Grief and Heroism as Survivors Struggle in the Philippines
By KEITH BRADSHER
Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
At 18, Jomar Pascual is the head of his orphaned family of four brothers and a sister in Tacloban, the Philippines.
Acts of heroism abound in the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan, often
with a special emphasis on ensuring the survival of children.
Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
At 18, Jomar Pascual is the head of his orphaned family of four brothers and a sister in Tacloban, the Philippines.
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: November 27, 2013
TACLOBAN, the Philippines — Jomar Pascual stirred a steel pot full of
instant noodles carefully in a typhoon-damaged former kindergarten
building. He had already cooked rice. His three younger brothers and a
younger sister, suddenly orphans like him, were hungry, and he began to
feed them, spooning the pallid meal onto their green plastic plates.
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Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
SWEPT AWAY Janiño, 8, played a
broken electronic piano on the spot where his family’s house stood
before a typhoon hit Tacloban, the Philippines.
The five siblings, the youngest just 8, sleep at night on a bathroom
door in the cramped room, which they share with two other families. They
seldom talk about the night their mother and father, two sisters and a
brother died, when the winds of Typhoon Haiyan shrieked deafeningly and
waves taller than nearby coconut palms swept over their home,
obliterating everything except a toilet bowl attached to a small square
of concrete foundation.
Three weeks after the storm killed thousands with its tsunami-like storm
surge and shredded homes with some of the most powerful typhoon winds
ever recorded, this town and many like it across Leyte Island in the
east-central Philippines are scenes of grieving. Yet acts of heroism
abound, and they have been intermingled with only a few acts of malice
and madness, as when a 12-year-old boy’s throat was slit when he showed
up during a spree of looting here, or when a man was chased out of his
home by an escaped convict with a gun.
The episodes of heroism reflect a remarkable will to endure among people
of all ages here, often with a special emphasis on making sure that the
children will not only survive, but also be able to rebuild the
devastated island.
Maria Kaaya, a 72-year-old widow who has spent the last few years
helping her grandson and his wife raise six children, had not eaten for
four days when she foraged on a recent afternoon among the stumps and
storm-felled trees of a coconut palm forest near her home in Malobago
Village in the center of Leyte Island. Carefully walking along one
fallen trunk and then the next because that was easier than clambering
up and down in the three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of broken trees, she
found what she had been looking for: the crown of a coconut palm, its
sweet, succulent core still inside.
Mrs. Kaaya’s big concern was not the hunger gnawing at her own stomach,
but how to hack open coconut palm crowns without the family machete,
which was lost in the storm. Each of the three tiny rooms of the family
home had been hit by a different falling coconut tree, destroying the
roof and flattening every exterior cinder block wall yet somehow sparing
the family members as they hid screaming under the bed; they have lived
under a scavenged tarpaulin ever since.
Studying the palm’s crown wistfully, Mrs. Kaaya said, “If only I can
find someone who can break it open. He can split it with me.”
As people like Mrs. Kaaya seek to look after loved ones, contrasting
scenes of ugliness are rare here, although not unheard-of. Many seem to
involve the roughly 1,100 convicts, including murderers, who escaped
from three prisons — all near Tacloban’s airport — that were destroyed
by the typhoon.
Jenny Malaki, a resident of one of the many cramped alleys here in
Tacloban, said that her cousin by marriage had fled to the other end of
the island after being chased out of his home by an escaped convict who
had obtained a gun and had a grudge against him. “The man almost shot
him,” she said.
In a separate episode, a 12-year-old boy was stabbed in the chest and
his throat was slit when he showed up soon after the typhoon at the
ransacking of the Robinsons shopping mall near the airport, according to
the Philippine Red Cross. Members of the crowd rushed the boy to an
orphanage where the staff had medical training, and his life was saved.
Mr. Pascual, who is 18, said that he had participated in the plundering
of a warehouse two days after the typhoon to obtain food for his younger
brothers and sister, but had been careful. He chose the least popular
canned food and did not participate in the melee for more popular items,
he said, partly because he could not afford to be injured.
“I just got some sardines,” he said. “I didn’t fight for the other canned goods.”
Mr. Pascual volunteered to show the way from the kindergarten to his
family’s former home. The site was covered with mud except for the
square of concrete under the toilet, and strewn with shreds of clothing,
the twisted remains of a child’s bicycle frame and battered auto parts.
Still tied to a fallen tree trunk were the remains of the pedicab in
which the family’s father used to pedal tourists around town.
Mr. Pascual pointed out a tall clump of bamboo. He had saved his
13-year-old brother, he said, by clinging to the top of the bamboo with
one hand in the surf while holding his brother with his other arm. “I
held him like this,” he said, gesturing a tight hold around the midriff
of the boy.
Mr. Pascual’s sister, 17, rode out the storm in a jackfruit tree farther
inland, while his 15-year-old brother clung to floating debris. Family
members used to swim regularly in the nearby ocean, but that was no help
in the churning surf of the storm surge that buried their home because
of the sharp-edged corrugated steel roofs and large chunks of wood that
seemed to rocket through the dark waters in every direction, Mr. Pascual
said.
The three brothers and a sister found their last surviving sibling,
Janiño, the 8-year-old boy, wandering near the site of their home two
days after the storm. He has been unable to explain how he survived. The
bodies of their father and 11-year-old sister have been found, but the
bodies of their mother, 5-year-old sister and 3-year-old brother are
missing. Mr. Pascual said only that the survivors knew from what they
saw on the night of the storm that all three of the missing had
perished.
Mr. Pascual said that they had not bothered to go through the procedures
for adding the mother, sister and brother to the official list of the
missing, but had only mentioned in passing to a neighborhood official
that they were gone.
Many local residents make similar comments, making it hard to gauge the
accuracy of government statistics that showed 5,560 people dead, 26,136
injured and 1,757 missing as of Thursday morning.
Mr. Pascual said that after having little to feed his siblings except
the sardines in the first week after the typhoon, he had stood in line
for household food rations from the government and obtained them. Food
rations tend to be more readily available here than in the interior of
Leyte Island, where the relief effort has moved more slowly. The
siblings are also using a blue hygiene bucket of soaps, toothpaste and
other basics provided by Unicef.
Unicef offered the siblings the opportunity to move into the SOS
Children’s Village, a home at the other end of Tacloban for children
from families in distress. But after some discussion, the siblings have
decided to remain at the damaged school, to be close to a second cousin,
Frederick Centino, and the survivors among their neighborhood friends.
Mr. Centino said that he and his wife already have a 3-year-old son and
2-year-old daughter and are also homeless and living in the same damaged
school as Mr. Pascual and his siblings. They plan to help keep an eye
on the orphans, he said. “They are big,” he said, “and they can help me
manage the little ones.”
COPY http://international.nytimes.com/
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