WHEN HAIYAN STRUCK by JESSICA ZAFRA On November 8th, after Typhoon Haiyan hit, Helen Merino, a forty-four-year-old h ousemaid

in Manila, tried to reach her parents in rural Barangay Tolingon, part of Isabel municipality in Leyte province. All power and communication lines were down, but somehow Facebook was accessible not for nothing is the Philippines know n as the world s social-media capital. That evening, a cousin messaged Helen s son o n Facebook and posted a picture of a tree that had crushed her parents house. But they were alive they had taken refuge in a school that had been turned into an ev acuation center. The school s roof had been blown off. Throughout the weekend, Helen, her three siblings in Manila, and two in the Dava o region, in the south, tried to contact their parents. Helen finally got throug h to her mother, Rosella, on Monday morning. Rosella reported that she and her h usband were all right, but they were still in their wet clothes, and had lost al l their possessions. All the trees on their land had been knocked over. They had a little food unripe bananas picked from a fallen tree. Rosella asked Helen to se nd them rice by air transport. Meanwhile, Helen s brother heard that relief trucks were making their way to Isabel. Helen and her siblings, none of whom makes mor e than three hundred U.S. dollars a month, pooled their funds and asked a relati ve in Cebu province to bring rice and other supplies to their parents in Leyte. By Tuesday morning, her father had already built a little shack. They had their homestead, a little rice, water they had collected from a spring, and a measure of calm. The Merinos don t have much, but they are accustomed to fending for thems elves, and they take care of each other. Not every family was together after the storm, or survived. But multiply this story thousands of times, and you begin t o get a picture of the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan. We in the Philippines consider ourselves natural-disaster veterans. We have eart hquakes: in October, a 7.2-magnitude quake leveled parts of Bohol province, incl uding massive stone churches that were hundreds of years old. We have volcanoes: after lying dormant for centuries, Mount Pinatubo, in Luzon, erupted in 1991, s pewing so much ash into the atmosphere that global temperatures fell almost a de gree. We have typhoons: up to twenty each year, which are growing more ferocious . These days, the sight of a street in Manila under four feet of water is no lon ger a source of amazement, just an inconvenience. By now, we know the drill: we re sitting in the most storm-prone part of the ocean , not to mention the earthquake- and volcano-filled Ring of Fire. These things h appen. We survive, and deal with the damage, with the help of the international community. Along the way, there will be chaos, and infuriating reports of corrup tion and ineptitude; there will be storms of blame, but we get up and collect ou rselves. In Manila, we had been getting storm warnings for days. On Friday, when Typhoon Haiyan (known locally as Yolanda) was expected to make landfall, we hunkered dow n in our houses with provisions, kept our phones charged, and waited. The storm didn t hit us. Instead, we watched, live on television, as it obliterated Tacloban City, in Leyte. One of my friends, watching the devastation unfold in real time , said, It s as if Tacloban was battered by the Fukushima tsunami and tornadoes fro m the American Midwest combined. Immediately the Internet memes began to sprout: we had been hit by Miley Cyrus s w recking ball; Haiyan had come for the woman at the center of the Philippine Sena te s ongoing investigation into the so-called pork barrel scam; Atom Araullo, the in trepid television reporter broadcasting from Tacloban at the height of the storm , was Thor himself. Our laughter was laced with anxiety: everyone knew someone i n the middle of the horror.

Dan de Padua, a television executive, correctly observed that our vocabulary exp ands with each new disaster: from tsunami and fault line to pyroclastic flow, lahar, , now, storm surge. We have all seen many things that you wouldn t believe, but this storm surge was well beyond belief. The strongest storm winds ever recorded, ri sing seas, and changes in atmospheric pressure combined to produce a thirteen-fo ot wall of water that plowed straight through Tacloban City, demolishing everyth ing in its path. As of Tuesday morning, official reports placed the number of dead at one thousan d seven hundred and seventy-four. This figure is expected to rise as power and c ommunication lines in the stricken areas are restored. (The Tacloban local gover nment has said that the death toll could be as high as ten thousand.) There are reports of corpses on the streets and a stench of death in the air, people searc hing in the rubble for food and water, and looting. It s easy for observers to condemn Philippine officials for the lack of preparatio n, but there was preparation. Days before the typhoon struck, there were mass ev acuations from vulnerable areas. President Benigno (Noynoy) Aquino had appeared on television to warn people about the storm. No one could have anticipated the intensity of Typhoon Haiyan, which left meteorologists stunned at its killing pe rfection. Now we must deal with the damage. Even before the government, relief agencies, and international community started sending aid to the hardest-hit areas, Filipinos had snapped into action. As vet erans of disaster, they hope that officialdom will help, but they know that they must help their own families. Family reigns supreme in Philippine society as one of my friends quipped, the impulse that leads our politicians to build dynasties is simply an exaggerated form of their desire to take care of their families. In Tacloban City, Maria Zyrah Alcober and her husband, Joel, were fortunate that their house survived the storm undamaged. They had stocked up on food and water in anticipation of the typhoon. But the situation nearby had deteriorated. Hosp itals refused to admit more patients; there were fears of disease spreading. And there was violence. At night, Zyrah heard people scavenging outside. Their n eighbors had already left the city. The houses close by had been looted and robb ed. The Alcobers concluded that it was only a matter of time before their house was ransacked. They packed the essentials, got in their car, and drove out of Ta cloban, into Samar province. According to Zyrah s brother, they are now in Catbalo gan City, looking for a hotel. One friend of mine has not been able to contact his family in Samar. He s received reports that they are alive, so he s going to Samar to get them out. Because the roads are impassable, he will fly to Butuan City, two provinces south of Samar, drive to Surigao, in the next province, board a fishing boat that will cross a p ortion of the Pacific Ocean, and land in Guiuan, Samar, where Haiyan first made landfall. Much has been said about the resilience of the Filipinos and it is not just public relations. It is a fact. Yes, the situation is dire, and please, we need help v ery badly, but we are not helpless. In Manila, private citizens are collecting d onations for typhoon victims. Many offices have cancelled their Christmas partie s in the Philippines, this is a very big deal and donated the funds instead to the R ed Cross and other relief agencies. And there are jokes to lighten the mood, bec ause that is how we get through crises. At the U.N. Climate Change Conference, which began on Monday in Warsaw, three da ys after Haiyan struck, the Philippine representative, Naderev Sano, told delega tes that climate change means that the world will face more supertyphoons like H aiyan. What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event

is madness, he declared. Sano announced that, in solidarity with his countrymen, and particularly his brother, who had not had food in three days, he would fast during the conference until a meaningful outcome is in sight. Meteorologists still have not conclusively linked climate change to supertyphoon s, but they warn that rising ocean temperatures will lead to increasingly extrem e weather events. We are shocked at the devastation wrought by Haiyan, but such mega-disasters may become a common occurrence. Who is ready for that?