Philippines: A calamitous response to calamity

last updated 8 January 2015

The situation is “far, far worse than can be imagined,” said The Manila Times in an editorial. This may be “the Philippines’ darkest hour in decades.” Typhoon Yolanda, known elsewhere as Typhoon Haiyan, brought “unbelievable loss of life and damage to property,” even for a country that has become depressingly used to natural catastrophes. The stench of cadavers rotting in the streets is rising over the city of Tacloban. “Please, please, tell authorities to help us,” survivors clamor. “Where is the food, where is the water? Where are the military collecting the dead?” Looting is rampant. Roads and bridges are washed away, cutting off towns from help and leaving thousands of injured to suffer without health care. We need tent cities to rise now, with emergency field hospitals to serve them. We need the military and police to restore law and order. “There is no room for the usual graft and corruption that is endemic in Philippine society.” For once, government must function, or many will die.

President Benigno Aquino declared a national calamity, but many of us think the country “should declare him a national calamity instead,” said Efren Danao, also in The Manila Times. After the earthquake in Cebu last month, he visited for just a few hours and “was even shown laughing with the quake ruins as backdrop.” Now, after the typhoon, he has behaved even more “insensitively and thoughtlessly.” He showed up in Tacloban and screamed at the local officials—many of whom had lost loved ones and homes—for failing to adequately prepare for the disaster. Then he stormed away from them like an angry toddler. “He should have just stayed home in Malacañang and played video games, for he hasn’t been of any help anyway.” President Aquino, your tantrum “sent a message of hopelessness and weakness,” said Nelson Forte Flores in the Manila Standard Today. This is a time for action, not finger-pointing. The people want security. “For them to know that you cannot stand bad news and that you are supersensitive and short-tempered is a betrayal of their hopes.”

We are lucky, at least, to be able to count on the international community, said Ana Marie Pamintuan in The Philippine Star. “Uncle Sam immediately deployed aircraft and ships,” and the U.S. Marines got to many places far more quickly than our own military. But that’s a wrenching indictment of our national inadequacy. The Philippines, with our “never-ending stream of natural disasters,” must develop our own emergency response. “Constant exposure to nature’s fury” has given Filipinos a sense of fatalism and black humor that helps us cope with catastrophe but also prevents us from preparing for it. “We laugh our troubles away, and pray that tomorrow will be a better day.” Let us hope that this time, finally, because of “the enormous toll inflicted by Yolanda, we might see disaster mitigation placed front and center in national priorities.”