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.
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 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 at one of the orgies 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 not only will survive and 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 that 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 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 looting of the Robinson’s 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 looting 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, I didn’t fight for the other canned goods,” he said.
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 late 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, 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 5,500 people dead, 26,136 injured and 1,757 missing as of Wednesday evening.
Mr. Pascual said that after having little to feed his siblings except the looted 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 the United Nations Children’s Fund, better known as 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 difficulty. 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.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/world/asia/orphans-friends-and-neighbors-struggle-to-endure-in-typhoons-wake.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print
