Deep Field (17 page)
The opportunities and self-reliance advocated by donors in the capital meant something entirely different and more sinister in Mindanao itself. Before leaving for Manila, I had learned that ‘recruiters’ had sensed fertile ground and become active in the some of the affected areas—offering women, whose livelihoods had been destroyed in the disaster, contracts to work as domestic labour overseas. At $400 a month, these contracts were considered lucrative by many local people, despite the serious risk of physical, sexual and economic abuse they carry with them, not to mention the increased vulnerability of children and families left behind.
In areas where people had received help—notably, along the sides of main roads—there was evidence of rebuilding and early signs of recovery. Elsewhere, despite the mantra of the development community to ‘build back better’, people lived in makeshift shelters made from the debris of their former homes. The unaided majority who lived in the mud on the site of their original homes were building back worse. For one woman I met, whose home was a flooded tent, Typhoon Bopha had brought devastation. She had been given a tent by an aid agency but this had been inadvertently placed in an unshaded area prone to flooding. By herself with four small children, she had been unable to relocate the tent, which was too hot to use during the day. Instead, she was living with her children in the remains of her old house—a wooden shanty at the outer perimeter of the village, which at least provided some shade. She did have some assistance from a cousin, who had come to help look after the children. Some vulnerable groups, such as the elderly, were barely in a position to build back or to help themselves at all. ‘Beauty enhanced, hearts restored’ read the title of one disaster recovery brochure I picked up in Manila.
Determined that there must be money available somewhere, given the clear and overwhelming emergency needs, I continued my donor door-knocking and found myself invited to an unscheduled meeting that was described to me as ‘something to do with the response’. Leaving no stone unturned, I showed up once more at the freezing steel and plate-glass towers of the diplomatic buildings in Manila and braced myself for another bout of hypothermia. I was ushered through the building to a small windowless office in which were seated a group of men in dark suits sitting around a conference table. Nobody looked up as I entered, and I took a seat to the side, unsure about the protocol in a room that had the sombre, formal and yet slightly edgy atmosphere of a yakuza conclave. Shortly after me the head of the UN in the Philippines arrived—a gregarious Brazilian woman who broke the monochrome uniformity of the room’s inhabitants. She stared ahead and straightened her already immaculate hair before introducing herself and, continuing to address the middle distance, read from a prepared statement about the humanitarian catastrophe that Super Typhoon Bopha had caused. And as I looked around, following the direction of her gaze, I noticed that a large TV screen at the opposite end of the room had been turned on, displaying a cavernous room with what appeared to be a large number of people sitting at desks. It was clear that the proceedings were being broadcast. As my Brazilian colleague finished, she turned to me and asked if I would like to say anything. And with slowly dawning terror I realised, as the microphone made its way across the table to where I was sitting, that I was about to address the member states of the United Nations in session by videoconference from Manila.
But still the response lacked funds and without any kind of international institution systematically managing development and humanitarian funding, financial decisions were made in a way that was random, ad hoc and based on calculations of national interest rather than humanitarian needs. In this context, the Philippines ranked low and the dependency of humanitarian agencies on donor whims showed in their increasingly desperate attempts to attract attention. Everything was signposted and labelled: ‘a gift of the American people’, ‘Canadian Aid’, ‘assistance from the European Commission’. Logos, brands and labels were everywhere despite the clear limits of the funding and the response, while donor institutions had gradually become more strident in the way they presented themselves. The formerly understated UK Department for International Development (DfID) had become the more aggressive UKAID, with the by-line ‘from the British people’ bizarrely tagged on hoardings outside the houses of grateful beneficiaries; the Australian Aid Agency embarrassingly flew the flag of a red kangaroo. It had become a criterion of funding for many donors that the ‘beneficiaries’ could state which country their assistance had come from. Some particularly ingratiating aid agencies printed special shirts for their staff to wear, which were decorated with the logos of all the donors—something that, as one colleague remarked, made them look like ‘humanitarian racing drivers’.
