by Tom Bamforth
The tiny windows of my streets of Arrabal,
Where a young girl gives a smile;
I want to stare once again
At those eyes that fondle with a look.
In the toughest back alley, a song
Says its prayer of courage and of passion; A promise
And a sigh
Wiped away a tear of sadness, that singing.
But what passed for bohemian in Buenos Aires was essentially the profound malaise of economic collapse in a place that was—within recent memory—strikingly successful. In the ‘tough back alleys’, dancers strutted for endless hours in front of occasional tourists, and from somewhere within the grot and decay was the ever present dank sweetness of the evening’s weed. The San Tango Hotel was itself once a sturdy bourgeois home with elegant balconies and high ceilings. But gradually these pleasures wore thin—first the external window blind collapsed, leaving the room in pitch blackness. Then the electricity and the water went out simultaneously. I stumbled around trying to find my head torch in order to get dressed, and managed to feel my way downstairs in search of the owner. But she had left, locking the front door behind her, and I realised that I was trapped. There was no other way out and after I’d spent several hours sitting, waiting in the darkness, my phone rang.
‘Greetings from Geneva,’ said a friendly voice at the other end. ‘There’s been a typhoon in the Philippines—do you want to go to Mindanao?’
The magic word had been said. Of course I wanted to go to Mindanao—in my mind a complex and dangerous place and one interlinked with my earliest exhilarating exposure to Islamic civilisation. For many years while I was growing up in the Phillipines, my family home had been filled with furniture, lamps, tables and chairs whose unmistakable arabesque decoration hailed from Mindanao. Pictures on the walls showed Spanish Philippine life in the 1890s, especially ‘postprandial scenes in Manila’—exhausted Peninsulares smoking great cigars and being waited on by attentive liveried servants in the heavy tropical heat of the night. The sofa had an elevated section under which visitors could keep their fighting cocks cordially separated while being entertained with tea and polite conversation. A colourful woven Philippine cloth was used for picnics, and our unsuspecting guests suffered in uncomfortable silence when they were told mid-canapé that it was, in fact, a shroud. As a child, I had even turned up at a birthday party in aviator glasses and a leather jacket posing as a bonsai General Douglas MacArthur—a midget American Caesar and Liberator of the Philippines (as MacArthur styled himself) appearing before a group of unsuspecting infants.
Mindanao was, in the late 1970s, off-limits—home to a deadly conflict between communist insurgents, Muslim separatists who had never quite succumbed to Spanish or American rule, and the stupendous smarminess and corruption of the Marcos regime. It was a brutal anti-communist US satellite state that, in a postcolonial twist, ensured its support from the former colonial master by substantially funding US Republicans—the despotic trunk wagging the elephant of the Grand Old Party.
It was a relationship of mutual reliance and admiration tinged with an almost postcolonial regret. Massive US bases in Subic Bay outside Manila were deemed strategically vital during the Cold War while successive Philippine regimes, not least that of Marcos, relied on American support and funding for legitimacy. But there was a legacy of direct American rule too, on which US claims to be a liberal progressive force for newly independent countries largely rested—a claim that the Philippines had been created, to quote the journalist Stanley Kurnow, ‘in our own image’, and that the country was the product of benign US tutelage. This mutually reinforcing self-regard filled the Reagan–Marcos relationship; as one State Department official later mused, the American president regarded Marcos like ‘a hero from a bubble gum card he had collected as a kid’.
When my parents expressed their disapproval of the crew-cut conservatism of the regime and its US backers to an English colleague, she replied that they should simply ignore the ‘depredations of the Hottentot’. Hers was the aloof response of the older empire to the apparent crassness of the new. Ironically, her early career in colonial Africa had been cut short when her husband was eaten by a crocodile while serving as a British district commissioner.
In the toxic dictatorial days of anti-communism and Marcos, my parents’ liberalism was seen as an almost incendiary provocation. Accused of being pinkos and commies, over an unwise attempt to introduce Dostoevsky into the curriculum of the international school at which they taught, they became embroiled in a series of confrontations with rabidly anti-Russian, anti-communist authorities. This eventually culminated in a potentially dangerous altercation with the Philippines Long Distance Telephone Company over non-payment of an astronomical and largely fictitious bill. As the dispute escalated, threats were made to have the family’s passports confiscated and visas revoked, and suggestions of implication in some communist plot were fabricated. An influential member of the Manila elite came to the rescue. In exchange for safe passage out of the country, my father would preside over the Philippines Long Distance Telephone Company Junior Executive Public Speaking Competition. This was a fate compounded by the fact that all the junior executives on the make were required to memorise and perform the same speech—José Rizal’s speech supporting the independence of the Philippines, which begins with the faux-rhetorical question: ‘What is a man?’
My unexpected return to the Philippines thirty years later found an altogether different country and circumstance. Typhoon Bopha, known locally as Typhoon Pablo, had smashed through the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, causing massive devastation. More than six million people had been affected, nearly one million left without homes, as the typhoon made landfall in Mindanao with wind speeds of up to 260 kilometres per hour. Driving through the wreckage when I arrived on the island, I saw palm trees that had been splintered like giant toothpicks, forests scattered across farms, fields and waterways, leaving roads blocked, gardens torn to shreds and houses smashed. In one area, Andaap, severe flooding caused giant boulders to wash downstream, diverting the local river—sweeping away entire villages in its path. Two thousand people died in the fast-moving river of rock. As the waters receded, they left a moonscape scar ripped through the farms and forests of Mindanao.
