Coconut trees used to remind me of languid beach vacations. Not anymore, since my first visit to Tacloban City in the Philippines.

 

Just after daybreak on Nov 8 last year, the strongest typhoon ever recorded made landfall here. Over the next three hours, a tsunami-like wall of water measuring more than 10 metres in height slammed inland and drowned thousands of people.

Tacloban's once thriving coconut industry was left in ruins. Of the trees still left standing, their fronds no longer wave but stick out in weird angles, as though frozen in a helpless flail.

 

It was February - four months into the recovery period, Tacloban City, once the fifth largest city in the Philippines with a population of over 200,000 residents, has regained some semblance of life.

 

On my third trip here since the fateful day, public transport is up and running again and makeshift stalls have sprung up selling food and provision items. But there can be no mistaking that it will be years and hundreds of millions of aid dollars before the city has a chance of returning to where it was even a decade ago.

 

As Tacloban City stretches out along a wide bay, there was little that was not affected. The drive from the airport to the city centre is a theatre showcasing the wrath of nature. Homes had walls battered in, school buildings had entire roofs ripped off while factories had their metal beams twisted like spaghetti.

 

Of the more prominent buildings, the four-storey high metrodome, which once served as the city's main typhoon evacuation centre, had its roof sheets flipped back double. Ironically, this building saw some of the highest concentration of casualties as the thousands who sheltered here from the rains were trapped by rapidly rising waters.

 

From a distance, the city cathedral is visible - with its cross bent crooked by the wind and rain. And these were only the brick and mortar buildings. Many shanty houses and wooden huts simply ceased to exist, the memory of them now just a pile of debris. Many of those who survived live in tent cities, courtesy of the humanitarian organisations that organised relief efforts in the intense early few weeks.

 

For a country that experiences annual typhoons, Typhoon Haiyan nevertheless stood out. In the words of one Filipino, it shook the country to the core not only because of its scale, but because it exposed the paucity of the administration in its ability to handle national disasters.

 

President Benigno Aquino III's high approval ratings came crashing down as the government dithered over what to do and grossly underestimated the number of casualties.

 

Aid agencies had initially estimated the death toll at 10,000 people. Aquino not only rapped this estimate but claimed that casualties could not have amounted to more than a fifth of that. Today, with more than 6,000 deaths confirmed, over 2,000 still missing and bodies still being discovered, the government has slumped into moody silence after declaring that it will no longer tally the dead after the count exceeded 4,000.

 

Imelda’s town

 

Strains are also beginning to surface over the distribution of the millions of dollars in aid pledged by the international community and nowhere is this more evident than here in Tacloban.

 

The province happens to be the stronghold of the Romualdez family, a part of the Marcos clan and bitter enemy of the President Aquino’s clan. Former first lady Imelda Marcos was a Romualdez before she adopted her late husband's (overthrown dictator Ferdinand Marcos) last name.

 

The reminders are everywhere. On the jeepney to town, one of the stops is Imelda Town. Closer to the city, I pass what was until the typhoon, a beautiful Spanish hacienda-styled Museum of Heritage. It was also the former home of the former first lady.

 

This dilemma is clearly written on the face of the current mayor, Mayor Alfred Romualdez, during our short meeting in January. With red rimmed eyes and a voice quivering with suppressed frustration, he made no secret of the antagonism between himself and the Aquino administration.

 

"The government claims that 80 percent of electricity has returned to Tacloban. The reality is that it is barely 20 percent," he asserted.

 

For organisations that want to help with rehabilitation of Tacloban, he suggests going directly to the ground and bypassing government agencies, including his own mayoral office. "It may be better for you to do this directly. If my office gets involved, that could cause more complications," he added.

 

If there is a silver lining to be found, it is in the work of private sector outfits and foundations that have responded quietly but effectively to the calamity. Mark Ruiz, the co-founder of Hapinoy, a successful microfinance facilitator that helps families set up home-based sari-sari (provision) shops, illustrated the mammoth task at hand.

 

"The entire supply chain in Tacloban broke down, not only due to the typhoon but also due to the widespread looting that took place in the desperate first few days," he said.

 

During the worst days when even aid agencies had to pull back from food distribution after several Philippine Red Cross trucks were said to have been hijacked, wholesalers faced armed mobs who came and took everything they could find in the stores. The fear of a repeat of this experience caused business confidence to return much slower to the city than was experienced by other post-disaster areas.

 

Ruiz views the situation optimistically though. "Right now, concerns over security is more perception than reality."

 

Hapinoy is engaged by the Philippine Disaster Recovery Foundation, a network of private-sector based non-profit organisations, to restore the local distribution channels and rebuild business confidence. The wholesalers, he said, are on track to rebuild their businesses. His challenge now is to set up a loan fund to enable poor families to take loans and start up their own small businesses once again.

                                                           

Preparing for future typhoons

 

Another organisation that has taken the lead to assess the livelihood needs of the disaster-hit areas is the Philippines Business for Social Progress, the largest corporate-led, non-profit social development foundation in the country.

 

Rafael Lopa, the organisation's executive director, described the challenge now not merely to be rebuilding but to reassess all the factors that can determine whether or not cities like Tacloban can survive another mega-typhoon.

 

"Weather patterns have changed and we can expect more typhoons in the future. So we cannot just rebuild the airport where it is today. We have to consider whether we need to move these facilities elsewhere. Similarly with homes. The government has declared a no-build zone 40 metres from the shoreline but the storm surge went in as far as 1.5 kilometres inland. How will a 40-metre zone change anything and where are we going to relocate the families that used to live in the no-build areas?"

                                               

Lopa recognises too the dilemma that city planners face. "It takes time to undertake assessments and address these matters because they involve so many things - land ownership, for example."

 

However, the flip side of this is that survivors with barely anything left cannot really afford more time. Since the end of January, survivors have held demonstrations with growing regularity to protest the government's slow response to relief and reconstruction.

 

As survivors slowly pick up the pieces of their lives, there is a lingering sense that the typhoon not only took away their belongings but also greatly eroded a very core part of their Filipino spirit.

 

Outwardly, they continue to face their circumstances with customary cheerfulness of a people who have often been described to be one of the happiest in the world. However, just scratch the surface and it will expose a collective of people traumatised by the tragedy, yet unable to access the help that they need to heal. The singing, dancing, drinking and smoking are rather a way of distracting themselves from their plight.

 

Shelagh MacFarlane, a volunteer psychologist, said that without exception, all survivors that she spoke with are experiencing some degree of post-traumatic stress.

 

"They all display some symptoms - nightmares, flashbacks, sensitivity to rain and wind," she explained. In the focus on reconstruction and rehabilitation, MacFarlane's experiences call for more to be done to support mental health programmes for survivors.

 

Typhoon Haiyan may no longer be in the news but its impact will long be etched in the minds and lives of those who survived it. As aid agencies and volunteers pull out, this disaster will be remembered not as one of heroism but one where politics ultimately skewers the chances of vulnerable communities to recover and rebuild better.

 

YAP MUN CHING is the executive director of a corporate foundation which led a public fund-raising initiative in aid of Typhoon Haiyan survivors. Her visits to Tacloban were to assess and identify rehabilitation projects that the fund would support. She is a former Malaysiakini journalist.