|
 The choppers have yet to drop off any aid, and the desperate
residents of Marabut are starting to wonder if they ever will.
"We feel totally forgotten," local government official Mildred
Labado said, staring across the ruins of her once-picturesque town.
Medical supplies are so short here that the injured are covering
their wounds with masking tape instead of gauze. Women are using
shattered wooden planks of homes for cooking fires.
"Help me!" some children in Marabut shouted to a journalist. "Put me
on Facebook!"
"People are still in a state of shock," Labado said. "They don't
know what to do. They don't know where to start. They're only
thinking about survival, about food and water. They can't even begin
to think about what comes next."
Marabut is across San Pedro and San Pablo Bay from Tacloban, the
eastern Philippine city where Typhoon Haiyan wreaked its most
gruesome destruction last week, killing hundreds of people. The
storm reduced both Marabut and Tacloban to grim junkyards of rubble,
but here the death toll was much lower.
Mayor Percival Ortillo Jr. said every one of Marabut's 15,946 homes
was destroyed in the typhoon, and more than 2,000 people were
injured, but only 20 people are confirmed dead and eight others are
missing. He said the death toll was relatively low because most
people managed to take refuge in concrete buildings — the only
structures standing amid a sea of wooden debris — and five caves set
high in hills.
The United Nations says the storm affected 11 million people in all,
more than 670,000 of whom lost their homes. The enormity of the task
of helping them all has pressed the resources of the Philippines
hard.
Survivors in all the worst-hit areas have complained that aid has
been far too slow to come. On Thursday morning for the first time,
pallets of international aid lined the grass runway at Tacloban. In
Guiuan, another blown-out city east of Marabut, U.S. Osprey
helicopters dropped off French medics and boxes of American food aid
in a soccer field. But far less aid has come to Marabut, a four-hour
drive from Guiuan, the closest town.
"Only places like Tacloban are getting attention," Labado said
Thursday. "But we are also victims. We also need help."
Shortly after she spoke, a helicopter landed in a small field in
Marabut for the first time, and hundreds of people rushed to the
spot. But soldiers aboard only disgorged a few sacks of rice to
supply a small military unit occupying a ruined home to boost
security.
[to top of second column] |
Minutes later, three trucks filled with sacks of food from the
provincial government arrived outside the destroyed municipal
headquarters, a two-story building with its roof and windows blown
off that now tilts forward slightly. Crowds quickly surrounded the
delivery, and a rifle-toting soldier wearing a belt of grenades
across his chest stood atop dozens of sacks of rice.
Ortillo welcomed the delivery, but said it was enough only to last a
day or two. "It's just not enough," he said.
Fear that supplies will run out have left the town on edge. When a
mayoral aide handed out a plastic bag filled with buns to a small
crowd of people, they nearly ripped it apart. A few of the town's
water taps still function, but people are afraid to drink the water
and use it only for washing.
The long-term future looks equally grim.
More than 80 percent of the population in this region makes a living
from coconut products, and tens of thousands of denuded palm trees
were literally snapped in half or uprooted by winds as high as 315
kph (195 mph) — including the trees on vast hills that surround Marabut on
all sides but the sea.
The trees will take five to 10 years to grow back, if not more,
Ortillo said. The typhoon also destroyed fishing boats, another
important source of income.
"The real problem is the people here have no more means of making a
living. Their livelihoods have been taken away from them," Ortillo
said.
For now, people are salvaging what they can from what is left of
their homes and placing these shards of their lives outside the
wreckage: family photographs, trophies, seashells and soiled teddy
bears.
[Associated
Press; TODD PITMAN]
Copyright 2013 The Associated
Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
