re all the same. You might have been rich before, but after Haiyan, you don’t have anything left.”
Colbe’s group, the Carigara Small-Scale Farmers’ Association, cleared land and created a shared farm with the help of local and international aid groups as well as the government. They diversified their crops to adapt to the changing climate and teamed up for disaster-readiness drills.
Most local farmers had relied almost entirely on coconut trees, but after the storm they began growing cassava, a weather-resistant crop, as well as vegetables such as tomatoes, eggplants, peas and cauliflower for a steadier stream of income.
They’ve since added a tilapia pond and recently began raising pigs and bees. The association took advantage of government grants to provide life and crop insurance for its 25 members.
Colbe became president of the group, in which women outnumber men 14 to 11. That’s another striking change after Haiyan: Farming was considered men’s work before the storm.
“We believed women were only for the home: to cook, care for the children, wash clothes,” Colbe said. After the storm, “we realized that we can do a lot more than men.”
This teamwork approach also is benefiting other farmers in Leyte province, where Carigara is.
Ciriaco Liporada, 60, helped form the Integrated Farmers Association of Hiagsam, a small town. “We built cooperation, camaraderie among each other,” he said. “That helped us to recover and bring back what we had lost.”
His group grows a wide variety of crops with help from government aid for equipment such as cassava dryers and rice threshers that individual farmers weren’t eligible to receive.
Dennis Amata, spokesman for the relief agency CARE Philippines, said his group focused on helping farmers organize and learn how to run a more sustainable business.
“Before Haiyan, most of them didn’t know they needed to form an organization to access these government benefits,” Amata said. “Now they create proposals on the own and approach the government themselves. They’re also drawing up their own business plans.”
No matter what nature may have in store for them, Colbe’s family and other farmers in Carigara now know that cooperation will be the new normal to help survive future storms.
“I prefer my life now because of the different kinds of experiences I’ve had with my farmer friends, all the help we’ve gotten, all the opportunities we have now,” Colbe said. “And of course, everybody should work together. Two heads are better than one.”