Trip Down the East Coast of Leyte

Stop and Go, Stop and Go

Wednesday's schedule was an exercise in patience. Our first-thing-in-the-morning meeting with officials of the municipality of Palo had been canceled without anyone knowing. When we arrived at City Hall, we were informed that Council had decided that more members needed to be in attendance for the meeting, so we were asked to return the following Tuesday (our last full day here). We then headed to the Kusog Tacloban office, it was locked, so we then set off to find a place with Internet and to work on the computer, typing up notes and posting blog entries. Three attempts later and a trip across town, we settled at a hotel lounge in Downtown Tacloban. After lunch, we headed back to the Kusog Tacloban office. To summarize, the day involved a lot of driving and waiting and figuring out where to go next, and, later in the day, attempting to prop ourselves up at a group dinner, as the jet-lag nagged at us. This short snippet is included to give you a flavor of the frustrations that may crop up in the course of a day when you have not quite become accustomed to the daily rhythm of life, when you are used to being in more control of your schedule—and your circadian rhythm! Thus, the virtue of patience should remain forefront in the visiting volunteer’s mind, the key to staying buoyant and finding satisfaction in the small successes of the day.  

Stories from Yolanda

There are times each day when stories from Yolanda well up. At lunch on Tuesday, a guy sitting next to us piped up and asked if we were American. He was too, though Philippine-born and recently moved back after a lifetime in the States and a career in the Service. He and his wife had settled in Barugo (a town in Leyte, which we will visit on Monday the 8^th) and taken up coconut farming. They lost their trees during Yolanda and took haven for a while in Manila. They are currently there for work, though the plan is to settle back down here.

Dinner at Don Julio's with some of the Kusog crew:
starting front-left going clockwise, Dennis Delgado,

Magina Fernandez, Joji Dorado, yours truly,

Marie, Angie Lopez, and Lito Mendonez

(poor Lito got cut off in the photo)

At dinner, the Kusog Tacloban team members swapped stories from the storm. Magina Fernandez, one of the KT founders and incoming executive director, vividly retold her experience of moving from the States to Tacloban just three days before the storm hit, deciding to stay in her house in Saghakan (near the airport in Tacloban and one of the hardest hit neighborhoods), and miracuously surviving the storm surge and winds. She helped get word out early on that immediate relief was slow. Three days after the storm, she managed to intersect with a CNN reporter and to emphatically state that the situation was “worsethan hell,” getting word out about the dire situation. She is now on a mission to raise awareness of what happened and what needs to be done in the region, working to maintain the memory of the experience in the global consciousness.

On Thursday, we attended a dinner at the home of the Garile family that owns Tacloban’s leading newspaper. The Leyte Samar Daily Express. They are family friends of our host Dennis Delgado (Kusog volunteer). Mr. and Mrs. Garile shared the frightful account of their survival during Yolanda. The storm surge swept through their neighborhood on the north side of town, quickly flooding their one-story home and forcing them up onto the roof, where they bunkered behind a water storage tank, crouching. Everyone survived, though Mr. tore several tendons in his leg during the escape to the roof. Several neighbors perished. The family’s business was affected; the storm surge flooded their downtown printing operation, destroying the equipment that produced the daily newspaper. They are now printing once-a-week via a facility in the capital Manila.  

On our Thursday visit to Tanauan, we drove out to Barangay Pago to check out new resettlement homes for coastal residents. These are townhouses about 1.5 kilometeres or so from the coast. An older woman sitting under a covered area for vendors asked me sit with her. She told me of her husband, age 68, who was “hard-headed” and would not leave their home during the evacuation. He perished, and now she will leave their home by the sea permanently, once her unit at the Pago complex is finished.

Tanauan, First to Have a Plan

The resettlement community in Pago, Tanauan, Leyte.

The resettlement village in Pago is one of an array of new projects that the mayor of Tanauan got rolling in the months since Yolanda. Tanauan has been dubbed the first municipality to have a plan. Mayor Pelagio “Pel” Tecson, a former marketing executive for Proctor and Gamble’s Asia division who came to office four months before Yolanda, has brought a restless energy and resolve to jumpstarting the city’s economy with a visionary’s zeal. Drawing on government funding and partnering with private developers, Tanauan appears to be ahead of the curve in implementing recovery measures. The city is rezoning in response to the disaster; embarking on building projects, from enhanced municipal facilities to an upgraded medical facility to a new shopping mall; and endeavoring towards agricultural transformation that will boost rice production. Tanauan is the second municipality south of Tacloban, after Palo, and Yolanda hit the city hard, killing 1,252, 2.5% of the population, the greatest loss of percentage population of any municipality. The typhoon damaged key infrastructure and municipal facilities, and wiped out a major coconut oil refinery.

We met with the mayor to discuss the project with Kusog Tacloban. He kindly listened to our brief presentation, but told us that “data gathering” had taken a backseat for now, because implementing the rehabilitation plan swiftly and effectively through concrete projects was most crucial. The city got its rehabilitation rolling in December, and has thus far completed sheltering for 47 of 54 barangays and started many of the projects described above. Having not read the recovery plan, we asked the mayor to update us on rehabilitation in Tanauan. He eagerly showed us to the lobby of the municipal building where gleaming posters with maps and architectural renderings summarized projects in the areas of sheltering, livelihoods, and infrastructure. We learned that all residents within 50 meters of the coast will be relocated and that the area has been rezoned for commercial activity. Resettlement areas, such as the one in Pago, will be placed within reasonable commuting distance of seaside livelihoods. Fortunately, Tanauan had worked with GIZ on a SIMPLE-based participatory planning process to develop its latest ten year comprehensive land use plan (CLUP) (a copy of which we saw at the GIZ office); this had been updated in October before the storm and should provide a basis for sound land use decision-making.

