How to stay alive – Tacloban City, Forty Days After the Storm (Daryll Delgado)
The last time I was in the DZR Airport in Tacloban City was in early November. My husband and I had come home for a few days to visit the graves of my parents and other relatives, for All Souls Day. At the airport, we met many people we knew, all of them also home for the occasion - to honor their dead.
We were home for only a few days, and we left on the first flight out of Tacloban on November 4th. I remember how lovely the view of the sunrise over the bay was, from the airport. And I remember telling my husband how, back in the day, on semestral breaks, after a night of partying with friends, we would drive to the airport, climb over the fence and lie down on the runway facing the ocean, or gaze up at the always-clear night skies, and wait for the sunrise. And just before the guards showed up and the airport opened at daybreak, we would scramble and run out of the compound or risk getting caught. That would then serve for a thrilling experience enough to last us for days and days.
I always tell my husband that, every time I come home to Tacloban, as soon as I step off the plane, and encounter the vast sea around me, the tree-lined path to my right, and the clear blue skies above, I always feel like I am set free, and my favorite expression has always been that it is as if walls have been magically blown off around me and I instantly feel like I can breathe more freely and think more clearly.
The next time I came home with my husband, just over a week after we left Tacloban, wasn’t on a plane, or through the airport. There were no commercial flights to Tacloban then, and there was hardly anything of the DZR Airport left standing. No more trees lined the path leading to it. There were instead huge piles of debris, very many roofless and totally wrecked houses, long lines of hungry and desperate people, and hundreds of dead bodies lining streets. The treacherous sea, however, was still there, entrancing as ever, but also haunting and mysterious, and as we now know, very, very deadly.
* * *
I was in Kuala Lumpur, on a work assignment, when the typhoon struck my home. The only other member of my family who wasn’t home during the typhoon was my sister who lives in California. Everyone else, my three siblings, their spouses, their children, our cousins, our housekeeper and her whole family, were in Tacloban. For three very long and agonizing days, after the typhoon, we heard nothing from our family, while all over the TV and social media, we saw the devastation, the destruction, the deaths wrought by the typhoon.
As soon as we heard from my brother, and confirmed that they were safe, but that some friends and an uncle were dead, that some of the people staying in the house which has been turned into a mini evacuation center were injured, that supplies were running out, and all around the city there was chaos and hardly any medical care, we knew what to do. It was decided that I would make my way to Manila from KL as quickly as I could, and then my husband and I would charter a van to Tacloban and evacuate as many of our family as we could to Manila.
My husband and I left Manila at 3 o’ clock in the morning of the 13th, and arrived in Tacloban at mid-day of the 14th, after almost forty hours of travel. We reached Tacloban through the famed San Juanico Bridge. Our mission was to deliver whatever relief goods we had, check on people whose families and friends had no means to do so themselves, and then evacuate our family, including my brother-in-law’s family, an aunt and cousins, who were then taking shelter in our house. To maximize space for the people who needed to be brought out of Tacloban, everyone had to bring only the barest minimum. Thus, we left our ruined home, our city, with very few possessions, and with very heavy hearts, before the sun could even set on the 14th of November.
* * *
As someone who writes mostly for pleasure, which is to say that I cannot and do not live off my writing, I have found it very, very difficult to write of what I saw, and heard, and feel about my home city, about the lives and experiences of my people, my family, my friends. I cannot stop consuming news about it though. But I cringe at the so-called “human interest” stories that have been coming off the pens of otherwise very good writers and journalists who have been covering the tragedy. In fact, and I know this is very irrational, I am offended at how we have become a city of stories for other people’s catharsis, nay, indulgence.
During Week One, I was asked by a few agencies to write a report, an account, anything they can print or publish. But this was all I could come up with, and I decided to publish it on Facebook myself: https://www.facebook.com/notes/daryll-delgado/what-is-there/10152424193399325
* * *
It has been a month, since I wrote that little piece, 40 days since the typhoon struck. Commercial flights have been resumed and the airport is semi-operational. People tell me that so much has changed, that there are marked improvements in Tacloban. The government even goes so far as to claim that normalcy has been restored to the city. And this piece is supposed to be about how Tacloban is getting back on its feet.
I arrive in Tacloban this time on a plane. The airport structure is still in ruins, but the runway is clear. Repairs and construction work at the airport take place amidst the hustle and bustle of passengers arriving and departing. Makeshift signs have been put up to direct people to arrival and departure areas. Airport attendants are on hand to assist passengers, and, outside, some enterprising locals have put their cars to public use, often for fees that are not at all normal.
