As we waited for our contact at the rear of the MacArthur memorial, we asked a guard there if our boats had arrived yet. “You mean the green ones?” he had said. “They’re stockpiled at the back of the DENR building across the road, rotting away.”
“No, ours are yellow.” I was there on behalf of my mother’s cousins’ family to turn over several units to local fishermen picked out by the Yellow Boat of Hope Foundation. It had been two years since Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan laid waste to this part of Leyte Island — was the endowment too much, too late?
Hardly, explained Palo’s head agriculturist Nick Quieta. The problem with the green bancas was that they were not seaworthy, having been built by unlicensed contractors without regard for MARINA specifications. “A lot of well-meant aid was wasted that way,” he said. His department received a shipment of coffee beans. “They were Arabica, suited only for cultivation at altitudes of 600 feet and higher.” A truckload of kamote (sweet potato) cuttings arrived a few days after the disaster, when people were too busy looking for sustenance and shelter to bother with planting. His office could not even spare enough tarpaulins to protect the plants from the elements; they rotted.
Maize? “Fine; the soil here is well-suited for corn. What the NGO failed to consider was that we had no machinery to mill it with.” Sans infrastructure or plain foresight, lost opportunities. Another NGO wanted chicken farms. “‘Have the fowl vaccinated,’ I told them. ‘A vial worth a hundred can save ten times that.’ ‘Not included in the project specs,’ they said. These people spend ₱4000 a day for a van to move around in, mind you. I advised them: ‘Take a habal-habal one time and use the savings for vaccine!’ Know what they said to that?”
“What?”
“‘Ay, too inconvenient.’”
“Goodbye manok.”
”Indeed.”
You work with people, you encounter some at their most unflattering; that is a given. I have some Waray blood in me, so I was curious: is it true about their temper?
“That they can be… stubborn?”¹ said Nicolas Torrevillas, our contact. “At times maddeningly so, oh yes.” A volunteer, Cocoy had turned out to be as Bisaya as they come, and Jenny instantly recognized him from their VISCA (now VSU) days in Baybay.
“And yet here you’ve chosen to make your home among them.”
“This is home now, yes.” Grin. It would have been completely disarming if he had not mentioned earlier that he ran a gun shop.
“How about you, Father?” I said, turning to “Padz” Larry, as Cocoy called him. “Where’s home?”
“For now, Ormoc. Previously, Zamboanga, Basilan. But I’m from Legazpi.”
“You should see the resettlement project they have up near Lake Danao,” Cocoy offered. “It’s color-coded.”
Actually, you should see Lorenzo Miranda, CMF. I have seen missionaries before, but this was my first time to meet one. “Are you sure?” I had said to Cocoy. “He looks like my neighborhood thug!” Not that we have one. On the other hand, Mayor Remedios Petilla could barely contain her surprise. “You’re a priest?!?”²
God’s helpers come in curious packages. Kind donors there are lots of, but it is because of people like Nick, Cocoy, and Padz Larry that our donations benefit recipients in the greatest possible way — they who work at ground level, know the local culture (sometimes more political than anything else), and are maybe even a bit mad enough to keep doing so. During lunch at a nearby restaurant, the owner came over to our table. “Please don’t tire of helping,” he had said to me. “There is still so much to be done here.” He was right, of course, but he ought tell Nick,³ Cocoy, and Fr. Larry as much and more often. We don’t hear about them in the news, and yet our lives could depend on them and their kind someday.
¹ I meant “war freaks,” no doubt reinforced by the Tagalog translation of the folk song “Waray Waray” from a celebration of the provincial life (e.g., “pirmi malipay” – always happy) to that of a battlecry (“handang matodas” – ready to die). In any case, some of the original boat recipients were said to have refused to put in the required work equity to qualify for the endowment. «
² As a former governor of Leyte, Matin used to work in that building located on the street named after one of her predecessors: Francisco Enage, my great-grandfather. She never made the connection. «
³ Nick never mentioned it, but we were told he and his wife lost four of their kids (plus other family members) to Yolanda. «
All photos courtesy of Jenny Ang
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