| Hope Rises From the Ruins | ||||||||||||||||
| By Qiu Shu-juan Translated by Tang Yau-yang Photos by Hsiao Yiu-hwa | ||||||||||||||||
When Tzu Chi volunteers invited them to clean up their neighborhoods through a work relief program initiated by the charity foundation, they eagerly responded. At the peak of the program, more than 30,000 people pitched in in a single day. Each worker got paid at the end of the day. Over the course of 19 days, the program paid almost 300,000 daily wages. Some participants worked several days—they liked doing it. With stronger hope in their hearts, residents of Tacloban worked harder to rebuild their neighborhoods. Typhoon Haiyan hit the central Philippines on November 8, 2013. It was the deadliest cyclone on record in the nation. Thousands of people perished. One of the most powerful typhoons ever observed, it also destroyed countless buildings and homes. Many survivors lost practically all they had. Shortages of potable water, food, and shelter were severe. Downed power lines left many locales without electricity. Tacloban, the capital of the province of Leyte, was hard hit. This tropical city is hot and rainy all year round, but November is actually one of the wettest months. The sun can scorch the area in the morning, but heavy rains soak it in the afternoon. Following the typhoon, the over-abundant precipitation made the garbage-filled streets even muddier and dirtier. The major thoroughfares in Tacloban were still strewn with debris even two weeks after the disaster hit. Fallen trees, cars, discarded furniture, and other junk littered the area—in some places piled up as high as a two-story building. Hidden among the garbage were dead bodies, as well as the carcasses of animals that had perished in the disaster. Their decay added a repulsive stench to the air and created a sense of urgency to clean up before an epidemic broke out.
Anibong Tacloban sits across the San Juanico Strait from Samar Province to the east. Its port is a local commercial hub which handles cargo containers traveling to and from Manila, Cebu, and Cagayen de Oro. The port and the surrounding area offered jobs, which attracted many poor people from out of town. In the area of Anibong, they used simple materials such as wood planks, galvanized metal sheets, tarps, or even palm tree trunks and leaves to improvise illegal, rudimentary living quarters along shoreline dikes. The dwellings added a confusing and unsightly element to the landscape. When Haiyan hit, those shacks proved utterly incapable of providing any protection for their occupants against the winds and tides. Row upon row of them collapsed and were laid waste along the shore, making the place look like a garbage dump. It’s no surprise the storm was able to destroy the shanties—even a two-story public market building and a nearby supermarket beside the port took a heavy blow from the disaster. Having nowhere else to go, surviving shack dwellers took shelter in the deserted market and supermarket, where they marked their living spaces with blankets and tarps. There were piles of debris everywhere after the disaster, but local governments were too severely short-handed to clear them away; most of their employees were themselves casualties or survivors of the disaster. The city of Tacloban had a staff of 2,250, but fewer than 60 people reported to work on the eighth day after the disaster.
When Tzu Chi volunteers arrived in Anibong, they saw people sitting in muddy surroundings, their eyes devoid of hope. Behind them, mounds of garbage and debris stretched for several kilometers. The first priority of the volunteers was to get the local communities back to normalcy by making the streets passable and to clear the people’s living environments of garbage and debris. That effort could prevent an outbreak of disease and also help lead to the revival of the local economy. Lin Guo-rong (林國榮), a long-time Tzu Chi volunteer from Manila, indicated that most typhoon victims in Tacloban worked in fishing-related jobs or grew coconuts or rice. They often scraped by on about 140 pesos (US$3) a day. Ramel Casiong, 57, a container truck driver, lived in Anibong. He said that many local residents worked as fishermen, and some made a living as dock workers. Some of the dock workers were paid a flat rate, such as a hundred pesos an hour. Others were paid based on the amount of freight handled, such as a peso per piece of freight. Either way, they could earn a minimal living—but only if they had work to do. As a driver, in contrast, Casiong used to earn 500 pesos a day, a very respectable sum. However, regardless of past earning power, everyone’s possessions had disappeared in the disaster. Under those circumstances, Casiong was doing as badly as everyone else. In the days after the disaster, at the same time that nobody had much income and everybody was at their most vulnerable, the scarcity of goods and services caused prices to shoot through the roof. The severe inflation made the tough lives of the victims all the more unbearable. They needed some financial aid.