There are trucks bearing the logos of international organizations – UNHCR, UNICEF, WHO, USAID, MSF, WFP, PLAN, and many others. There are banners announcing performances by foreign artists. A week ago, Justin Bieber flew to Tacloban to entertain the kids at a public elementary school, and there are talks that Katy Perry is in town.
There are tents for aid workers and military personnel from other countries set up near the airport, and, where the Fisherman’s Village used to be, there is now a village of white tents bearing the logo of the United Nations’ agency for refugees. In the Calanipawan area, a relocation site has been developed, and rows of wooden houses are being constructed and being readied for occupancy by Christmas, I was told. The main streets from the airport to the center of town have been cleared. There are tow trucks and workers bearing DPWH orange uniforms, alongside locals who have taken part in the cash-for-work initiative of the Taiwan Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation. There is a proliferation of small food stalls and makeshift stores selling fresh produce and, I’ve also been told, looted goods. The strip of lechon stalls is now mostly back in business, and there are eager buyers where there used to be none just a few weeks ago. There are also much less people walking about aimlessly or in a daze, and a few passenger jeepneys and tricycles are now plying the streets of Tacloban, their loud rumbling lovely music to my ears.
At night, the street lamps in some parts of the city center are actually lighted. A few food establishments have started operating along Avenida Veteranos, where a number of restaurants, a school, and Tacloban’s biggest private hospital are located.
Indeed, there are signs of recovery everywhere. And if you choose to see only these signs, there is much to be glad about. In fact, if I stop the piece right here, I would have fulfilled my assignment of writing about how the city is getting back on its feet. * * But it’s very hard to take comfort in the improvements I see around Tacloban, when the reminders of what were taken away from the city and its people by the deadly storm and by the government’s inefficiency are everywhere, including in the air that people breathe, which still bears the smell of corpses that have yet to be unearthed from the debris, or of those buried haphazardly by their own families in shallow graves around the city. The Kusog Tacloban volunteers staying in our house (which has been turned into a headquarters for Kusog Tacloban) tell me that, every day, bodies are still recovered among the debris, under the rubbles, in the bushes. They find it laughable and absurd that the death count has been stopped weeks ago.
On the day I arrive in Tacloban, more than a month after the storm, six bodies are recovered in the mangroves near the airport, and I see two body bags in the street being readied for pick up. On my way to the airport, two days later, to pick up my husband and another lawyer friend who has come with him to help out, I and one of the volunteers driving for me see another body bag on the street where he lives. He tells me that behind his house in Burayan, San Jose, just a few days ago, the bodies of a mother and her child had just been recovered under a pile of wood and rocks. He says that he and his family are lucky – his family lost their home and all of their possessions, and here he is volunteering in relief efforts and saying he is lucky – because his grandmother died inside their house, and they didn’t have to go on a futile search for her body. He says that, for a few days after his grandmother died, his uncles had tried to keep watch over their mother whom they had bundled up in clothes and blankets and laid down on the street, hoping someone would pick her up and help them bury her. But the decomposition was happening too fast, they had to bring their grandmother to what used to be a morgue, where bodied were being left for the authorities to get them. He tells me that they are not sure where she was brought to after that, but that when they checked, all the bodies in the morgue had already been taken and most likely buried in a mass grave at the public cemetery.
Where streets have been cleared, so much trash and debris have accumulated in piles that continue to grow every day, while collection of garbage is still not done regularly. In many areas, these piles are now as high as people’s homes. In an area near Manlurip, where there used to be a lovely pond and fronds, there is now a sea of trash and people have taken to poking through it, for money or for anything they can make use of.
Two friends of ours, sisters, whose entire house in San Jose, near the airport, was washed away, and whose parents and the child of one of the sisters drowned in the 17-foot-high storm surge, have also taken to poking through the mountain of trash near their area. Ever since they found a piece of clothing which they are convinced belonged to their mother, and some kitchen ware which they believe, or want to believe, were part of their mother’s collection, they have been obsessed with collecting as many of these articles as they can. I implore them to please don’t do this, for health reasons at least, but they have bigger reasons to keep at it. They never saw the bodies of their loved ones who died. They were both in Manila when the storm struck. For weeks after the storm, they searched night and day for their parents and for the child, until they were informed by a neighbor who had positively identified their family members that he himself had helped in bundling them up for burial in a mass grave in a place called Vasper, near the San Juanico Bridge. Since then, they have taken to recovering, collecting, rebuilding from the trash and debris what they can of the home and family that they lost.
