Crossroad

WORDS ARE NOT ENOUGH Tacloban after Yolanda

“Malinaw naman ang sistema dito. Kaya lamang malaki talaga ang pangangailangan. 
Kahit galon-galon ang inihahanda, dahil sa lakas nitong si Yolanda 
ang pangangailangan ay parang naging swimming pool,” 

the Department of Interior and Local Government Secretary said 
over Radyo Inquirer 990AM

THE PHILIPPINE GOVERNMENT IS AT a crossroad. And to no fault of its own, it came at the expense of probably the worst typhoon ever to hit the land. Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) will go down in history as the single most defining moment for a Philippine administration so far. So enormous was the devastation that the Aquino government, at some point, responded with, "Saan kami nag-kulang?" after receiving a storm of complaints on the ground and on social media by being slow in responding to those who were severely affected. And to make matters worse, even its Interior Secretary was at the loss for words when he said that the need of the moment is steadily becoming like a huge "swimming pool".

Sounds strange, isn’t it? But at the moment I don't exactly know where to place that analogy, despite having a lot of dead bodies floating around. Perhaps the Interior Secretary is already thinking about a vacation after almost a week of locating the corpses. I can only imagine the stress, the sleepless nights, and the mountain of garbage out there, but to stress out the idea of a swimming pool as a measuring stick for its enormous need is definitely a no-brainer. That's way too small for a super typhoon to come up with.

Many say that this will ultimately define Aquino's presidency. His response to it, and even his personal resolve to rise up from the rubble of Yolanda, will ultimately shape his legacy as the chief executive of a beleaguered nation following a strong typhoon. P-Noy, however, hours after Yolanda hit landfall, declared the nation in a state of calamity. That would have been a comfortable position after he personally examined Leyte and saw the extent of Yolanda’s wrath, but after appearing on national TV twice, the last being a mere report of the government's intent and itinerary in Tacloban and somewhere else, P-Noy somehow went out of circulation, as stories after stories of loss and grief gripped Malacañang into a standstill.

And as a result, P-Noy allegedly blamed the Local Government Units (LGUs) for responding snail-like against a seasick (not swimming pool) of rubble and rage. He even walked out in one of those meetings, perhaps signifying his frustration to the LGUs out of “doing nothing” on the ground. The pressure was (and is, still) mounting and P-Noy somehow opted out just to take a breather. It was a difficult situation: the press was out there, the survivors were clamoring for some food, water and a place to stay, the body bags were in demand, another tropical depression looming in the horizon, the Bohol earthquake still a concern, and Misuari is still at large. P-Noy felt like an old man that day: weak, helpless, sensitive.

It would take years before Tacloban and the rest of those affected to begin a new life. We understand that what happened in Visayas has to have that sustained help for it to recover immediately from its utter ruin, but the Philippine government cannot afford to sustain that stimulus for a very long time. If these people are going to be rescued from the mud and mire of Yolanda, they have to be rescued now, not later, while there's still some help (and tax-free at that).

Even the Department of Health (DOH) admitted recently that this is going to be the biggest aid (money, they say) they have received as far as responding to a calamity is concerned. Not that I doubt their capacity, alongside the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), two main agencies tasked to look after the disbursement of these funds, but that this aid will again suffer the strains of some self-serving interests (like what happened to those relief goods in DSWD Davao for those Pablo victims) and could not at all make a full impact on the ground. I hope history will not repeat itself. But as it is, barely a week after Yolanda went out of control; the inevitable happened.

CNN's Anderson Cooper shared some of his thoughts while in Tacloban five days after that fateful landfall, “You would expect perhaps to see a feeding center that had been set up 5 days after the storm. We haven’t seen that, certainly not in this area. Some food is being brought to people here at the airport, some water being distributed but these are very, very difficult conditions for the people here on the ground and it’s not clear how much longer it can continue like this. Something’s got to give," he said.

"There is no real evidence of organized recovery of relief. It is demolition not a construction job here. I have not seen a large Philippine military presence out around here. The search and rescue never materialized. There are mothers searching for their children, it is a sickening sight five days later," he later added on his Twitter account. This, and a host of other assessments from Cooper, however, angered some of us, including, of course, the Interior Secretary's wife, who also happens to be an anchor of a Philippine news channel.

She said Cooper doesn't know what he's talking about (that her husband is talking about a swimming pool and not a feeding center). But I can go as far as Tacloban if she wants me to. Her statement was so loaded I don't even know how to respond to it, all I know is that it is so hard to argue with someone who is not even on the scene unlike Cooper (at least from the time this issue came out). If she's thinking about the potential harm of those statements to the image of the country, or simply protecting the welfare of those survivors (and her husband, too), then there must be something wrong with the way things are happening in this country, in the same way that the needs of those survivors is as big as a swimming pool?

There was some swimming a few days before that in a surging sea water, nine feet tall. We were so busy then, trying very hard to accept Napoles' responses, unmindful of a super typhoon hovering across the eastern seaboard, until it finally wreaked havoc and exposed the bitter part of our loss, like we don't know exactly what we're talking.

Maybe the Interior Secretary was thinking about the deep end of that pool, mostly 8 to 10 feet high, that those gallons had to fill. But it sounds so morbid to say something like that under the circumstances. Maybe he's just containing the situation by using a pool instead of a sea. Or maybe he finds it overwhelming to be able to go through the process of cleaning up the whole nine yards of dead and debris, as deep as a swimming pool piling upside down. Unfortunately for him, it came out dangling on the wire. It's hard to put up a sensible response sometimes when you're tired, stressed out, and under pressure in front of that huddled mess. Perhaps that's just one of the signs really that you're at a crossroad; you simply don't know what you're talking about.   

photo: csmonitor.com