Port, Tacloban, Leyte. June 2016
[from FB post: November 12, 2013]
Watching BBC every morning before work and wondering how BBC (and other news agencies) and get into a disaster zone with all their equipment yet aid for those affected is so slow? The images coming out of the Philippines remind me of the tsunami in Japan where it took a few days for help to come... I can only imagine how much longer it will take for the Philippines.
[June 10, 2016]
Tacloban was levelled by a super typhoon. Old Testament kind of destruction. The aid agencies came and put on a band aid so the developed world would feel less guilty. One look into people's faces here and you see they have been through a lot. Lots of street kids. But... a lot of development too. The best way to help a place is to come visit, spend money and tell others. Meanwhile.... it really is just a sad sad place with an "edge" you normally don't feel in cities this size in the Philippines.
[June 11,2022]
Lunch with American Protestant missionaries in staunchly Roman Catholic Philippines. Most of their (loud) discussion was about underground churches in China. I feel like I am back in Saudi Arabia
Part of my huge 2016 summer vacation was spending a few weeks in the Philippines. I had come to love the Visayas (Central Philippines) after visiting Negros and Cebu. I decided that I would fly to Tacloban, Leyte and overland it to Ormoc on the other side of the island where I would catch the ferry to Cebu City and onward. I honestly don't know why I picked Leyte to visit other than I hadn't been there yet?
Tacloban airport was new (post-cyclone) and was very well-organized. A good samaritan helped me get on the right transport that took me into the city (quite far away). As we came closer to Tacloban the guy pointed to the land all around me and said "this all used to be houses" - all I saw was swamp. I made it to downtown and checked into my hotel.
Three years earlier Typhoon Haiyan had leveled much of Tacloban. The downtown was apparently rapidly rebuilt (or not as badly damaged due to the better construction of the buildings?). Looking at the place three years on, one never would have guessed anything so horrific happened there. However, as I mentioned in my FB post, the town had a "shell-shocked" feel to it. The normally smiling Filipinos were more subdued, the town was less vibrant. It was in the process of "bouncing back". The real devastation occurred in the all the villages (barangays) outside of the city proper. Most of those structures were not made of anything that could remotely hold up to a category 5 typhoon and they were literally blown off the face of the earth. So, on the one hand, Tacloban looked like business as usual, but on the other, it had lost its entire ring of suburban villages.
The town was surrounded by water and just across the narrow San Juanico Strait were the mountains of Samar Island. It was incredibly scenic. Samar and Leyte were connected by a bridge, one of the few that connect "main islands" of the Philippines, because they were so close to each other. The town was beautiful to walk around especially toward sunset when the shadows of towering cumulonimbus clouds reflected off the still waters between the islands. I liked the place - it was calm and serene compared to most other frenetic Filipino towns of its size. I even found a great wood-fired pizza place that had damn good product considering where I was (much better than anything in Saudi Arabia at the time anyway). While on one of several visits to the pizza place, the group of missionaries mentioned in my FB post above came to have a meal. They were no doubt left over from Typhoon Haiyan aid work. I would like to think they were in Tacloban actually helping these people restart their lives and not just saving their mortal souls.
Tacloban's other claim to fame was the exact return point of General Douglas Macarthur's famous, "I shall return" in World War Two. There was even a section of Tacloban called "Macarthur" since it was near the beach where he landed. Interestingly, like the unfortunate cathedral of Christchurch, NZ which was toppled by earthquakes several times [see: Christchurch Cathedral], Tacloban had been devastated by typhoons twice before - both times literally wiping it from the face of the earth. People rebuilt and the city persisted. What actually prevented the town from growing larger in the past was not those devastating weather events, but piracy. The San Juanico Strait was not easily defended, so the town didn't take off until the piracy was controlled. How fascinating that piracy stopped the city from growth in its early days, but extreme weather events which were far more destructive played no role at all.
I was happy I visited Tacloban. Time is well-invested to see places which are depicted in the media in one way, but in reality are quite different. The only bad part of the visit was realizing I had to take a very small and crowded van to Biliran Island, my next stop. Those cramped, "hell on wheels" vehicles with their hard seats were not my preferred way to go anywhere in the Philippines, but alas, sometimes there was no choice...
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