Made it to Cebu

Photo: Jodie Willard

We left Tacloban today and flew to Cebu after an extremely productive, yet devastating, couple of days. It's pretty tough to comprehend the destruction that this storm caused--on par with the Moore, OK tornadoes but in a vastly larger area. Power lines are all dangling from the air, there is no running water, timber from houses look like matchsticks and they blanket the ground for as far as you can see. There's no food or water to to be had on the island other than the bits that are being distributed so people are leaving by the plane and boatload to refugee camps in Cebu. Many people are literally starving. At one point we saw a food truck distribution line that must have gone on for a mile. When we walked down an alley to give some food out to a family thinking we could remain largely inconspicuous, we were instantly swarmed by another 50 or so people and unfortunately didn't have enough to go around.

Our night consisted of a meal of MREs under flashlight in a seriously damaged Leyte Park Hotel which has become a hub of humanitarian activity. Tents and hammocks are set up in every flat part of the yard and in any trees that are still standing. I know people say the aid efforts have been slow to arrive and help the people (although logically when you think about it, it makes sense as orgs have to organize personnel, supplies, and equipment from all over the world and try to get it all into the same small space--in this case an island chain--at the same time when the airports and seaports are all damaged as are the staff who work in them) but it sure is here now. The hum of generators can be heard all night as people are frantically making their plans for the next day.

Jodie somehow managed to get us into a room, which of course didn't have electricity or water, and inside it looked like everything had been left just as it was when the storm hit--like the people who were there 10 days before left and never came back.

In its previous state, the hotel would have surely been an amazing place. The rooms had amazing views and I took my place out on the deck and managed to sleep outside until it started raining on me in the early part of the morning.

I will try to make some sense of what we saw and heard in the hospital visits we made yesterday and how it is that these people have such amazingly positive outlooks on things. But I'm not quite there yet. Still baffles me.