When all else had largely failed, a ‘donor mission’ was organised in which representatives were invited to come and see the destruction caused by Typhoon Bopha for themselves. A small group of diplomats and aid agency representatives agreed and were flown around in helicopters from one destroyed village to the next to have a look. But they never really got close to anyone who had actually been affected—aid agencies had gone in paroxysms of sycophantic activity, printing more and more shirts for greater ‘visibility’ of their employees and even orchestrating distributions of food and relief items that happened to coincide with the donors’ royal tour. Aid agency representatives hung around with funding proposals in their back pockets waiting for a moment when they could impress a donor with their new recovery concepts alluringly entitled ‘Debris to shelter’ or ‘Ruins to resiliency’.
Security was also close. In one area, nearly a hundred families lived in a collapsed football stadium because they were unable to return to their original homes, which had been washed away in a vast torrent of sludge and rocks. The donor party was surrounded in concentric circles by their own heavily armed embassy security teams as well as the M16-toting Philippine Army Special Forces—much to the alarm of the unsuspecting families, who were engaged in such threatening activities as doing the washing, collecting water and preparing the evening meal. Whatever else, it was vital, as one UN colleague explained during a meeting, that no one used the donor visit as an ‘opportunity to complain’.
Over dinner that night in the fake marble dining hall of a swanky hotel back in Davao, the donors declared themselves moved by the experience. The cash-strapped Spanish representative, remembering the good old days of Spain’s dominion, pledged a paltry amount on the spot—as much as the dire conditions of the Spanish economy allowed. Other in-principle emergency pledges were made—still well short of the total amount needed.
‘There seem to be a few people who need a house,’ observed one of the more astute and generous representatives.
But the word ‘emergency’ as experienced by a villager in Mindanao and as understood in the fluoro-lit corridors and behind the office partitions of bureaucratic power in Canberra, Oslo, Brussels and Washington were clearly very different. Five months after the typhoon had hit, contracts were still being drawn up and funding criteria finalised. As we finished our reports late that evening, one of my colleagues looked up mournfully from his computer. ‘I’ve been googling for half an hour and I can’t find any good jokes about donor visits to underfunded disasters,’ he said.
It was a strangely detached experience working to coordinate the humanitarian response. Overly zealous security restrictions meant that for the first few weeks we were unable to leave Davao, the main city of Mindanao—which had not been affected by the typhoon. The security rules were devised by someone who genuinely believed that we would be instantly captured and sold into captivity in order to fund the electoral aspirations of corrupt politicians. This was the fate suffered by an unfortunate Swiss birdwatcher, who had strayed, in hot pursuit of a rare and exotic ‘twitch’, into territory controlled by an insurgent group several thousand kilometres to the south.
We were stuck in an office overlooking the fake marble reception of an up-market hotel, where everything seemed like an elaborate and very earnest exercise rather than the real thing. We worked sixteen-hour days, seven days a week hunkered down in our office, attending meetings and gathering information remotely without actually seeing anything of the effects of the typhoon or talking to anyone who had first-hand experience. Below us, the crooner in the hotel restaurant played ‘Born free’ and the theme tune from
Superman
on his synthesiser.
After a week of being locked up, I decided I couldn’t legitimately do any more without seeing for myself what had happened. As I finally drove out of Davao on a wet, grey morning, the devastation that I had been reading and meeting about was immediately apparent. Torrential rain had continued to cause massive flooding and, while the roads were at the high point, some villages lower in the valley were flooded up to roof level. By the sides of the road, men and women had constructed makeshift shelters with tarpaulins over the portable frames of string beds, piled high with family possessions, and occasionally articles for sale. The family rooster would be tethered at a high point nearby, out of danger.
Lining the highway out of town, stark evangelical billboards in black and white added an apocalyptic edge to the sense of catastrophe:
MY WAY IS THE HIGHWAY.
—GOD
As we went on, it was clear that some aid had reached the people living in villages by the main roads, but it did not take much to find places that had received nothing. The floods and immensely strong winds had caused huge damage, and the landscape, under the grey clouds and incessant rain, evoked the Western Front in places—scarred earth, shattered trees and farms, the strewn wreckage of lives, homes and livelihoods across vast tracts of Southern Mindanao. The earth, deeply disturbed by years of mining and deforestation, had been churned by the typhoon. Where villages had stood, great mounds of mud, rock, and splintered wood remained.
