Catastrophic madness

A recent trip to Leyte provided me with the opportunity to witness, with my own eyes, how money that should have gone to rehabilitate the province in the aftermath of Yolanda is being misused, for reasons that I should be clear to most people.

 Let me qualify, however, that my first-hand observation is limited to what I saw as I traveled back and forth on the road linking Ormoc to Tacloban, the capital. But I am confident that what I saw, limited though it may have been, was too uniform that it may as well speak for the entire devastated area.

Let me talk about schools first, because the new schoolyear is just around the corner and classes are set to begin again. Along the roughly 120-kilometer stretch of highway between Ormoc and Tacloban can be found dozens of public schools. In varying degrees, not a school was spared Yolanda's wrath.

Yet for all the talk by government, especially by the unstraightforward education secretary, not a school -- I repeat, not a school -- has completely restored roofs. In every school that I saw, there was always a building or two that had to make do with blue-colored tarpaulins as shield from the elements.

In schools that suffered more destruction than others, meaning buildings have been so badly compromised they have to be condemned and abandoned, no new constructions have been noted. In place of new constructions, what cannot escape notice are the gray "half-moon" huts occupying the school grounds to serve as classrooms.

These "half-moon" huts have markings on them. Upon closer scrutiny, the markings say the structures were donated or provided by the Tzu Chi Taiwanese Buddhist Foundation. That these structures are everywhere begs the question -- so where is our own government?

Well, it would be grossly unfair to say the government is nowhere. I cannot imagine what the scenario would have been if it had not been there. But it would be safe to say the government is clearly missing in many areas where it should be, areas that have been left to the tender mercies of foreign benevolence.

To this day, six months after Yolanda, many hotels in Tacloban are still entirely being occupied by UN and foreign humanitarian organizations. It is heart-tugging to realize how so many foreigners have stuck it out with Yolanda's victims, staying on make sure they are ready to stand back on their feet.

But I can cite one very clear example of where our very own government should not be. Along certain stretches of highway, one can see hordes of women hunched over by the roadsides, blunt weeding instruments in their hands, clearly intent on doing away with the overgrowth to achieve a manicured look for the grass.

What these hordes of women were doing was to clean and beautify the roadsides. Nothing wrong with that except that rehabilitation and not beautification should be the call of the hour. Leyte can beautify later. It needs to get back on its feet first.

But worse than this misplaced priority is the fact that these hordes of women are not the volunteers that many of the foreigners are. From asking around, I learned that each of these women is getting paid P250 per day to do the beautifying.

Now I do not begrudge these women their pay. Whatever money is earned goes a long way in these trying times. My beef is that, for such "good money," they are doing work that is absolutely useless at this time. If this government program is a take on what Tzu Chi did earlier, it is a very poor and stupid copy indeed.

Tzu Chi, in the days after Yolanda, embarked on a meaningful and practical initiative called "cash-for-work." With Tacloban in ruins and government discombobulated, the Taiwanese paid people to clean up their own communities. This not only speeded up normalcy, it allowed people to earn badly-needed cash.

But trust our ever-reliable government. Instead of paying people P250 a day to, say, help speed up the restoration or reconstruction of schoolbuildings, it instead decided to throw money away on such non-pressing endeavors as trimming the roadside grass. What a catastrophic madness.