What better way to help people in the disaster area than to start a cash-for-work program? Such a program could help clear away the garbage while putting some money in the pockets of the victims and helping them reestablish themselves. It was for these reasons that the Tzu Chi Foundation decided to sponsor a large-scale work relief program.
Work relief to the rescue Typhoon Haiyan left a swath of destruction in much of Tacloban; many neighborhoods could have benefited from a cash-for-work program like this. How did the foundation determine which communities should be offered the program? Alfredo Li (李偉嵩), Tzu Chi Philippines CEO, and Michael Siao (蔡昇航), a volunteer and veteran work relief planner and leader, surveyed the disaster area for an ideal site to set up a staging area, and they settled on Leyte Progressive High School in Anibong. The school was ideal because it was in a neighborhood that needed a good cleanup, the neighborhood had plenty of potential workers, and the school offered plenty of space where a great number of people could assemble. The work relief program started at the storm-damaged school on November 20, 2013. Li and Siao led participants to clean up the campus, and they set up the headquarters for the cash-for-work program there. Then they pulled on rain boots and sloshed through the muddy alleyways in the neighborhood, using megaphones to call on people to come out and join the event. The first day, 611 people turned out for work. After a day of cleaning up their neighborhood, they received cash in hand for their labor. Their surroundings looked better and they got cool cash for their efforts; it seemed like a good deal.
The minimum wage in Tacloban was 260 pesos a day, or about US$6. The Tzu Chi work relief program offered 500 pesos, about US$11, for a day’s work. Some of the first workers originally had their doubts about such a good bargain, and they wondered if they really would get money for cleaning up their own community. Now, cash in hand and all doubts dispelled, they went home and spread the news. The next day, 2,310 people showed up at the high school. The volunteers welcomed them all and encouraged them to invite more relatives and friends to join in. Tzu Chi started a second site for the project that same day at Anibong Elementary School. At the end of the day, 2,688 Taclobanians, including those at Leyte Progressive, each went home 500 pesos richer. Every participant was assigned to a work team; no one who wanted to work was turned away. A person could work multiple days if he or she so chose, and many did. On day three, 4,500 people gathered to work at Leyte Progressive and 1,610 at the Anibong school. After helping to lead a pre-work rally in which he gave the participants a pep talk and shared the Tzu Chi ideals, Michael Siao rushed off to organize a third staging area for the project. A total of 6,580 participants reported to the three sites that day. By the end of the fourth day, the program had paid out 10,949 daily wages—a total of 5,474,500 pesos (US$122,000) that local residents could spend to improve their lives and help revive their economy. Though that was an impressive group of people and, by local standards, a respectable sum, it wasn’t enough given the vastness of the disaster zone. Tzu Chi volunteers subsequently started five more new sites. As the work areas grew, so did the number of participants. A record 31,587 people worked in a single day, on the 14th day. From November 20 to December 8, the work relief program paid 287,170 daily wages. Some people undoubtedly were paid multiple times, once for each day they worked. Still, these were impressive attendance numbers, especially considering the population of Tacloban—220,000 people. In those 19 days, the program paid out 143,585,000 pesos. That was a cash infusion of about 3.22 million American dollars to people who would spend much of their earnings to help reestablish themselves after the disaster. That money was also a shot in the arm for local peddlers, shopkeepers, and craftsmen, even if they themselves did not participate in the work relief program. The multiplier effect of that seed money rippled out far and wide to touch and improve the lives of many more people.