Some people have taken to burning trash piles every afternoon just before dark, and in many parts of the city, you see flames and thick swirls of gray smoke against a deep orange sunset. The scene this makes is strangely beautiful, surreal, and cinematic, except that this is not happening in a movie, it’s happening right in front of your very eyes, in your home city. * * * It is very hard, as well, to take comfort in the miniscule improvements one sees in Tacloban City, when in the neighboring coastal towns of Palo, Tanauan, Tolosa, Dulag, and others that were also badly-hit by the storm, where many of our relatives and friends are from, where so many people died and lost their homes and livelihoods, hardly any improvement can be seen.
To this day, these towns still look like they’ve been bombed out. Fishing villages are no more, concrete houses are now just piles of rocks. Thousands of coconut trees in vast coconut plantations have been decapitated, and only the trunks remain, a few of which are standing, but many are completely felled to the ground. Where thriving, dense communities used to be, these have been replaced with tent homes, nice ones from the UN if they’re lucky, or makeshift ones using tarpaulins they’ve somehow managed to get from other organizations if not so lucky. Many of the school buildings have been crushed, entire structures flattened. Some of the schools were lucky to get tent classrooms, many others have to wait from the DepEd for help.
We meet several kids happily hanging out in school grounds, a couple of brave and naughty boys jumping precariously on unsteady, broken walls. They tell us that they have started going to school, using just one building, but that they don’t really do any schoolwork yet. When I ask them how it is that they fit into just one building, they tell me that many of their schoolmates are no longer around, that many of them have died, and others went away with their families to Manila or Cebu. We meet more kids in the intersection of Tanauan and Tolosa, in the small triangle park where used to stand a big sign saying “this way to Tanauan Poblacion” but which the locals have turned into a grave site. They point us to their families’ burial mounds, and we see many haphazard crosses and wood plaques bearing long lists of names with the same family name per mound.
One boy, Diether, about ten years of age, brings me to where his four brothers and sisters, his father, his grandparents and two baby cousins he wasn’t sure were boys or girls, are buried. I ask him where his mother is and he points to a small makeshift tent house. He tells me that he survived by hanging on to a trunk of Gemelina tree, because, he informs me, Gmelina wood is a good floater, and that it manages to stay on top of strong, strong waves, much like the waves that came and ate up his house and his brothers and sisters and his grandparents. He says he was separated from his mother when the waves came, and when the waves went back to the ocean, he was thrown to the ground and then he just got up and started walking, walking, and walking until he chanced upon Elvie, his youngest sister aged one year old, near the “Triangle”. Elvie is among those buried in the mound on the triangle park.
Another child, a girl named Angela, aged nine years old, tells me she found herself on top of a mango tree when the waves came, and she held on to a branch for four hours, her body shivering, going rigid in the cold. She says that at some point she wanted to let go already, but that her hands were frozen and she could not lift them from around the branch. Her older sister, several cousins, and grandparents are buried in the mound she brings me to. She tells me that her mother’s name is also written on the wooden cross planted on the ground, but that her body is actually buried in another area. When I ask her why this is so, she says that her mother’s body has just been found only the day before, and can no longer be buried with the other members of her family who had died.
A little boy, aged five, proudly volunteers that he survived by “sorfing”. When I ask him if he means that he laid on top of a wood plank, he says, no, he actually, really “sorfed”, and the two other kids confirm that they saw how he did it, that he had indeed stood and balanced himself on a floating plywood and rode the waves. I ask him if he is a surfer, like many of the boys in Tanauan, and he says that he just learned to “sorf” during the storm. I tell him that he is very brave and that he should join my brother and his friends when they come back to Tanauan to surf, and I am rewarded with a very sweet toothless grin. This boy also lost a parent, and he points me to a part of the triangle park with rocks formed into a square. It is not very clear from his innocent, childish narrative if he also lost siblings, but I see many names bearing the same last name inscribed on the small crosses lining the head of the rocky plot, and I do not bother asking him whose these names are exactly.
There are many more plots, mounds, bearing makeshift crosses on the triangle park. Next to the crosses, we see articles of clothing belonging to the dead loved one, a limbless doll, a pair of sneakers, and unopened bottles of water. I ask a man tending to his wife’s grave why there are bottles of water, and he tells me that they don’t want their loved ones to go thirsty much like what they, the living, went through, days after the storm. He says that these are also a reminder that it was water that took their loved ones away.
