Blog post

Priorities

TACLOBAN - It's my birthday. Not a particularly big birthday, but a birthday nonetheless. When you're part of the recovery operation after the largest typhoon in history has slammed into the side of an island nation, balloons and cake aren't really top of the priority list.

In operations like this, there are a lot of priorities: food, WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene), shelter, logistics and of course communications. As a result though, something's gotta give and a lot of the time, it's the humanitarian workers themselves. In the same way as it's the builder who has the half-finished house, and the mechanic with the shoddy car, it's often the humanitarian workers who neglect to look after themselves.

An MSB report from Tacloban said that daily temperatures are up to 42 degrees Celsius and as a result heat exhaustion and dehydration are the biggest health risks for humanitarian workers. Wound and skin infections related to lack of water for personal hygiene and bad quality shower water are also very common. When there're no showers, you somehow hope that the sunscreen you applied two days ago is still effective. Looking at the red-haired and now red-skinned Irish guys, this is apparently not the case.

Conditions have definitely improved a lot since the first days when we arrived. Actually, everything has improved since we first arrived. I'm back in Tacloban now and it's amazing to see the team still going at full speed. The inflatable emergency.lu satellite antenna has been demobilised as the local ISP has restored services to City Hall – a 100MB fibre link! The ETC is now sharing these services across Tacloban from City Hall to the stadium where the OSOCC (On-site Operations Coordination Centre) has been set up. Over 1600 humanitarians have now registered to use the system. We have installed this solution in South Sudan and Mali but never before have we had this many registered users in such a short space of time.

I took a photo from the roof of a building in town the other day. It was from the same location that I took a photo from three weeks ago. The difference is amazing, and encouraging. The debris on the streets has been cleared up and replaced with crowds of people getting their lives back on track. In the mornings and evenings now there's even ‘rush hour' with everyone going to and from work. One of the most natural indicators of life returning to the city is the leaves on the trees. Three weeks ago, these same trees looked like giant charred matches sticking out from the ground. Now, they have bright, fresh, green leaves sprouting from each branch. Then there's the radio station blaring (and I mean blaring) from a loud speaker down the road.

Tacloban still has a long way to go before it gets back to what it was, but the improvement in the past three weeks is impressive. Recovery, restoration, rebuilding – these are our priorities.

Oh, and it turns out some of the bakers in town have recovered too…


By Mariko Hall, ETC Philippines