Morning rallies Though Alfredo Li was born in Southern Leyte Province, he moved away when he was in elementary school. Michael Siao grew up in Manila. As a result, Tacloban was basically a strange place to both of them; even the languages were quite different. In these unfamiliar surroundings, it would have been a big challenge for them to lead such large groups of workers if it were not for their prior experience. Typhoon Ketsana badly trounced Marikina, a Manila suburb, in September 2009, and Typhoon Saola hit Rizal Province in July 2012. Li and Siao organized and led work-relief projects after both of those typhoons. Those experiences helped prepare them for the undertaking they would start in Tacloban. After they had convinced people to take part in the cash-for-work program, the first thing that they needed to change was the behavior of the participants. It was a very large crowd and, like most crowds anywhere, very disorganized. In a disorganized disaster relief distribution, people tend to jockey for position close to the distribution goods so they won’t go home empty-handed. This is a scene that volunteers try to avoid. Volunteer Kalam Chan’s (陳嘉琳) message blasted out of the loudspeakers: “We’re Tzu Chi volunteers. We don’t know any of you folks personally, so why are we here today? We’re here because Master Cheng Yen couldn’t bear to see you suffer.” The crowd became a little quieter. Chan continued: “Why are we asking you to assemble, line up, and sit quietly on the ground? It’s because we want you to settle down so we can register you. We don’t want to miss any of you, not even one. We want to keep this cash-for-work program going. If you follow the rules, we’ll be able to proceed; otherwise, we can’t.” When Chan finished speaking, the crowd was silent. After the participants had lined up, ten to a group behind a leader, Li and Siao led group activities to cheer up the crowd. Then they shared the Master’s teachings and Tzu Chi ideals with them and led them in singing “One Family” with accompanying hand gestures. They wanted the participants to know and to feel that they were all part of a large extended family. They encouraged them to work with each other in unison to accomplish the mission of community cleanup. A prayer—for everyone’s families, for the land, for a brighter future—followed. When that was finished, participants filed out in an orderly fashion to their designated areas to start cleaning up.
On the street Mountains of debris stood alongside or right in the middle of muddy streets and alleyways. In the face of so much stuff to be removed, the workers had little more than their bare hands, enthusiasm, and ingenuity to do the job. Without the luxury of proper tools, they turned their creativity loose and improvised the best they could. To clear away the garbage and to haul objects to collection points, participants used buckets, baskets, pieces of galvanized sheet metal, garbage can lids, or even abandoned refrigerators… just about anything that could help boost their productivity.
Some made large-capacity garbage haulers by tying ropes on opposite corners of large metal sheets to act as looped handles. Two persons would hold the rope handles and pull a sheet around onto which other people could pile the rubble that they had picked up. When the sheet was filled up, the duo would pull the load to a designated collection point, dump out the contents, and return to pick up more rubbish. The work locations, quiet before the cleanup program started, became very animated and noisy. People bustled around, each tending to their work. Ramel Casiong, the former container truck driver, also joined the program. He, his family, and their neighbors hauled wood boards out of their collapsed houses into the street. They also cleared the roadway, returning it to its former serviceable state. Casiong pointed at a pile of wood by the dike and said that it had been his home, a home that he would never live in again. Casiong was out working when the typhoon warning was announced, so his boss told him to go home. He arrived home in the early morning hours of November 8. They received the evacuation order when he was having breakfast with his family, at around four o’clock. The water was already rising when they got to their front door—there was no time to take anything from the house. They hurried to a Buddhist temple on higher ground across from their home. Rough winds whipped up 6-meter (20-foot) waves as Casiong and others looked out in horror from inside the temple. They ran up to the third floor. From the balcony there, they saw storm waves washing 20- and 40-foot cargo containers from the nearby harbor into their neighborhood. The containers knocked down one house after another—their homes—right in front of their eyes, and the waves continued to push towards them. Luckily the waves started to recede after a container knocked down the gate of the temple. It was just three meters (ten feet) short of hitting the temple itself. Casiong recalled the event with gratitude, knowing that he might not have survived if the waves had not pulled back. Because of that close call, he slept restlessly in the nights that followed. The neighborhood was dotted with cargo containers in the aftermath of the storm. Though quite bulky, those containers were actually quite small compared to the five container ships, each thousands of tons, that Haiyan had also brought and left inland. Man-made objects, however big, are simply no match against natural forces. Casiong and his family have taken shelter at the temple since then. He said that the ships were loaded with rice and the containers were packed with clothing when surviving residents inspected them after the typhoon. Those things, however, were mostly taken by survivors, so the vessels and containers were all but gutted. He got some rice that had been soaked in sea water. His family ate that for two days before eating the three kilograms (6.6 pounds) of rice that the Red Cross had given them. The family had exhausted all their rice when he heard from the village head about the Tzu Chi work relief program. He started on the very first day and worked five days. He received 2,500 pesos for his efforts. “We lived on canned food after the typhoon. The pay has enabled us to buy other food. We’ll save the rest of the money to rebuild our house.” Realyn Portillo, 28, lived even closer to the sea than Casiong’s family. Her husband drove a cycle rickshaw for hire. He could not find work after the typhoon, so the couple took part in the work relief program for five days. On the third day, after finishing the day’s work for the cleanup project, they used the money they had earned to open a small grocery store at their home by the sea, selling things like instant coffee, biscuits, candy, eggs, combs and hairpins. They both returned to work on the relief project the next morning for the fourth day of work, and again the fifth day. Each day after getting off from work there, they opened their store for business. Each day they took in 700 pesos. The relief project had worked as intended as far as Portillo and her husband were concerned: The project had helped them get on their feet again. Moreover, her husband resumed his pedicab service on December 6. They could now support themselves and their family. “We’re really happy that Tzu Chi started this initiative here,” Portillo said. “Otherwise, I can’t imagine how we could have made it.”
