The #Tacloban experience of #Haiyan / #Yolanda is both challenging and fraught with danger. Within the context of a world community slowly becoming more aware of the diminishing validity of certain combines that still keep going through the very same motions of guiding and leading this planet's population into their perceived state of well being.
It cannot be overemphasized that the new normal will have to incorporate the very resources with which to nourish disaster preparedness, risk prevention and response. In the Tacloban experience, many governments opted to donate directly to a lot of towns outside of Tacloban and if possible, in an incognito manner whereas it is public knowledge in that area that more or less tens of thousands died in the Tacloban tragedy and only measly 20s or 50s or a few hundreds perished in the other places.
Months after #Yolanda, the stench of death still hang in the air, no one will be able to contest that. How many in Tacloban and in the provinces hit got their lives back really in terms of power supply, food, children being able to go back to their classrooms, people getting back to their livelihood... a terrible statistic to swallow but the reality is there, glaring and accusing.
For some, the acceptable assumption was to provide succor to those people that were supposedly left behind in the gargantuan efforts to resuscitate Tacloban. However the resulting product was the opposite of those altruistic intentions. When fires started happening in the United Nations donated tent homes, the predicament of a people who were said to be receiving the lion's share of disaster and humanitarian aid became exposed to one and all. Thousands still living in tents long after the calamity and to be honest, not only the fires but scores of other causes kept killing the survivors. It was not a blessing for some to have survived. In the throes of death post-disaster, they should have been thinking what a curse to have lived through all that bedlam and sham.
All the fanfare about construction projects getting bogged down by corruption, complaints at the highest levels by rehabilitation managers of the stiff resistance of key national leaders to pushing the disaster-hit locality towards fuller and better recovery was not just hype. These were real circumstance that were happening as if the nonchalance and cold treatment of the early days of post-#Yolanda were not enough.
That the Taclobanons have not really been truly helped, but have instead become the butt of too much aggrandizement and enrichment by some sectors, the shameless public infighting within the public sector, the frustration of many who have the real desire to be of help not out of great and grand ideas but out of new approaches and ways of dealing with old problems that have never been fully understood is the loss of the world community.
In the end, the cliches and all the damned rhetoric will apply, indeed it will not just be #Haiyan, or other much vaunted mega disasters like Japan's. But cliches and rhetoric do not help and lighten the day for the victims in Tacloban and elsewhere that there was real catastrophe and not sheer descriptions in paper and oratory.
What it cannot be helped to be preached is that with the people of the world shifting their own personal paradigms, isn't it clear enough that the leaders attending ASEM and future other events like this try at least to go with the flow?
For true leaders at heart, it is really sad to be clearly left behind, albeit still talking and writing voluminous diaries of things past and future, holding on to spoils and many other things unpleasant. That's the danger.
Shifting gears and getting hands really, really dirty might get the rehabilitation and resurging development in Tacloban clearly going in more truer terms. That is the real challenge and heaven not forbid, it might even cleanse some soul...
Clue #1:
A Philippine scientist and a Russian counterpart argued who among them had the lowest salary and worst treatment in the world.
Clue #2 - 400:
Please find out for yourself, it might just be right beside you.
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