GUIUAN - Generally, being woken up at the crack of dawn to your neighbour hammering away frantically does not make for a good morning. Here in Guiuan, well, it's still quite startling but once you remember where you are, it's actually quite comforting.

It's nearly three weeks since Super Typhoon Haiyan slammed into the Visayas region of the Philippines and the relief efforts are still going strong. The hammering of roofs being fixed, grinding of trucks removing debris and murmur of neighbours greeting each other as they go about their work is constant from sunrise to sunset.

Today the team installed the ETC Response Solution on the roof of the IOM office next to the IHP base camp. The emergency.lu Rapid Deployment kit, along with WIDER, the Wi-Fi management solution from Ericsson Response, are now providing high-speed internet connectivity to the humanitarian community in Guiuan. The applause when this was announced at this evening's Coordination meeting is fairly indicative of how much it was needed.

Base camp has been set up in the building that was formerly the Guiuan gymnasium. Now, it's a wreck of twisted metal and concrete. Never would I have believed that wind could cause so much damage. Unlike Tacloban which had the tidal surge as well, Guiuan just had the strong rain and winds. When I say ‘just' strong winds, they were gusts so powerful that it looks like this building was struck by an earthquake or something more sinister.

Two weeks ago, it was difficult to envision how these towns looked before the typhoon. Now though, as the roofs get nailed back on and the streets get cleaned up, everything starts to come back into shape.

By Mariko Hall, ETC Philippines