Open for business Residents working in the cash-for-work project took garbage from narrow alleyways out to designated locations beside larger roadways. Tzu Chi then sent out earthmoving equipment to haul the garbage to locations that the city government had specified. Forty dump trucks, seven front loaders, and one excavator worked alongside the tens of thousands of people in this joint cleanup effort. Some of the machinery was rented by Tzu Chi, some was provided by the city, and some was shipped to Tacloban from the city of Surigao in Mindanao Province through arrangements by volunteer Yang Guo-ying (楊國英). Yang borrowed the equipment from a friend who was in the nickel mining business. It was the off season for this friend, so he graciously loaned 25 dump trucks, two front loaders, and one excavator to Yang free of charge. The friend even loaned the equipment operators and their backups, whose work Tzu Chi paid for. The alleyways, too narrow for heavy machinery to enter, were just right for people to get in and clear out the garbage. On the other hand, the big piles of garbage on the thoroughfares—too voluminous and heavy to be moved long distances by hand—were perfect for earthmoving equipment. The equipment operators efficiently loaded and hauled the garbage away to sites designated by the city. It was a nice combination of human beings and heavy equipment for the cleanup project. Divided, neither group alone could have done the job completely; united, their efforts gradually removed debris, big and small, from the neighborhoods, which slowly but surely became serviceable and livable again. The frequent rains in the area turned out to be a big help as well. They cleaned away the mud and dirt that remained in the streets after the garbage had been cleared away. Roadways therefore became as clean as on any ordinary day, a good sign of the return to normalcy. Other signs of normalcy were also popping up here and there. Burgos Street, two blocks from Leyte Progressive High School, was home to many stores that showed signs of damage by Typhoon Haiyan, as well as by looters. Most of them were forced to close after the storm. Five days after the cash-for-work program started, peddlers started opening up one stall after another again, selling things like nails, mosquito coils, soy sauce, vegetables, fruit, clothing, kerosene lamps, and matches. Thelma Saleda used to have a vegetable stall in the public market before it was destroyed by Haiyan. With the Tzu Chi work relief program in motion, she observed that people were getting money and buying things, so she hurried and put up a new stall on Burgos Street. The typhoon destroyed the house where she and her son lived, and she said that she was making less money from the roadside stall than she had at the public market. However, she was still grateful to the foundation for the cash-for-work program, in which her grandson worked three days. He earned enough money to pay for his own schoolbooks, tuition and uniform. Every bit helped. “The Tzu Chi program has really helped a great deal,” she said. “If people don’t have money, they can’t buy things.” The desire and the means to buy things are the parents of commerce. That phenomenon was well illustrated by the cash-for-work program. Jun Awa-Ao used to be a construction worker. He noticed the vigorous commerce that had sprung up in the neighborhood, so he also started his own stall. “I used to get 250 pesos a day in construction, but here I get 2,000 pesos a day selling things,” he said. Buyers also attracted shop owners who had fled the scene after the typhoon back to Burgos Street to restart their businesses. One of them attributed the flourishing commerce there to Tzu Chi. “We reopened five days ago, and I tell people all the time about the good that Tzu Chi has done.” Huang Cai Lizhen (黃蔡麗珍) ran a canvas store there. On a banner above the entrance of the store were great big letters that spelled, “Now Open to Serve You!” She told us in fluent Chinese that it was the Tzu Chi cleanup initiative that enabled her to reopen her store.
