Building back slowly

The new houses are in neat rows and there is some landscaping, but you can tell that the dwellings can be easily blown away by 200-kph winds. And there are still too many tent shelters.

Like many communities in this archipelago, there is also a scenic ocean view in almost all the areas ravaged on Nov. 8 last year by Super Typhoon Yolanda. The sea, when calm, is wonderfully soothing and a source of livelihood for millions of Filipinos. But the proximity of the sea also means there will always be the threat of another killer storm surge that can sweep away everything up to several kilometers inland.

Those new shelters we see in the typhoon-hit areas of Leyte and Samar look better than the fishermen’s huts that lined the coastal communities before they were blown away by Yolanda. But they’re obviously not going to be as disaster-resilient as we hope if another super typhoon comes barreling across the Visayas.

Not that there is any coastal community in this country that is disaster-resilient, in the global warming-era meaning of the phrase. But because disaster resilience and “building back better” became catchphrases of the post-Yolanda effort, Pinoys want to see what these mean exactly, in the communities now taking shape in the typhoon zones.

Residents particularly in Tacloban, whose mayor was famously reminded in their hour of dire need that he is a Romualdez and not an Aquino, are complaining that government aid has been disappointing. But the approaching visit of Pope Francis seems to have given renewed urgency to the rehabilitation effort. Several people in Metro Manila have told me that their relatives in Leyte have been given P10,000 in cash and some materials to build their own homes ASAP.

The pace of the rebuilding, it seems, has become a matter of perspective. Those who see a glass half-empty remember Tacloban in its days as a prosperous port city and the other areas lush with coconut plantations and with thriving fishing communities. They see full recovery still a long way off, with the reconstruction off to a slow, plodding start. They see poverty all around, driving women to prostitution and forcing residents to leave the disaster zones to find jobs – any job – elsewhere.

In Metro Manila there are still women and children from the typhoon areas offering to work as househelp if only to be assured of shelter and regular meals.

Commercial activity is back in Tacloban, but you hear complaints from those who can’t expand their operations because basic services including electricity have not been fully restored and supply chains remain disrupted.

People continue to dig up the remains of victims, and many may never be identified. Residents remember the unfortunate decision of the national government to stop the official count, which also gave low priority to identifying remains that were recovered. The inevitable suspicion was that President Aquino, who had given marching orders to his team to work for zero casualties during disasters, was annoyed by the prospect that the death count could actually hit 10,000, as predicted by rescue workers and announced by the Eastern Visayas police commander, who was promptly sacked.

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Those who see a glass half-full, on the other hand, compare the pace of recovery with those in other countries that have seen severe devastation from natural calamities. It’s not encouraging to be compared with Haiti, but that’s what some aid agencies point out: reconstruction in that earthquake-hit country is also taking years.

The optimists also tend to remember the disaster areas in the immediate aftermath of Yolanda, and see the improvements since then, with residents eagerly rebuilding their lives. They are touched by the resilience of the typical Pinoy, fatalistic in the face of nature’s fury, laughing to ease pain.

Optimists also take comfort in the continuing assistance from the international community. The World Bank, Asian Development Bank and United Nations agencies have committed billions in various forms of aid. US, European, Japanese and Australian agencies, the international Humanitarian Country Team and UN agencies have also committed to sustain aid programs. South Korean soldiers are still in Eastern Visayas, in their biggest-ever overseas deployment for disaster aid. Even the Chinese government has a significant aid program in place, providing it with no fanfare.

I flew on a military plane over Samar and Leyte shortly after the typhoon, starting at Guiuan in Eastern Samar where Yolanda made landfall. From the air the islands of the two provinces looked desolate, so flattened by Yolanda’s fury that the sea seemed capable of swallowing them up entirely at high tide. Experts have said it would take at least two years for the coconut plantations to recover and become commercially viable.

Preparing to fly back to Manila in the evening during my first visit, I could see in the darkness long lines of people, waiting in the open for food rations and their turn to be airlifted out of their communities. There were children of all ages, a number of them orphaned. Everything was down: electricity, water, telecommunications, sanitation facilities.

Today, seeing shelters with four walls and a roof securely attached to them, and greenery peeking out of the mud can encourage hope.

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Despite the positive developments, however, certain aid officials have expressed frustration to me over the slow mobilization of resources.

There’s a lot that’s available but stuck in circuitous bureaucratic requirements that are supposed to prevent fund misuse. A common comment from exasperated aid officials is that the cure should not be worse than the disease. Some observe that micromanagement ostensibly in an effort to institutionalize global best practices in fund disbursements is turning into mismanagement compounded by political feuds.

Then there’s the question of how disaster-resilient communities can be, particularly marginalized ones, in an archipelago of 7,100 islands lying along the Pacific Ring of Fire.

These communities cannot afford the flood-resilient new port development in the German city of Hamburg, for example, which involves construction of a network of pontoons and elevated public walkways as well as buildings constructed several meters above the water level, with sliding flood barrier windows at the base level.

Fishing communities aren’t going to give up their livelihood and they aren’t going to move too far away from the water. Maybe barriers to break the impact of powerful waves can be built near coastal communities.

Building back better is a fine objective, but it’s moving slowly. A year after Yolanda, the communities that were left in ruins are still as vulnerable as ever.