IN a few days, the country will mark the tenth year since super typhoon Haiyan slammed its eastern seaboard in the vicinity of Guiuan, Eastern Samar, before moving on to Tacloban, Leyte and imprinting Tacloban forever in the memory of millions of people around the world over who never ever knew where Tacloban was.
Indeed, except for those old enough to have lived through World War II or who had listened to tales of that war, very few outside of the Philippines ever heard of the name Tacloban or knew where to locate it on a map of the Philippines.
Heck, students of political science in a Jesuit school in Alabama whom I met in 2016 even had trouble locating the Philippines itself on the map!
And so, if that was the case for Tacloban, even fewer knew that a town called Guiuan existed, or where it was. Myself included. But “Yolanda” would change that.
I had delayed my return from the US from 5 November to 7 November to allow the typhoon to pass, and given the fact that you lose one (or two?) days, I arrived in Manila on the 9th of November and immediately was called to the office of Manny Zamora, our Nickel Asia (NAC) chairman. “Go to Guiuan, use the plane,” he told me. “Bring your doctor friends from PGH. We received an SOS from our friend Analiza Gonzales as they were badly hit by Yolanda.”
‘May something like “Yolanda” never happen again, but may the spirit of coming together to help total strangers be forever a hallmark of all our lives.’
Guiuan? Where the hell was Guiuan? I Googled it while sending a text to Dr. Michael Tee at PGH to ask him if he was free to join the trip. I found out that Guiuan was at the southeasternmost tip of Samar island, clearly along the typhoon belt, and had an airstrip once used by the US during World War II. My doctor friends led by Dr. Tee were also willing to go but requested for a day’s delay because they had patients scheduled for the 9th and could not cancel.
And so, on November 10, I flew on a King Air with Dr. Tee and three of his UP-PGH colleagues plus box loads of anti-tetanus medicine on a one-and-a-half-hour flight to a place that seemed, to me at least, as if it were the 2013 version of Hiroshima.
Guiuan, you see, was Ground Zero. It was the first LGU that bore Haiyan’s wrath. But since the town was on the western side of the landmass and not, like Tacloban, on the eastern side, it was not subjected to the worst effects of storm surge that Tacloban felt.
But the devastation was appalling.
“How could these people recover from this sort of utter devastation,” I wondered to myself. Coconut trees either had their tops chopped off or bent as if all pointing towards Tacloban. Virtually all concrete structures were damaged, their roofs blown away and some of their walls crumbled. An old wooden courthouse next to the PNP headquarters was gone; only its cement staircase was left. In the marketplace next to the “pier,” no stall was left standing and I noticed numerous Coca-Cola refrigerators scattered all over. There were Philtranco buses lying on their sides blocking the road and even a gasoline delivery tanker. Young men roamed the streets, some holding what looked to me like dos-por-dos. In what was left of the municipal hall, there was Manila paper attached to one wall with a tally of Barangay residents living and dead. Then-Mayor Christopher Gonzales and his elder sister, former mayor Analiz, were in another room discussing how to solicit relief for Guiuan.
I felt like a fly on the wall.
My doctor friends went to the only operating hospital in town, a private one, and treated whoever they could treat. A handful were at the airport when we arrived, they who needed to be brought to where they could receive advanced care. Using a satellite phone, I asked my boss for permission to have our plane fly them to Cebu and Manny Zamora simply said, “Do what has to be done.”
“Balikan mo kami bago dumilim (make sure you come back for us before it gets dark),” I told the pilot as the injured were loaded onto the King Air. I watched them take off, then headed into the town.
That was ten years ago this Friday. Ten years ago today, November 6, people in Eastern Samar and in the Leyte provinces thought the big typhoon coming was no different from the so many big typhoons they’ve lived through all their lives.
Today, you’ll hardly see the scars of Yolanda in Guiuan. It’s the richest LGU in Eastern Samar, save only I think for Borongan City, the provincial capital. The town center is a hustle and bustle of activity. The damaged church (built in the 18th Century) has been restored. The trees, they’re all back to their full crowns. And on weekends at the plaza, the Guiuan town basketball team competes for the championship of the NAC-sponsored Eastern Samar Basketball Association (EBA) – Kaugop Cup league involving all the 22 towns and one city of Eastern Samar, and whose top prize for the champion team is a cool P1 million.
Analiza Gonzales is mayor again. Michael Tee is now the Chancellor of UP Manila. I am still an employee of Nickel Asia. But ten years ago, just as Yolanda changed the lives of so many in Guiuan and Tacloban and beyond, it too changed our lives – bringing us together in the understanding that when tragedy strikes you do what you can even for people you don’t know from Adam, in places you still have to Google as if they’re somewhere abroad.
May something like Yolanda never happen again, but may the spirit of coming together to help total strangers be forever a hallmark of all our lives.