I spent yesterday on the road visiting people in informal settlements affected by typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng a year almost to the day after the disasters struck. The Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) coordinated by the World Bank in the latter part of last year concluded that the damage done by these two typhoons amounted to some 4.4 billion dollars or 2.7% of GDP. With regard to the victims, whose homes were inundated and in some cases washed away, it concluded that ' the vast majority of damage to housing stock was concentrated in the informal sector, so reconstruction means providing better alternatives for informal settlers', so I also wanted to meet representatives of the local authorities affected to see how things were going on that front. The vision that was painted at the PDNA meetings was of a golden opportunity to invest in medium rise, adequate accommodation in the urban context, giving people the chance of a decent life based on a place to live close to where they work. In the past, by contrast, the approach taken has always been to acquire some land out in the rural outer limits of the affected municipalities and set up single-room, semi-permanent housing in barrack like rows, to which the many unwanted squatterscan be moved from their makeshift shanties on stilts over the choked up waterways or outside the flood barriers on the shores of Lake Laguna. The fact that we are still funding NGO projects building those new homes in the middle of nowhere a year on after the disaster, while many of the victims of the typhoon are still living in tents at the edge of the construction sites, is already indicative of the fact that the bright new vision isn't materialising yet and that even the old-fashioned solution has been taking its time.
It is interesting to visit the palaces of local government on the same day that you visit shanty areas and the new camp-like settlement for the displaced. It does not have the same grotesque bathos as the displaced persons camps down in Maguindanao, where you can see pathetic rows of tent dwellings under the shadow of the palatial municipal palaces built for themselves by the Ampatuan family before the grizzly murder of some seventy female members of a rival family and accompanying journalists last year, just a month on from the typhoons in fact, led to their, possibly not so very permanent, demise. But you are in a different world from that of the shanty-dwellers. In the latter the first thing that strikes you is that everywhere there are children, hundreds and hundreds, splashing in the polluted waterways, sitting on their mothers' laps, quarrelling, playing, laughing, shouting crying, all around you. Women have ten, a community leader tells me, that's normal. Five is the minimum. I always feel a special unhappiness inside on these occasions, because to see children should be a cause for joy, always, but when I see this demographic supernova exploding around me in these cramped and miserable spaces, my thoughts are different - I see the problems these people face and the nightmare of the future their children may face and I wonder why it is so hard to make it easier for people to have smaller families as well as better lives in other ways. Which of course brings me back to the PDNA and its vision of a better urban environment for slum-dwellers emerging in the wake of the typhoons.
Talking to mayors and their staff tells a consistent story. Every local government is an island, doing its own thing in its own localised way to deal with the people they refer to as squatters who are now also known as Ondoy victims. Some mayors have in fact got the message on 'going high-rise' or 'densification' of human settlement, but they lack the financial wherewithal. As with other sectors, the responsibility is given to local government, while policy remains with the centre, or lost in a messy vortex of competing agencies, commissions and regulatory authorities, out of which new directives, acts of goverment, executive and administrative orders pour in their own bizarre, uncoordinated flood, while funding for the kind of large-scale transformation of the urban habitat is more like a dried-up river bed.
Up in the hills at the back end of Antipolo City, beyond where the surfaced road runs out lies the resettlement site of Pinugay, a sloping muddy field on the edge of a village, on which three or four stern rows of closely packed one-room dwellings, each with a shiny tin roof glinting in the sun that gathering rain clouds threaten to hide at any moment, line muddy unfinished roads. We sit down with a group of women in one of the tents where the people waiting to move into their houses once they have been completed have lived for months on end. When we ask her about how the experience of the flood and then this uprooting has affected her a young mother of five starts to cry. I try to imagine how it must be to go through what she has. She lived in an insecure slum, but had a job in a computer shop in comfortable Green Hills, a place where she could dream of a different future. Now she has been moved back into this landscape of rural poverty, while her husband is working on a construction site down in Cainta and can only come home at weekends.
So here she is in this big muddy camp in the middle of nowhere and I find I have nothing to say. If I have a lesson to learn it is the one I re-learn every time I go to the field, which is that if you listen toomuch to the macro-economists talking at meetings you start getting into that Marie-Antoinette way of thinking the meetings in nice hotels and offices always seem to induce. And it is easy in those meetings to find solutions to all the problems. But when you get out of the office and then out of the car or four wheel drive and start to walk a bit to where the people are who all the talking is about, then you realise you don't actually have much more to offer than your good intentions.
