Typhoon survivor Jonathan Bacsal Jr. runs past a cross that indicates where his father is buried at a mass grave for typhoon Haiyan victims in the outskirts of Tacloban city, Leyte province
Four months after she lost her husband and home to Typhoon Haiyan’s fury, Agnes Bacsal gave birth to their sixth child — a sprightly boy, whose company has eased the family’s pain.
Other survivors, like fisherman Ben Pedrero, still struggle. His wife and son perished in the monster storm and more than 40 other relatives are still missing, one year later.
“In just a blink of an eye, they were all gone. I’ll only overcome this tragedy when I die myself,” the 61-year-old Pedrero said, wiping tears with his shirt as he helped relatives roast a pig and prepare food for the disaster’s anniversary.
On Saturday, as church bells pealed and sirens wailed across this central Philippine city to commemorate the moment on Nov. 8, 2013, when Haiyan barreled inland from the Pacific, Bacsal and Pedrero were planning to light candles and offer prayers at separate mass graves in Tacloban.
Leyte Roman Catholic Bishop John Du led prayers at a site where close to 2,300 people are buried. Some lit candles and wrote names of their family members on newly planted white crosses in the vast field on the outskirts of the city. At a city hall commemoration, 1,000 white balloons were released to signify acceptance of the human loss.
Typhoon Haiyan leveled entire villages with ferocious winds and tsunami-like waves, leaving more than 7,300 people dead or missing.
Funeral parlors were overwhelmed, forcing survivors to bury their dead near where they were found — on church grounds, roadsides and beaches, as well as in front yards and backyards.
The worst-hit city of Tacloban and outlying regions have crawled back from the rubble. Shopping malls, hotels and offices have reopened, with cars, taxis and motorcycles clogging downtown streets — the same spots where huge mounds of debris and bodies lay scattered weeks after Haiyan blew away. Yet, human scars are harder to overcome.
While the exact figures for the dead and missing are still being collected, the physical recovery from Haiyan remains a challenge. The typhoon demolished about a million houses and displaced more than 4 million people in one of the country’s poorest regions, where a Marxist insurgency has endured for decades.
Overall damage was estimated at 571.1 billion pesos (USD12.9 billion), including about 16 million knocked-down coconut trees, a major source of livelihood.
With the loss of income, about a million more people were pushed deeper into poverty, according to the Asian Development Bank.
Building more than 200,000 new houses for the poor, who were left with nothing, is proving difficult. The Philippine government, backed by international donors, has built temporary bunkhouses and shelters, but many residents have hammered back their shacks in the same coastal villages where they were hit by the storm — and which have been officially declared “no-build zones.”
About 3,000 people still live in tents in Tacloban, though the city government has pledged to move them to permanent housing by the end of the year. Under the long-term plan to protect against similar typhoon onslaughts, the government wants to build an elevated road connecting Tacloban to two coastal towns that also will serve as a dike.
“Like you, I am impatient,” President Benigno Aquino III told residents during a visit Friday to nearby Eastern Samar province.
He added, however, “We can’t be reckless as we build back better.” Joeal Calupitan, Tacloban , AP
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