Long-term commitment

A full month after Super Typhoon Yolanda unleashed her fury in the Visayas, the difficult task of rebuilding has started.

I’m not sure if we can describe it as a slow start. The government may be taking its sweet time, with reconstruction bogged down in specifying the powers, functions and limitations of “rehabilitation czar” Panfilo Lacson.

But the victims themselves are in a hurry to get back on their feet. Yesterday I returned to Ormoc, Leyte, and also visited Tacloban with the Australians. The Ormoc airport arrival lounge looks a bit better from when I visited two weeks ago, although the facility is still surrounded by concrete rubble and fallen trees.

In Barangay Libertad, the elementary school reopened last Monday, with a lot of help from the Aussies, although fewer than half of the 500 students have returned to their classes.

Across the street a woman invited me into her house, which survived the typhoon but lost its roof. GI sheets for roofing are in short supply, she told me, and they were waiting for tarpaulin from aid donations.

A resident of Manila, the woman was vacationing with relatives when Yolanda struck. Now she intends to stay until after the Christmas holidays to help in the rebuilding. Reconstruction was providing jobs, she said, and food supplies were being restored.

In Tacloban, a similar guarded optimism is evident. As we disembarked from the Australian Air Force’s C-130 Hercules transport plane, local workers clearing trees and rubble merrily raised their hands and posed with wide grins when I aimed my camera at them.

Barangay official Lolita Candaza told me they could again buy cooking gas but automotive fuel was still in short supply. Power and water supplies were intermittent. She and her companions complained that they all had no working mobile phone because they could not charge the devices.

I asked her about the absence of fishing boats in the bay. She said the few people whose boats survived stopped fishing because corpses were still being found floating in the water and people refused to buy fish.

Her house was destroyed and her husband Rogelio, 51, has lost his livelihood as a tuba or coconut wine maker. But things would get better, Candaza assured me, and they have no plans of leaving their city.

Candaza expressed her optimism over and over, like a mantra, as if repetition would ensure that it would come true. Maybe this helps in restarting lives.

In this the Philippines is fortunate to have a lot of help from friends around the world, who are sending high-level representatives to assess how they can improve their assistance.

* * *

Yesterday our flight from Villamor Airbase to Tacloban was delayed for an impromptu meeting between Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera. The two found out they would be visiting Tacloban on the same day and taking off from Villamor within minutes of each other, and decided to chat.

Bishop flew in for a brief visit to see the disaster zones, accompanied by their amiable Ambassador Bill Tweddell, and assess their government’s aid response. Onodera discussed regional tensions (mostly linked to China) with Philippine officials, and also visited the disaster areas yesterday on his military’s own C-130.

The World Bank’s regional vice president for the Asia-Pacific, Axel van Trotsenburg, was also in Manila last week for a quick visit to assess the disaster situation.

Top-level international visitors are also expected soon, I was told by reliable sources.

Van Trotsenburg, the Aussies and the rest of the international community have a common message as the first month since Yolanda was marked yesterday: disaster victims can rest assured that the foreign aid is for the long-term.

“We will ensure that we will continue to be supportive,” Bishop told Filipinos in a field hospital set up by his compatriots in San Jose, Tacloban. “We stand with you. We understand there is a long road ahead. Australia and your friends won’t let you down.”

Her country has about 500 defense personnel currently in the Philippines, doing humanitarian work including extensive medical assistance.

Foreigners also have a common observation in the disaster areas: the victims are resilient, cheerful in the face of adversity, and driven to restart their lives ASAP.

* * *

Van Trotsenburg, whose World Bank Group has committed $1 billion to the relief and reconstruction effort, said the victims were “taking their fate in their hands.”

“There’s a lot of entrepreneurial spirit and you want to capture that,” he said. “You also have to capture all the goodwill of the people.”

The WB has approved a $500-million quick-disbursing budget support to be made available to the government. The target beneficiaries are community-driven priority investment and livelihood projects such as school reconstruction and the purchase of fishing boats.

Van Trotsenburg told me in Manila last week that the review of the proposed loan facility was approved by the WB board in record time, with the usual process cut by about 95 percent.

WB employees in Washington also launched a fund-raising campaign among themselves, with the individual donations amounting to $110,000 so far.

Van Trotsenburg noted that soon the cameras would leave the disaster areas “but the hard work will still be there.”

“The harsh reality is that the reconstruction will take more than a year and in some areas more than a couple of years,” he told me. “We are there for the long term. When things are tough we will still be there.”

It helps that many victims aren’t sitting around waiting for help. In Ormoc and Tacloban, I counted only a handful of children who begged for alms. And they weren’t persistent like the beggars in Metro Manila.

“I think it is very important for the people that they don’t feel abandoned… to know that people care,” Van Trotsenburg said. “You cannot let them down.”