I arrived on the second rotation, replacing a colleague who had been there when the typhoon hit, as an emergency coordinator. The response had been going for a month but, as my predecessor said as we parted at the airport: ‘Good luck—it’s like swimming in treacle.’ And he was exactly right—the humanitarian response that we were attempting to coordinate had all but stalled. Despite the endless hours I spent in meetings, listening to overawed government representatives and pushing donors, interest in the Philippines had largely tailed off. Nobody was interested in funding the response; international NGOs sat ready and waiting to gear up but had to make do with the pathetic resources that were slowly trickling in.
Major international organisations and their leading responders had circled for a brief moment after the typhoon, but the old hands had seen the writing on the wall early on and returned quickly to their strategic locales in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and New York. I found a note in a pile of old documents calling for the exalted names of international disaster response, O’Boosie and Panico. Representing major UN and NGO institutions, they were considered the only men capable of handling such a large-scale operation. But by the time I arrived, the heady days of the O’Boosie–Panico disaster response dream team in the Philippines were a distant memory and the long slog of another underfunded and half-forgotten response was left to lesser mortals.
‘I know you’ve lost your house, but have a laminated sack,’ mocked one of my colleagues in frustration at the deeply substandard relief supplies his agency was forced to distribute. The typhoon had occurred at exactly the wrong time—in early December, just as government, media, civil society and international donors were beginning to wind things up for the year. A CN
N reporter arrived in Mindanao for just two days before being dispatched back to Bangkok, while several NGOs pooled funds to fly in the BBC, which didn’t even have the budget to cover the event itself. Christmas in the irredeemably Catholic Philippines combined with the seasonal media black hole effectively blocked out any immediate coverage of the typhoon, after which it had become old news. Donors, already disengaged, had even less incentive to respond, even as heavy post-typhoon rains continued to cause widespread flooding—leading to the further displacement of 40,000 already homeless people. They camped by roadsides, saving basic possessions and tethering their prized fighting cocks to the barriers that lined the roads and highways, or took refuge in ‘bunkhouses’—shabby plywood constructions unconnected to water, sanitation or drainage, which housed ten people to a room.
Trying to raise funds, I returned to Manila to meet with donors and to try to impress upon them the clear and immediate needs that still existed. From the wrecked coconut plantations and apocalyptic rockscape of Andaap, I was plunged into the heart of the Manila business district—a mini Singapore surrounded by high security, clusters of grey skyscrapers separated by unending, immobile lines of traffic. Through the barbed wire and concrete walls lining the freeway on the way in from the airport, glamorous half-European models looked out at the passing traffic advertising Pizza Hut or the latest kitchen range from enormous billboards bolted onto the roofs of the city’s vast slums. At one particularly intractable intersection dominated by a tangle of telephone wires and yet more concrete flyovers, a grim billboard dominated the surroundings.
WE STRONGLY SUPPORT LETHAL INJECTION
It was advertising an insecticide. Further on, celebrating the overthrow of the Marcos regime by Corazon Aquino’s People Power Movement, another banner read:
THE FILIPINO IS WORTH DYING FOR
The legend was written in the hand of Aquino’s assassinated father, who had returned to the Philippines from exile in the US to campaign against the authoritarian corruption and cronyism of the Marcos regime. All over the city, neon signs on the tops of buildings flashed with the self-promoting religiosity of the American bank note: In God We Trust. Along the Manila’s once stunning palm-fringed bay stood Asia’s largest shopping mall. The enormous icerink at its centre cooled the boutiques for miles around as the middle classes learned the delicate arts of figure skating and ice-ballet. Located near some of Manila’s extensive slums, this was—in the disturbingly euphemistic words of Imelda Marcos, who still wields influence from her seat in the Philippine senate—‘a challenging transition from a traditional order to a progressive humanist society.’
While ‘the Filipino’ may have been worth dying for, they were certainly not, according to the donors I met, worth funding. Racing between offices in the small thicket of plateglass towers housing embassies and United Nations offices in the heart of Manila’s financial district, I found virtually identical unphased and unresponsive reactions to my pleas for assistance. Hermetically sealed behind bomb-proof doors, metal detectors and armed guards, diplomats and donors looked down on the humid, smog-filled city below. They were even further removed from it by the intense cold and thin air of viciously air-conditioned offices—a bloodless arctic stillness in the middle of South-East Asia.
‘Shouldn’t we see Typhoon Bopha as an opportunity?’ I was asked in one office. The destruction of farms, houses and livelihoods along the Mindanao coast had swept away the potentially annoying ‘human element’ in future plans for beach resorts and mass tourism. Another international donor went into paroxysms of pleasure when I showed a handout which, quite by accident, had a picture with their logo on it. We should be promoting the private sector, someone else told me, instead of seeking aid ‘handouts’, while a man from Iowa instructed me about how he spent his holidays out on his farm with a chainsaw in hand and there was ‘nothing to it’. What this meant I never really learned—after a long discussion about the virtues of self-reliance, I was told the US didn’t fund United Nations humanitarian funding appeals anyway. Bush-era prejudices clearly survived in the lower reaches of the American administration. Crestfallen, I declined the offer of a frozen burrito and made my way out.
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’, ‘C
anadian 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’.