Occasionally, as the rain stopped, the sound of chainsaws started as people began cutting up the debris and trying to re-make their homes. But these were few and far between—vast deforestation caused by the economic exploitation of Mindanao’s famous hardwood trees had finally led to a government-imposed ban on chainsaws. But even those that were in circulation came at a cost. At about twenty cents per plank, the cost of wood was unaffordable to many of the tenant farmers who had lost everything. In the absence of an effectively funded aid effort, some people had started to build back using what resources they had. But for the majority, most were living in pathetic lean-tos made of the debris and rubble of their former homes. Rusty and bent corrugated-iron sheets had been carefully twisted back into shape and secured with stones and rope, while tarpaulins and bits of wood provided cover for families huddling in the rain amid the desolation of their destroyed farmland.
LOST? MY WAY IS YOUR ROADMAP.
—GOD
And many lived by the side of the road because their land was still underwater. Hovels had sprung up alongside the main arterials—in some cases little more than tarpaulins wrapped around bed frames. In one ‘spontaneous settlement’ I entered, a well-meaning NGO had delivered a number of tents sent by a donor in the Middle East. Lightweight and made of non-waterproof canvas for arid climates, this ‘aid’ only made the situation worse.
Amid the chaos, destruction, and occasional signs of hope and reconstruction, I noticed again and again the neat, well-spaced triangular shelters in which the fighting cocks were kept. They were everything that, in many ways, the shelters provided during the relief effort were not. Understanding the territorial ego of the cockerels, the shelters were well-spaced, allowing for dignity, privacy and harmonious living. They were built on the high point of a hill and therefore not subject to flooding, and drainage trenches lined the huts in neat rows. Seed was scattered in designated areas to avoid crowding and confusion. In short, unlike the arrangements for humans, the arrangements for cocks met and even exceeded most humanitarian standards as set out in the field guides and handbooks of aid workers. But what these animals had, which many of their human counterparts clearly lacked, was an economic value.
FOLLOW ME.
—GOD
The god squad billboards listed a telephone number, and as we stalled in an intersection I rang up to find out whether the deity had any views on traffic congestion. A recorded message advised that the number was no longer attended.
With the flood waters receding, I decided to walk down from a ridge where World War II was commemorated by restaurants and plaster models of Japanese soldiers, and back through the streets choked with autorickshaws and jeepneys belching diesel fumes. I walked past corner stores and retail outlets selling pirated DVDs, clothes and food; shops with names like Jolly Ant and Pot Dog. I walked on past the great malls of the city—upper-class malls and middle-class malls—and deep into the bridge-side slum where, clustered round a mosque, there were autorickshaw repair shops deep in oil, and clouds of dark soot from coconut husks being converted into charcoal. The upper- and middle-class malls were deeply aspirational: Western goods at Western prices and modelled by Europeans. The centrepiece of one mall, beneath a fashion boutique whose gothic script announced that it was called Bum, was a set of plastic European manniquins acting out the family ideal. A blond, muscular male manniquin stood over a reclining, bikini-clad female manniquin, while two blue-eyed plastic toddlers played with equally synthetic toys in a plasticfantastic universe of fake beachside glamour. Further on, glass cabinets advertised Fairlane homes—designer pre-fabricated houses dominated by enormous garages where outsize models of American cars asserted that, in this miniaturised world, the occupants had arrived. A sleek young woman handed me a flyer. ‘Fairlane Homes,’ it said, ‘moving to a better future.’
But if these malls were the new commercial and cultural centres of Philippine social life, then the cockfighting arena represented the brutal and bloody opposite end of the spectrum. The ice-cold synthetic paradise of the shopping centres gave way to the death, dust, beer and cigarettes of the cock pit. Walking past the Matina Gallera, a large, octagonal wooden building on the way down from the ridge, I heard a massive roar of noise. A barrage of sound—male voices in unison—erupted from the Gallera. As I got closer, the sound stopped. There was complete silence again as another bout started amid the deep concentration of men absorbed in a blood contest. It was a sport so important that wealthy politicians were known to fly their favourite beasts by Lear jet to major derbies. One international competition organised by American and Filipino enthusiasts was won by an estimable bird from Louisiana known as ‘The Rapist’.