By Pheona Camille M. Parido
BA Communication Arts
University of the Philippines Tacloban College
I was thinking out loud about how much I love the yellow-white lampshade in my room one evening when all of my nieces and nephews started laughing. They all come from Lower Caynaga, a barangay in the municipality of Lope de Vega, Northern Samar, and are spending their summer vacation with us in Calbayog.
I have always adored warm ambient lighting, but apparently, the yellow lampshade reminds the kids of the blackouts during and after tropical storms and typhoons in their hometown. This is when all of them would gather around the lampara, eat on a hagikhik leaf, and talk about anything that could distract them, either from the ongoing wails of the ferocious wind or from the deafening silence of the night during weeks without electricity. I didn’t quite understand what exactly was funny about these, but their laughter made me chuckle too, while furrowing my eyebrows.
All provinces of Samar—Northern Samar, Eastern Samar, and Samar (formerly Western Samar)—are listed among the top 100 places vulnerable to the exacerbating destructive impact of climate change, according to The Cross Dependency Initiative (XDI). Yet, for some reason, my relatives and the people from Lope de Vega seem to be troubled with heavy rains, flash floods, and landslides more frequently than we do here in Calbayog. Storms hit them one to three times a year. And living near the river means that a mere heavy rain can trigger floods that can block the road and isolate the place.
The children continued to talk about other ‘funny’ scenarios they often encounter during storms, such as the ‘agaway ispat’ or the struggle over the flashlight, the gloomy budol fight next to stinky rescued pigs, and the ‘gasud-gasoray’ or the neighborhood clamor during evacuation. My niece imitated one of their neighbors: “Hoy, pakadi na kam sa unhan kay tigbaraha na (Hey, come over here now, it’s about to flood)!” Most of the time, people need to leave their houses and seek higher ground when they are faced with the threat of flooding.
I asked why they don’t just stay at our uncle’s two-story house, but I was met with yet another question: “Kay makatakas pa kami (Can we still be able to escape)?” This made me fall silent. “Kun didto kami nagbakwit san Usman, makatakas pa kami (If that had been where we evacuated during Usman, would we still have been able to escape)?” they added. It was at this moment when their faces grew a little more solemn.
It was Tropical Storm Usman in 2018 that seared painful experiences into the hearts and minds of the people of Lope de Vega, making it one of their scariest nightmares to this day. It was a relatively less windy storm, but the incessant downpour with large, heavy droplets caused the water to reach up to two stories high (20 feet). This deluge resulted in large-scale crop failures as well as serious damage to homes, furniture, appliances, and personal belongings. Many residents returned to find their houses completely destroyed and their pets and livestock killed and swept away by floodwaters.
For Lalai, my 15-year-old niece, the worst part of every storm is the evacuation, because this is when all her old trauma would come rushing back. “Maapo ba amon balay (Will our house be washed away)?” is the usual question that races through her mind while she helps move all the valuable possessions they can relocate. For those who are less fortunate and have no place to store their belongings, there is no other choice but to accept the possibility of losing everything and starting all over again.
Lalai was only nine years old during Tropical Storm Usman. And wading through the knee-deep, chilly water, carrying heavy objects amidst overthinking, panic, and fear, was overwhelmingly traumatizing for her. At around 9 p.m., the nearby river began to rise within a matter of minutes. They had to climb a hill, but the original path was already blocked by a landslide. So, they were forced to look for an alternative route and scale a steep cliff near a larger river.
They hiked up a new narrow trail less than a foot and a half wide, where one wrong step could send them plummeting into the raging river below. In their group was our nanay, who was one of those who nearly fell. There were also other elderly people and a woman who had just given birth, carrying her baby in a blanket wrapped around her neck. While all this was happening, the entire municipality was plunged into darkness, and we lost any sort of communication to any of them.
Thankfully, by midnight, everyone had safely reached the top. They set up tents using tarpaulins and layered makeshift mats using coconut fronds. “Mahulos tas mahagkot ura-ura. Pag hubas, makikita mo damo ka na samad tas tunok (It was wet and freezing. When the water subsides, you will see you already have lots of cuts and puncture wounds),” Lalai recalled.
The most peculiar circumstance was that some of the bold and desperate individuals, even little girls, ate a grilled snake to appease their hunger. Eventually, Lalai and the other kids were able to sleep for a few hours, while the adults, like our aunt, spent the night swatting mosquitoes away from the sleeping children.
From these narratives, I think it is important to recognize that, apart from having a higher chance of dying, girls and women experience worse sufferings during natural disasters because of cultural limitations on mobility. We often lack important survival skills, such as climbing, swimming, and hunting, because they are more typically taught to males and are perceived as too masculine for women. Also, because we are traditionally regarded as the caregivers, we not only have to look after ourselves but also after the children and other vulnerable members.
Meanwhile, for a mother like my Aunt Mary Rose, it’s not the flood itself but the aftermath that brings a different set of insufferable torture—specifically because of the strenuous labor of cleaning. Once the floodwaters recede, a putrid, viscous mud that clings to everything it touches, even the walls, is left behind. At some point, they stopped trying to renovate or beautify what little remained undamaged because it became pointless to invest time and money into home improvements and decorations when they knew it would all be destroyed and washed away by the next flood.
The municipality already struggles with recurring power interruptions and limited access to clean water. And the frequent, severe flooding does nothing but intensify these issues. They are often bereft of electricity and clean water for extended periods, sometimes lasting for months. Because of this, it became standard practice for them to use floodwaters for washing clothes and cleaning homes, despite the risk of catching diseases like leptospirosis, which has already caused more deaths in the municipality.
After natural disasters, basic necessities become luxuries, and basic necessities for girls and women become more luxurious than luxury itself. It’s rare for residents to receive relief unique to female health and hygiene needs, like sanitary napkins. And this leaves many of them having to adapt and improvise for themselves. Some would use pantyliners for longer times in an attempt to conserve them, while others would make menstrual pads out of scrap fabrics washed in flood water. Both of which can be uncomfortable and unsafe.
During times like these, it really is easy to glean the great moral and intellectual sinew of girls and women. My nanay, for one, built our family an evacuation center on top of the hill—a small kubo made of coco lumber and sawali—that has saved several other families from being drenched in the rain while waiting for the storm to pass. A senior high school teacher also taught and encouraged her students to make recycled life jackets using six 1.5-liter soft drink bottles, inserted and stitched into a rice sack, with slings repurposed from unused bags.
Here are two of the students using their recycled life jackets to float on the flood that was triggered not by a typhoon but by a shear line in November 2023:
Many girls and women indeed triumph over tragedies and emerge as active leaders and innovators in the face of adversity. But ultimately, while other Filipino communities are already focused on or celebrated for progressively recovering from major disasters they experienced, many of them in the province and rural areas are still stuck in an endless loop of destruction and rebuilding. Their trauma has become a curse that is being passed on to the children and future generations. It’s never healing, only compounded. Until now, for many of them, it is still a mystery how to ‘bounce back’ and maintain some measure of normalcy when each effort to recover is disrupted by yet another catastrophe. xx
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