Islanders join forces to rebuild their lives
‘Bayanihan’ communal system like North American barn raisings
Twelve days after typhoon Haiyan slashed a vicious path across the central Philippines, many mountain and seaside communities — including this tiny island in the Visayan Sea where U.S. and Japanese warships once hunted each other — have still seen little help.
The monster storm of Nov. 8, whose official death toll climbed to 4,011 Wednesday, was estimated by the United Nations to have seriously disrupted the already threadbare lives of more than two million Filipinos. The havoc it caused here, 300 kilometres to the west of Ground Zero at Tacloban, was evident from a great distance as I approached the island of Olotayan aboard a rickety, wooden, two-passenger skiff known as a pump boat.
Great stands of trees had been stripped of their foliage or knocked down by the wind, leaving a few palms still standing in a narrow strip of the white sand that cut the island almost in half between what locals call “mountains.”
The storm, with sustained winds of 250 kilometres an hour, and the powerful sea surge that those gales churned up, spent four hours obliterating about 260 of Olotayan’s 280 houses, which mostly crowd the shoreline. The few homes that survived were badly damaged.
Worst of all, perhaps, 40 of the 55 fishing boats that had been the sole source of income for the island’s 980 residents had disappeared in the tempest.
“Our life is so difficult because of that typhoon,” said Gemma Deloviar, 47, whose Grade 2 classroom was ripped apart by the storm. Nobody has received any help. “We don’t have shelter. We don’t have enough food or drinking water.”
For all that, Deloviar and most everyone else I spoke with during a day visit to the island — which at another time would probably have appeared to be a Robinson Crusoe-like paradise to a visitor — was cheerful and, in that particularly Filipino way, resolutely and relentlessly upbeat.
“Despite the difficulties we have suffered, we still smile because God has given us hope, strength and another life,” the school teacher said as she and a few others led me through the ruins of their lives.
The first stop was the Roman Catholic Church. It was the only significant structure left standing once Haiyan departed for Mindoro Island and the open waters of the South China Sea. Even the church, where everyone sought shelter after the school blew apart, had a huge tear in its roof.
It was at the church, which only sees a priest once a month, that the barangay (village) captain, Manuel Aninang, distributed a modest pile of supplies that had been donated by former residents of the island who now live in Canada, the U.S. and Australia. The names of the Canadian donors were given as Analyn Arenojo and Stephanie Aninang.
‘Despite the difficulties we have suffered, we still smile because God has given us hope, strength and another life.’
GEMMA DELOVIAR
Grade 2 teacher
Every family was being given a couple of kilograms of rice, about eight litres of water, a couple of small tins of sardines and corned beef and some used clothes. Other than that, no assistance of any kind had yet reached this island outpost.
“These were really important gifts because we have no agriculture here and must depend on the waters around us for crabs, squid, cuttlefish and tuna,” said the 59-yearold barangay captain, who used to be a policeman in nearby Roxas City. “We cannot even properly start to rebuild our homes because nipa (a natural building material) and bamboo and other things we might use are not available anywhere. We need plywood. We need nails. We need everything.”
Surveying the storm damage, which killed only one person on the island, Aninang said the community no longer had a school and its only well had been contaminated by sea water. As for power, the town’s generator had been destroyed and not one family could afford to buy even a small generator.
“I’m not satisfied at all right now,” he said. “How can we possibly recover?”
Joerly Tanlawan, and his wife, Imelda, who are both 48, lost everything when their home was flattened and their fishing boat was washed out to sea.
“We’ll look for another boat but they cost about 80,000 pesos (about $2,000) and we have no money,” Imelda said.
Precious Deloviar, 32, who married Gemma Deloviar’s brother, and was also a teacher, said Olotayan would survive because of the “bayanihan” system. This is a communal tradition in the Philippines where everyone pulls together to achieve an objective. It is similar to the logging, spinning and barnbuilding bees that often took place on the Canadian and American frontiers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Look, we’re already trying to fix up as much as we can,” Precious said as hammers could be heard tapping in the distance. “People are using pieces of scrap wood from their old houses to build temporary covers for their children to sleep under.”
One of the village’s three classrooms, where 289 students had studied before the typhoon, remained more or less intact. That was now where students from Grades 3 and 4 had already resumed classes this week during the morning. Classes for Grades 5 and 6 were held in the same place during the afternoon. Grades 1 and 2 were being taught on a stage that no longer had a roof over it.
“We no longer have many school supplies and no ballpoint pens,” Precious said, pointing to a meagre stack of notebooks drying in the sun in the school’s tumbledown courtyard.
“Some students still can’t make it from the other side of the mountain because the path is blocked by fallen trees. But people remain optimistic because they are still alive.”
To cheer themselves up, she said that she and the other school teachers had got together on Monday to give each other manicures.