Charlotte Court: Restoring self belief after Haiyan just as crucial as aid

UK assistance alone has reached a staggering £50m, showing both the pockets and the hearts of our country to be bigger than people may have ever imagined.

However, after this big money figure has helped with the headline issues of food, water and healthcare and the world starts to turn out tomorrow’s news, what will a country like the Philippines need to stand on its own two feet again and is it something Britain can actually afford?

In 2009, I spent some time in Tacloban, the city that has been at the heart of the devastation, working with Volunteer for Visayans (VFV), a non-profit organisation, registered with the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) that provides social welfare services to assist underprivileged and underserved local communities.

I worked in a centre in the heart of Tacloban City. It was a rabbit warren of wooden houses and poverty, filled with families of 10 and over, with poor draining, little heating and prone to electricity cuts and flooding. 

Despite this, I became immersed in a society helping itself to improve its own conditions. Local homestay accommodation was available to all volunteers in the area, where a room, an immense amount of food and overwhelmingly hospitality were provided in exchange for money for your food and board.

I met families with several children who survived in one- room huts simply through the determination of their parents to provide everything they could through the money derived from 14-hour days of rickshaw bicycle driving.

I worked with local children pushed by the centre to get an education who would be driven to school by VFV full from a breakfast provided by the centre that may have been their only meal of the day.

Many were being sponsored by donors through VFV from all over the world and showed their gratitude with impeccable letters and intricate drawings detailing their life and hoping one day to meet the person who had been so good to them from so far away.

I met local people who were working hard to clean up the area and create and build new infrastructure for the community to help themselves battle against natural disasters like Typhoon Haiyan and provide a nicer environment for those living there.

This life felt as if it were only just clinging to the edge of safety before Haiyan hit and, unfortunately, it’s likely that the majority of local community projects will have been obliterated by the storm.

However, the area was, and still will be, surrounded by people who want to make it a better place for the next generation. It will be this determination to recapture a sense of self-belief and self-reliance once more that will help Filipinos to recover.

The calls for instant donations that charities have been making have been essential but the real legacy will come from the help with the small things that will allow local people to regain their daily lives.

Of course, the millions affected by the devastation will need a lot of international help, but only to act as a platform for regeneration, not as an answer to all their problems.

Help will be needed to rebuild infrastructure and provide replacement rickshaws, to ensure that local people can earn their own money again. Communities will need materials and seeds and ground cleared of debris to enable them to grow their own crops.

They will still need community sponsorship, but to enable them to continue the local improvements they have already began. They will need to believe in their own abilities to rebuild their country again.

Despite the UK’s enormous generosity for Haiyan aid and many other recent homegrown and international charities, it’s often felt that we as Western individuals are squeezed too hard for too many causes.

But it’s important to understand that it’s not just an endless supply of money that the Philippines 
will need to recover from this disaster.

Maybe the real value is not in what the money can purchase but in what it signifies in inspiring the local population to believe in themselves, regain their motivation and push on back to self-sufficiency.

To find out more about Volunteer for Visayans, the work that they do and the help they will need to restore Philippine communities, go to: http://www.visayans.org/.

* Charlotte Court is a Leeds-based writer and former Philippines volunteer.