One of a dozen or so posters at the municipal building

detailing Tanauan's rehabilitation plan.

In Philippine municipalities, the mayor is the chief executive, and the vice mayor is the head of council. Just as soon as the mayor was through with his presentation, he was whisked away to another meeting, and we were hurried upstairs to meet the vice mayor and council. After a quick and condensed review with the mayor of his vision for Tanaun, we had a more measured discussion with Vice Mayor Roland Flores and three councilors (council members) about our ideas and their needs.

Our tools were met with critique. The sections suggesting ideal situation of development relative to risks that would be much too rigid to follow on the ground said the vice mayor, and the councilwoman in charge of the housing and social services committee told us that the questionnaires we had prepared (we had since changed the format from a scorecard to a simple checklist) were too “intellectual” and needed to be more grounded in/directly linked to residents’ needs as far as shelter and livelihood—particularly now, in wake of Yolanda. And since one round of barangay-level participatory and thematic mapping had been completed and incorporated into the municipality’s CLUP, what was really needed now was localized scientific data, more finely detailed data and mapping of risks to be used in future updates of the CLUP—this over additional input from local residents. Of course, we cannot provide that sort of data (we too wish that they existed and were available), so we tried to redirect the conversation towards our involvement with Kusog Tacloban and how education and awareness among residents could serve the greater community.

The president of the barangay captains’ association, Ina Larrazabal-Gimenez, arrived during the meeting. She emphasized how off-guard everyone was taken during Yolanda and how the storm needed to be used as a lesson for local communities to prepare for the worst type and scale of disaster imaginable, given the national government’s inability to cope with the disaster that affected such a huge area. She emphasized the need to help communities up their level of preparedness as a means to reducing vulnerability so everyone could rely less on the government next time. She liked Dennis’ idea of a ‘visual educational tool’ for residents such as a video or t.v. segment. She said it would work best if reintroduced to communities through several rounds of exposure. We discussed how our other informational materials might be retooled to fit communities’ needs and how the video/film could serve as an educational piece introducing/complementing an environmental site assessment guide.

Thoughts on the Project

We’ve been reminded several times that whatever it is that we are doing needs to connect for people at a fundamental level, relating to their basic needs. Environmental assessment for the sake of conserving natural resources or even avoiding certain risks may fall flat, given the more immediate concerns of the present. This totally makes sense, of course, but then we are told that people need more education on disaster preparedness and vulnerability so that there won’t be a repeat of the deaths from Yolanda and a greater capacity to cope with the effects, we are left wondering what exactly that means or what that should look like. Simply more education on hazards so that people will evacuate when necessary? What about mitigation through land use planning? What about making sure residents understand why they are being relocated, if forced from the coast, and how where they are resettled is safer than the coastline? (We were informed that hazard risks was definitely taken into consideration for the resettlement development in Pago, Tanauan; it is in a low flood hazard zone.) I just wonder if officials aren’t underestimating the capacity of residents to understand environmental conditions and to become more involved in determining their fate, if only given some means to do so (i.e. education and the opportunity to put it to use in participatory forums for residents).

We learned from GIZ that their SIMPLE plan—Sustainable Integrated Management Planning of Local Government Ecosystems—involves barangay residents mapping out their communities thematically, so that their local knowledge and familiarity of the landscape can be incorporated into a Barangay Development Plan (BDP) and stitched together for creating municipal maps (for the municipal CLUPs), which often results in mapping of conditions in more detail than the currently available national agencies’ maps provide. This approach has been successfully implemented in Tanauan (though current officials there did not seem familiar with SIMPLE) and Javier (we’ll visit there tomorrow). Since we are working with Barangay Candahug, Dori Nuevas of GIZ told us that they still needed more of this type of mapping for local flooding in Palo. GIZ has generated this awesome SIMPLE plan, but it is up to municipalities to participate and to support barangay-level involvement. Dori emphasized how important it that the barangay-level activities be used to strengthen the barangay’s contribution to and involvement in the municipal-level planning. We agree with this, but wonder what this guide might also offer for communities in the way of planning and land use decisions when higher levels of government are not actively facilitating neighborhoods' involvement.

A View of the Coastline, a Side Excursion

Where the highway hugs the sea and hills in, between
Tolosa and Dulag.

Entering the earthship.

Inside, looking at the rice storage area.

After the visit to Tanauan, Dennis wanted to take us to the WINDSHIP Philippines, an Earthship Village project, that had cropped up in Dulag, south of Tanauan. Dennis and his brother and friends had grown up surfing down in Dulag and through his connections he had heard about this project. The ride down gave us the opportunity to see more of the damage in urban Tanauan; places along the coast where the sea is eating away at cliffside roads; swaths of inland areas where coconut trees were felled by Yolanda and coconut lumber production has popped up everywhere; and a convoy of Korean soldiers pulled off at a barangay hall running some sort of event with residents (there is a notable presence of Korean military personnel working on recovery in the area). We finally made it to the earthship via several backcountry roads and found it in the midst of coconut trees next to the local schoolhouse. (These "radically sustainable" structures are made of upcycled tires, glass, and concrete, and are covered in earthen materials.) No one that we spoke with seemed exactly sure how it got there or why it was in that exact place, but evidently volunteers who had come to the barangay after Yolanda erected it within 10 days (we looked it up later). The roofing is not quite complete, but there are two chambers that serve as storage space (rice was drying inside of one), and eventually it is intended to serve a multifunctional community space. We met a volunteer yoga instructor and basketball coach who invited us back to a community festival over the weekend. We’ll have to see what the weekend holds, but our free schedule on Sunday might allow us to return!  

Trevor