* * *
In Tacloban City, we find ourselves hanging out, at the end of each tiring day, in Giuseppe's, the Italian bistro along Avenida Veteranos. The place is well-lighted, always packed. From the outside, it all looks normal indeed, festive even. But when we enter the place we do not recognize anyone except the owner, Joseph. The place is packed with foreign aid workers who like to come to the restaurant for a good meal, a bottle of wine, a cold beer, after a long day’s work. While here, as long as you don’t see the many military personnel walking around, and police cars constantly patrolling the street outside, it is easy – and sometimes necessary – to forget that, elsewhere, there is darkness and disorder, death and devastation.
On my first night back home, I meet with a doctor friend, Mabel, who is working with one of the international organizations on the ground. We are telling ourselves just this, exactly, that we like and maybe deserve this fantasy, this illusion of normalcy, when, from the street, a young woman, speaking very loudly, laughing hysterically, intrudes into the scene. She is scantily clad, and covered in grime. Her eyes are wild, dilated, angry.
The crowd of international volunteers and aid workers remain calm, and try to ignore her. The police watch her very intently, aware also that they're being watched by humanitarian workers. The woman continues to provoke the crowd, starts dancing, gyrating in the middle of the street. She starts to approach us, even as we try to avoid staring at her, hoping she won't single us out. She does single us out and in a very loud voice, demands for a slice of pizza, speaking in English. We tell her, in a calm and what we hope is a comforting voice, to ask nicely and put on her top. She calls our bluff and shouts, demands even more loudly. Then, she says, you want me to put this on? This? Here! She pulls at her tattered top violently, flings it to the ground, and flaunts her almost-naked body at the crowd instead. Then she breaches the small garden separating the restaurant from the street and comes straight for us, grabs our beer and dashes back to the street. She takes a gulp from the grande bottle, pours the rest of the content on herself, and then smashes the bottle on the street. She then grabs a sliver of glass and threatens the women tending a small stall across the restaurant, and suddenly she is lunging at them with her weapon, and the women start to run. She runs after them, shouting, waving her weapon in the air. The people, the foreign aid workers in the restaurant tell the two policemen to please restrain her already. The policemen finally run after the crazed woman, while we all look on, helplessly, and try embarrassedly to go back to our pizza and beer.
My doctor friend says there are many like her, and many more will be like her, if they remain untreated, if their trauma remains unaddressed. She fears that the young woman might be on drugs or might have gone through something very, very violent. She says she can see it in the woman’s face. And I think, well, there she is, hers is the real face of the city. And perhaps we need to gaze at her straight in the face, no matter how difficult, or painful, or frightening it may be.
* * *
I start writing this piece only on the fortieth day after the storm. In traditional Catholic practice, the fortieth day is significant in that it marks the official end of mourning, and the dead are honored and “sent off” with prayers and a feast we call “pa-cuarenta”. All over Tacloban and in neighboring coastal towns, people are lighting candles, saying prayers. Our families in different parts of the world also light candles in their own homes.
Magina Fernandez, Joji Dorado, and the Kusog Tacloban volunteers have involved themselves in the arrangements for the “pa-cuarenta” memorial and candle-lighting in remembrance of the dead. They have taken time off from distribution of relief goods, from doing repairs of people’s homes, from assisting medical missions, for this equally important undertaking. The “pa-cuarenta” candles provided by the tourism office illuminate the city, and the people, as a collective, temporarily confront the darkness around them. When the candles melt and their lights die, a full moon appears and is reflected on the still body of water that surrounds the city. Many people take comfort, find grace in the fact that the “pa-cuarenta” falls exactly on the night of the full-moon, on December 17th. They find meaningful connections and patterns in these incidents and coincidences. And, indeed, the event, the public display of mourning and grief, is really much about helping people find grace and comfort too where these are scant, through symbols and rituals of healing and recovery they believe in and understand.
My friend, Didits Palami, whose family owns a school in Tacloban, for her part says that, in terms of coping, the best way she knows of right now, is to not stop working, not rest, not relax. My cousin, Marie Apostol, who initiated Kusog Tacloban, also feels the same way. And so do I, so do many of us who survived, who were spared, or who weren’t there in Tacloban to go through what our families went through on November 8th.
We have read enough books to know that this is survivor’s guilt, but this is also, in very practical and pragmatic terms, what is needed right now – to work hard, to not waste time, to not flinch. But then, on the fortieth day, at 3:00 in the afternoon, we also stop, to light candles, to remember, to honor the dead, and the city that once was.
