Hope

Many of the areas battered by Tropical Storm Urduja (Kai Tak) last weekend were the same areas devastated by Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) four years ago. Reading reports about Urduja making landfall, I emailed my new friend Joanna Sustento, a Yolanda survivor who still lives in Tacloban, to ask if she was OK. She replied that she was in Manila and her flight back to Leyte had been cancelled. “I was really anxious and worried by the fact that I wasn’t there and I didn’t know how strong the storm was. Sa ngayon, no wind and rain anymore but no electricity. Hope it gets restored asap.”

I met Joanna on a recent trip to Leyte, and I cannot but admire her strength, her fortitude in the face of such immeasurable loss – she lost her parents, her eldest brother and his wife and child (another brother had also survived) in over two hours of an epic battle with the wind and the rain and the surge that claimed an undetermined thousands of lives.

Joanna was just 22 then, and what she has done and become in the last four years is remarkable. She had considered moving to Cebu; what was there to live for in Tacloban? But it was her home, so she stayed. She did not return to their house, but now stays with her grandmother in their ancestral home. She currently works with Greenpeace’s Climate Justice and Liability campaign, telling people and companies and governments the Yolanda story, putting a “face to an abstract concept like climate change, empowering communities through storytelling and changing mindsets for them to know their rights and be moved to hold governments and corporations accountable on climate.”

Earlier this year, she went to the Arctic to support People Vs. Arctic Oil, where Greenpeace Norway and Nature & Youth sued the Norwegian government for awarding new licences to drill for oil in the Arctic. She was invited to join the peaceful protests to “call out companies and their government, showing them what happens when profit is prioritized over people.”

Last month, she was in Bonn for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 23) for workshops on climate litigation – “how countries all over the world are using the law to confront big polluters/fossil fuel companies. The ongoing climate and human rights petition here in the Philippines was also discussed in that event. I was invited to speak in behalf of the people who are severely impacted by climate change, and how climate change violates our basic human rights to a safe, clean, healthy and quality life.”

Last year, on the third anniversary of Yolanda, Joanna wrote a moving and powerful piece on her Yolanda experience. Beyond the heart-wrenching account of how she lost her family and everything they had, she sounds a call to action that is a bright ray of hope – a young person who had lived through unimaginable challenges has turned around and used that to fight for a greater cause, a cause that impacts the life of each one of us living on planet Earth. Joanna did not just survive Yolanda; she has triumphed.

* * *

A year after the onslaught of Haiyan, Leyte was anticipating the landfall of Hagupit? – ?another super typhoon. I can not articulate how exhausting it is to feel so helpless as I waited for the damage it would bring to my city.

Then I thought, is this it? Is this all we can do? To wait for another super typhoon to happen? Are we just going to record the casualties? The injured? The missing? Are we just going to wait for relief and aid from foreign countries every time we are met with catastrophes? Are we just going to rebuild and rehabilitate every time super typhoons such as Haiyan wreck our homes, buildings and livelihood?

I am done waiting. I do not want to see my whole world fall apart right before my eyes once again. And I could never bring myself to think about my children, and my children’s children, bearing the agony and trauma of what my family experienced. Homes, buildings and livelihoods can always be rebuilt, but no amount of money can ever bring back the thousands of lives lost and the emotional turmoil caused by these dreaded calamities.

We have already survived the worst, it is time we do more than just adapt and endure. Haiyan may have changed our lives, transformed our principles and altered our priorities, but we needed that change. Just like a caterpillar breaking out from its chrysalis, it endures the painful process to become a butterfly and achieve its beauty. We have to know that embracing our own metamorphosis can be extreme, but definitely worth the pain.

It took three extreme, furious waves and raging winds to annihilate our homeland. It took more than 10,000 lives lost and over 14 million people displaced for the whole world to finally be able to put a human face on the climate crisis.

For the longest time, climate change issues have always been about theoretical studies and scientific researches. But when Haiyan spread its fury and we were stripped of all that we had and everything that we were, it made us realize that the long-standing issue of climate change poses a major threat and has a price to pay, and it is not a small one. Haiyan is an example of what’s to come. Climate change is not just statistics and numbers; it is already about us, the people.

The climate crisis is as real as a father who has worked all his life to provide for his family, only to wake up one day and realize his livelihood has been torn apart. It is as real as a mother bearing the agony of looking for her missing husband all day, and sleeping beside the dead bodies of her children at night. It is as real as a child who is looking forward to an education only to find out his school is damaged and he can not study anymore.

The climate crisis is as real as the thousands of families who lost their homes and livelihood? – who until today are living in makeshift homes, struggling to make ends meet, with little to no food and clean water.

It is as real as the thousands of victims who perished? – the accounted and the unaccounted. It is as real as the thousands of survivors who lost their families? – and with them, their dreams and ambitions. The climate crisis is as real as the Filipino who has been adapting to its effects all his life, but is now taking a stand to intervene and fight for his basic human right to a safe, clean and healthy environment; the right to have a peaceful and quality life, with no fear or worry about the future adverse impacts of climate change.

Haiyan was apocalyptic. It was the strongest typhoon ever recorded in history. Nevertheless, we Filipinos, known for our courage and resilience, were able to rise. Of course, with the whole world coming to our rescue and the adaptive nature embedded in the Filipino culture, we were able to push ourselves forward despite unprecedented circumstances. However, now the real question is: are we still going to wait for another Haiyan before we take action? I want people to be aware of the things happening on our side of the world and that the decisions we make today will also affect the choices of future generations. We only have one planet, one home; let us not take it for granted.

It is high time that we Filipinos be known not only for being victims of tragedies. We should prove to the world? – ?and more importantly to ourselves? – that although we were left with nothing but the trauma of wrecked homes, shattered livelihoods and death, our story does not end there. Every cut and dent signifies our struggle, every bruise and scar marks how we are reborn. The storm may have given us an inconceivable heartbreak, but it has refined us and it has given us the resiliency to continue our life’s story and make it a triumphant one.