NewYorker - On November 8th, after Typhoon Haiyan hit, Helen Merino, a forty-four-year-old housemaid in Manila, tried to reach her parents in rural Barangay Tolingon, part of Isabel municipality in Leyte province.

1. NewYorker - On
November 8th, after
Typhoon Haiyan hit,
Helen Merino, a fortyfour-year-old
housemaid in Manila,
tried to reach her
parents in rural
Barangay Tolingon,
part of Isabel
municipality in Leyte
province.

2. All power and communication lines were down, but somehow
Facebook was accessible—not for nothing is the Philippines known
as the world’s social-media capital. That evening, a cousin
messaged Helen’s son on 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
evacuation center. The school’s roof had been blown off.
Throughout the weekend, Helen, her three siblings in Manila, and
two in the Davao region, in the south, tried to contact their parents.
Helen finally got through to her mother, Rosella, on Monday
morning. Rosella reported that she and her husband were all right,
but they were still in their wet clothes, and had lost all 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 send 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 more than
three hundred U.S. dollars a month, pooled their funds and asked

3. Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/11/when-haiyanstruck.html

4. 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
themselves, 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 to get a picture of the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.
We in the Philippines consider ourselves natural-disaster veterans. We have
earthquakes: in October, a 7.2-magnitude quake leveled parts of Bohol province,
including massive stone churches that were hundreds of years old. We have
volcanoes: after lying dormant for centuries, Mount Pinatubo, in Luzon, erupted
in 1991, spewing so much ash into the atmosphere that global temperatures fell
almost a degree. 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 longer a source of amazement, just an inconvenience.

6. 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 down 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 from the American Midwest combined.”
Immediately the Internet memes began to sprout: we had
been hit by Miley Cyrus’s wrecking ball; Haiyan had come for
the woman at the center of the Philippine Senate’s ongoing
investigation into the so-called “pork barrel” scam; Atom
Araullo, the intrepid television reporter broadcasting from
Tacloban at the height of the storm, was Thor himself. Our
laughter was laced with anxiety: everyone knew someone in

7. Dan de Padua, a television executive, correctly observed that our
vocabulary expands with each new disaster: from “tsunami” and “fault
line” to “pyroclastic flow,” “lahar,” and, 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, rising
seas, and changes in atmospheric pressure combined to produce a
thirteen-foot wall of water that plowed straight through Tacloban City,
demolishing everything in its path. As of Tuesday morning, official
reports placed the number of dead at one thousand seven hundred and
seventy-four. This figure is expected to rise as power and
communication lines in the stricken areas are restored. (The Tacloban
local government 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 searching in the rubble for food and water, and
looting.
It’s easy for observers to condemn Philippine officials for the lack of
preparation, but there was preparation. Days before the typhoon struck,
there were mass evacuations from vulnerable areas. President Benigno
(Noynoy) Aquino had appeared on television to warn people about the

8. Even before the government, relief agencies, and international community
started sending aid to the hardest-hit areas, Filipinos had snapped into
action. As veterans 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. Hospitals refused to admit more patients; there were fears of
disease spreading. And there was violence. At night, Zyrah heard people
scavenging outside. Their neighbors had already left the city. The houses
close by had been looted and robbed. 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 Tacloban, into Samar province.
According to Zyrah’s brother, they are now in Catbalogan 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

9. 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 very badly, but we are not
helpless. In Manila, private citizens are collecting donations for
typhoon victims. Many offices have cancelled their Christmas
parties—in the Philippines, this is a very big deal—and
donated the funds instead to the Red Cross and other relief
agencies. And there are jokes to lighten the mood, because
that is how we get through crises.
At the U.N. Climate Change Conference, which began on
Monday in Warsaw, three days after Haiyan struck, the
Philippine representative, Naderev Sano, told delegates that
climate change means that the world will face more
supertyphoons like Haiyan. “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