DRAMATIC DETOUR TO A CHILDHOOD HOME
Malou Caise travelled from Toronto to the Philippines to find her family after Typhoon Haiyan destroyed her birthplace
A wall of rubble blocked the road that led to the neighbourhood where Malou Caise was born and raised. There was no way around the soggy wreckage, but Caise had come too far to turn back without finding her childhood home. So she started to climb.
It was November 2013, a week after Typhoon Haiyan devastated the city of Tacloban, and Caise had returned to the Philippines to search for her family. She hadn’t been able to confirm their safety from her home in Toronto, where she lives with her husband and two children, so she booked a flight. Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk and I travelled with her. Bodies were still lined in rows along the roadside when we arrived eight days after the storm, and the sour stench of death hung in the air as children played in the streets and their parents clawed through the rubble to search for the missing.
Haiyan was one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded, with winds that reached 315 kilometres an hour. When it made landfall on Nov. 8, it sent a wall of water barrelling toward coastal communities in the eastern provinces of Leyte and Samar, leaving more than 7,000 dead or missing. It obliterated the wooden shanties with corrugated metal roofs that dotted the shore, and it crashed through concrete buildings, knocking down walls previously considered typhoon-proof. The Caise family home was one of them.
A few hours before she set out in search of the wreckage, Caise learned that her youngest brother’s wife and 5-year-old son had been carried away by the sea when the walls came down. The rest of her family was safe, but Caise didn’t know it yet. We were leaving Tacloban the next morning to travel to the village where her parents now lived, which was a three-hour drive along the storm-battered coast. The attempt to find her childhood home was a spontaneous decision — not an essential part of her mission, but an aim that seemed to take on a deeper meaning now that she was on the ground.
Wearing a flimsy pair of running shoes, Caise climbed to the top of the two-storey heap of wreckage and began to creep across it, stepping on torn chunks of wood and tin, dodging nails and broken glass. “There are still bodies down there,” one man warned her. Lucas followed close behind, carrying his cameras. I watched and made a mental checklist of the things I would have to do if one or both of them slipped through the pile of rubble.
Lucas was ready with his camera when Caise caught sight of the pale pink concrete walls. The home was destroyed, as she knew it would be, but there was something about finding the pieces of it that brought her a sense of triumph.