How much does the world support the Philippines in disaster relief and rehabilitation? Let us count the ways:

The largest aid commitment, from the World Bank Group, amounts to $1 billion, of which half will be for financing support for livelihood and investment projects.

From the Asian Development Bank, there’s nearly $500 million.

From foreign governments, millions of dollars more in cash and kind have been released, apart from assistance whose value is hard to quantify, such as the use of foreign military aircraft and crew to transport evacuees and relief goods for the Philippine government. Most foreign donors did not include this in assessing the amount of their aid to the Philippines.

And there’s more where the aid came from, as far as the major donors are concerned. The aid is much needed and appreciated. What donors are waiting for is a detailed plan from the government for utilization of the still growing mountain of foreign aid.

The donors have common priorities for both shortterm response and long-term reconstruction. Apart from the rehabilitation of ruined infrastructure, they want speedy resumption of education and health services, the revival of economic activities to create jobs, agricultural resuscitation, and construction of houses and buildings that are more resistant to gale-force winds, earthquakes and severe flooding.

The World Bank, in an official statement, called for “timely reconstruction” to reduce the impact of Super Typhoon Yolanda. That was a diplomatic way of putting it. Other donors are more blunt: several say rehabilitation must be in full swing ASAP.

The donors do acknowledge that this may be difficult, given the magnitude of the devastation. But donors are also hoping that the rehabilitation will be better than the initial response to the super typhoon. In the first few days, government officials seemed to be running around like a headless chicken.

Rehabilitation will certainly have to move faster than the public-private partnership or PPP program and the many big-ticket development projects that have languished in government drawing boards under P-Noy’s watch. A concern of several donors is whether the country can come up with the necessary counterpart funding for rehabilitation projects.

This concern may be partly addressed by the approval (in record time) yesterday of the 2014 budget bill by the bicameral conference committee, which includes an allotment of P100 billion for the post-Yolanda rehabilitation, apart from the supplemental budget sourced from this year’s General Appropriations Act (GAA).

Ratification and enactment of next year’s GAA, however, will have to wait until after the holidays. The Senate has gone on Christmas break, with the House of Representatives to follow shortly. Reliable sources have told me that certain legislators have booked expensive vacations overseas for the holidays. No devastating typhoon can stop them from having a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

The government can build on the fact that despite the disaster and corruption scandals, there’s still general bullishness over the Philippines. The World Bank, whose pre-Yolanda GDP growth forecast for the country for 2013 was 7.0 percent, 6.7 percent next year and 6.8 in 2015, revised the figures to just 6.9 percent for 2013, and 6.5 and 7.1, respectively, for the succeeding years.

But the disaster has also raised fears that economic growth, even as it continues, will become even more inequitable.

The World Bank, which is assisting the government in drawing up a comprehensive rehabilitation plan, is prepared to provide technical assistance and access to international best practices, which are based on experience in disasters elsewhere in the world.

“It’s important that one incorporates those lessons well,” Axel van Trotsenburg told me. The World Bank’s regional vice president for East Asia and the Pacific visited the disaster area last week.

Part of those best practices is timely and efficient utilization of foreign aid.

2 Speaking of foreigners, some diplomatic missions are now wondering about the fitness of Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago for a seat in the International Criminal Court (ICC), following her counterattack against Senate Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile.

Her harangue sounded like the unauthorized biography of Enrile and many of the accusations deserve to be investigated, particularly the charges about smuggling and illegal gambling in the independent republic of Cagayan.

In other countries, such serious accusations are followed almost immediately with a formal investigation. In South Korea and Japan, the accused might even jump off a cliff or a bridge from shame. In this country, the accused will push the accuser off a cliff, or smirk and play a video game. Senators, meanwhile, rushed not to investigate the accusations of high crimes, but to patch things up between the two foes and save the image of the Senate.

Foreign missions aren’t overly concerned about Enrile’s fate, although they wonder if he would ever be punished for his alleged sins. What they are concerned about is attitude – Senator Miriam’s – and, as one diplomat put it, “how casually” she throws around prejudices, ridiculing people with HIV, the elderly, and overseas Filipino workers, among others.

When the P-Noy administration lobbied foreign governments to support Senator Miriam’s bid for a seat in the ICC, several ambassadors were aghast. But they relented and went along with the idea, popular at the time, that P-Noy knew what was good for his government. Now Senator Miriam’s harangue against Enrile is reviving the foreigners’ concerns.

These sentiments are bound to reach the ICC. It would help if Senator Miriam presented evidence to substantiate her accusations, and make her case minus the insults. She knows how to entertain, but some people are not amused.