Rebuilding

Slowly but surely, Super Typhoon Yolanda is receding from the headlines, and attention is shifting from relief to the long and arduous task of rebuilding.

Clearing that mountain of rubble alone could take as long as the construction of new structures. Coconut plantations cannot be revived until fallen trees and homes have been cleared and the mud leveled off.

Rebuilding calls for resources on a scale that can be provided only with a lot of help from friends – the kind that requires long-term commitment. Albay Gov. Joey Salceda estimates that the reconstruction effort will cost $9.2 billion. The biggest reconstruction aid commitment so far is $1 billion from the World Bank.

We must remember that we’re not the only developing country in need, and foreign aid can quickly shift when the next apocalyptic disaster strikes elsewhere in the world.

We must also remember that the international community is still deeply involved in relief and rebuilding in the other Philippine disaster zones, now seemingly forgotten: the earthquake-devastated Bohol and parts of Cebu, and the recently besieged Zamboanga City.

There’s such a thing as donor fatigue, and it can set in even before the horrific images of death and destruction are no longer on prime-time news.

Our biggest single aid donor, the United States, is reassuring the Philippines of sustained assistance for rebuilding.

“I’m not worried about any abrupt drawdown of foreign aid,” Jeremy Konyndyk told me last Saturday. “That’s not going to go away anytime soon.”

While foreign relief teams have started scaling down their presence in the disaster areas, “departure is the wrong way to look at it… it’s not going to be a departure but transition,” Konyndyk said.

Konyndyk heads OFDA, or the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). He arrived in Manila Friday night from the US to discuss the transition phase with Philippine officials.

The Americans emphasize that the multinational aid effort would simply follow the lead of the Philippine government, so a rehabilitation plan must be presented soon to the donor community.

Rubble clearing alone – described by Konyndyk as “a massive effort” – cannot get underway until foreign teams with the equipment and knowhow get guidelines from both local and national agencies. There are laws governing property ownership, for example, which might be violated if an American team comes in with heavy equipment and starts clearing ruined structures on private land.

Typhoon victims should hope this counterpart input expected from the Philippine side would move faster than the preliminary studies that investors looked for in the public-private partnership program. The long wait for those studies was one of the reasons for the tepid investor response to the PPP.

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Apart from worrying about the sustainability of foreign aid for the expensive rebuild, another concern is restoring self-reliance among typhoon victims.

“You don’t want foreign aid to stay forever,” Konyndyk told me.

Many typhoon victims agree, stressing in interviews that while they welcomed emergency assistance in their hour of need, they preferred stable livelihood opportunities to dole-outs.

Al Dwyer, OFDA principal regional advisor for East Asia and the Pacific, has spent time in devastated Tacloban and notes that victims are moving to get back on their feet as quickly as the ruined circumstances will allow.

“People down there are very energetic. There’s a lot of self-help,” Dwyer told me. “They’re rebuilding on their own. The Philippines has always been like that. That’s a positive.”

Dwyer, who flew to Manila from his office in Bangkok a day after the monster howler struck, compares the Yolanda-ravaged areas to earthquake-devastated Haiti. The difference, Dwyer says, is that “Haiti has no government as coordinated and strong as in the Philippines.”

Before critics scoff, Dwyer also quickly points out that local governments in Tacloban and the other hard-hit areas could not respond effectively to the disaster because many of the personnel were themselves victims. “They were wiped out, too,” he said.

Dwyer’s job covers 48 countries. “I just do this full time, from one disaster to another,” he says as he points out that the one in the Visayas “has been a massive disaster.”

Americans aren’t the only foreigners with kind words for the disaster response of the Aquino administration.

“You have to be patient,” Thai Ambassador Prasas Prasasvinitchai told me when I ran into him last week at the Incident Command Center in Cebu’s Mactan Air Base. “I’m sure the Philippine government is doing its best.”

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USAID is giving priority to the provision of more permanent shelters and livelihood to typhoon victims.

Cash-for-work programs are being drawn up. A “transitional shelter program” uses galvanized sheets that can be easily put together. Dwyer said up to 60 percent of the rubble in Tacloban is reusable and is currently being used for rebuilding homes.

OFDA has brought in 20 “subject matter experts” from Bangkok and Washington to focus on specific aspects such as food supply, logistics, shelter, water and sanitation, and protection for women, children and the elderly.

USAID has 50 foreign service officers involved in long-term assistance. “We’ve really spared no expense to help,” Dwyer said.

He explained that assistance initially focused on Tacloban because aid workers believe urban dwellers used to the comforts of modern life tend to have weaker coping mechanisms for disaster than the underprivileged who live in marginalized communities.

A challenge at this point is how to persuade displaced residents to return to their ruined communities and participate in the rebuilding.

The resources and willingness to help are there from the international community, the OFDA officials say, but the government must lead the way, with Konyndyk emphasizing, “You need to have some clear leadership for this to work.”

“The government can tell us what’s good, what’s not,” Dwyer said. “It needs to happen very quickly.”