Minds of goodness Tacloban City Administrator Tecson John Lim (林福益) commented that Tzu Chi not only gave the area an infusion of cash to help feed the participants and their families, but also instilled in them the concepts of being good people and using money wisely. Those who got paid for their cleanup work were repeatedly urged to be honest, and to not spend their wages on smoking or drinking. Many of them apparently followed the advice. The noise and liveliness of reconstruction everywhere was proof positive that those people were not wasting money on vices. They also heeded the admonition to be honest. “I’ve heard that some people returned the wages that they’d received from Tzu Chi because they hadn’t really done the work and thus hadn’t really earned the money,” Lim said. “I was really happy to hear those reports.” The principles that volunteers had inculcated in the minds of the project participants before they set out for cleanup work had worked as intended. The early morning pre-work rallies did have their value. There is a saying in the Philippines that goes: Give a poor man a hammer and some nails, and he will build himself a home. After the disaster, stalls selling nails were doing brisk business. When people had money, they could afford to buy building materials and tools such as hammers, nails, and galvanized metal sheets. Those things and wooden boards or planks that they either purchased or salvaged from the debris were all they needed to start putting their homes together again. No wonder that whenever Tzu Chi volunteers went into the disaster area, they were almost always greeted by the local residents with chants like, “Tzu Chi! Tzu Chi! Go! Go! Go!” and “Tzu Chi! Tzu Chi! Thank you!” Tacloban Mayor Alfred Romualdez also expressed his gratitude to the foundation. He pointed out that the typhoon had left city employees exhausted, and though he was the mayor of the city, he did not have total control of the situation nor could he better manage public security. He had been getting by with just five hours of sleep a day, busily helping his city cope with the multitudes of pressing issues in the wake of the disaster. “The large-scale assistance from Tzu Chi has had a profound impact. We’re most grateful to Tzu Chi,” he said. “We didn’t expect that those volunteers would get here so quickly,” said City Administrator Lim. “They reached our city six days after the disaster struck. They calmed our citizens down and encouraged them to get out of their homes and do things. Most significantly, they have given them confidence and hope.” Four o’clock in the afternoon was quitting time for the cleanup workers. At that time, everyone assembled at the same staging area where they had gathered that morning before they set out to work. These typhoon survivors were happy and smiling, their eyes no longer dull, their shoulders no longer drooping. Some of them even danced to the music that Tzu Chi volunteers were playing. The morning and evening assemblies had become occasions where local workers shared their joy and sorrow with the volunteers. As they poured out the worries that had beleaguered them after the typhoon, they also gradually opened their hearts to happiness. Many of them were very forthcoming in expressing their gratitude to Tzu Chi. They drew pictures, wrote letters, made posters, or held up placards to ensure that their thanks would reach the volunteers.
Many of them even made small donations to the foundation. They dropped their loose coins into coin banks at the assembly points, or they saved their money in plastic bottles and donated them to Tzu Chi. They hoped that they could begin to support the foundation’s missions around the globe with their donations. They identified with Tzu Chi ideals, and they wanted to be part of its efforts. The 19-day cleanup was filled with countless interactions between the typhoon survivors and the volunteers—sometimes funny, sometimes heart-warming, but always truthful and real. The Tzu Chi presence thus became part of the daily lives of local residents. In a letter to the volunteers, one of the project participants wrote, “I’m used to having Tzu Chi here, and I hope that its volunteers can be here forever.” To sentiments like that, volunteers responded: “Though we can’t physically be here forever, the Tzu Chi spirit can and will be if you folks choose to keep it alive. When some of you join us and you see our logo here, you’ll know that Tzu Chi is still around.” |
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