TINDOG TACLOBAN
Witnessing the destruction that typhoon Haiyan caused in the city of Tacloban and the island of Leyte, it was images of war-torn landscapes, uninhabitable and barren, that came to mind. Those destitute cities, ravaged by conflict, that haunt the recesses of our collective conscience.
Here too the streets are littered with debris and the bloated and blackened remains of countless bodies, scorched to bursting in the tropical sun. The architectural anomalies were everywhere: cars turned upside down in the middle of the road, whole communities washed away and vast steel trawlers beached hundreds of meters inland, their progress halted only by the presence of a hill. It would seem impossible to adequately plan for such a disaster, and the mangled remains of buildings, whole structures crumbling back into the earth, stand as testament to that fact.
What was unique in all of this to the Philippines, was how the dynastic family rivalry between the Marcos clan (to which Tacloban's Mayor Romualdez belongs) and the family of President Aquino hampered and pervaded the disaster response efforts of the local and national governments. As the bitter rivalry played out on the grand political stage far above the city, those left scavenging among the rubble trying to rebuild their lives were at once
oblivious and yet the most urgent and unwilling victims of this modern Shakespearean tragedy. First as tragedy, then as farce.
But mostly it was the churches that survived intact, those structurally sound concrete edifices to the glory of God, beaming up into the gloaming, like the physical clamouring antennae of all God-fearing men. Everyone here has an agenda, from the cloying NGO press officers hunting for any kind of media attention, to the City Mayor Alfred Romualdez (and nephew of Imelda Marcos), who is trying to relocate the informal settlers from along the coast so that he can turn the area into a commercial zone. These images and film are a brief glimpse into the lives of the people of Leyte as they try to rebuild their lives, under the watchful eye of a very vengeful God.