Ground zero: Dolores, Eastern Samar

A couple of days before Typhoon “Ruby” first struck land in the third class municipality of Dolores, Eastern Samar, while its destructive force was gathering momentum over the ocean, our dear leader Benigno Simeon (aka BS) was also busy chastising media for what he termed as “alarmist” reporting on the developing supertyphoon known abroad as “Hagupit.”

He told a group of media people that, based on the report from the Department of Science and Technology, Typhoon Ruby was nothing like Supertyphoon “Yolanda” that devastated the country last year. He told the group that the path of Typhoon Ruby was not even certain, it could yet veer away from the Philippines. Moreover, its intensity could nowhere be near that of Yolanda, likening Ruby to Typhoon “Pablo,” instead, which devastated Mindanao a couple of years ago.

It seemed that media reports on its potential for devastation could have sounded a bit exaggerated to our leader BS—or perhaps his boys in the Cabinet and Malacañang, who perhaps gave him a briefing on the latest typhoon.

Well, we could probably look back to the disaster caused by Typhoon Pablo, which was the “weaker” typhoon, at least in the view of the Aquino (Part II) administration. Reports at that time said that more than 1,000 people died. The damage it wrought on property and farms could be anywhere between P35 billion and P45 billion.

And so, boss, we were not supposed to be alarmed by such a destructive force?

To think, the weather monitoring agencies abroad already warned that Hagupit was packing winds of 350 kph, and from the looks of its path, it was headed toward the Philippines, particularly the Visayas islands.

In such a situation, according to the thinking among “disaster preparedness groups” in the business sector, the best reaction would be to expect the worst. Indeed everybody down here in my barangay reacted thusly.

Lo and behold, when reports started to trickle in, stating that the number of casualties from Ruby could be much less than either Pablo or Yolanda, our beloved public officials patted themselves on the back for this supposedly new culture of preparedness.

You know—it was as if Malacañang did it alone!

Still, despite the “alarmist” media, the Philippine Red Cross reported that Ruby actually killed about 21 people, mostly in Eastern Samar where Ruby first struck land, which was not bad—really—because the actual death toll from Yolanda was … well, still unknown up to today.

Perhaps embarrassed by its inaction in the face of Supertyphoon Yolanda, the Aquino (Part II) administration stopped counting the dead after one lowly police official estimated that the casualties could easily reach 10,000 people, and so we could never find out how many actually died from the supertyphoon.

The administration at that time announced the release of P1 billion for rescue and relief operations for the Yolanda victims, spicing it up with the promise of P18 billion additional funding for the rehabilitation of the devastated areas, which was practically the entire Visayas, including the town of Dolores that became ground zero with Ruby.

Up to today, we still do not know where the promised P18-billion rehabilitation fund really went. Up to today, even donors from abroad—both government and private organizations—still wonder where their donations for Yolanda victims went.

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Personally I have this love affair with the town of Dolores, which started a few years ago when my Rotary Club, the Rotary Club of Makati Dasmariñas, went on an eye-cataract surgery mission there.

The club happened to have among its members a kind-hearted eye doctor, simply known as Doc Bong Cruz, who previously organized one cataract surgery mission after another in various places like Ilocos Sur and Mindoro.

Doc Bong personally knew the mayor of Dolores, a septuagenarian lawyer named Emiliana “Ewit” Villacarillo, who came back from the United States some years ago because she felt it’s her duty to serve her hometown even at such a ripe old age.

Upon Mayor Ewit’s invitation, and perhaps insistence, Doc Bong dragged a group of Rotarians to Dolores for the medical mission. I was one of them.

Believe me, the trip to Dolores was not a walk in the park. You had to rise up from bed in the wee hours of the morning to catch the early flight to Tacloban City, and from there, you have to take a four-hour ride on, well, not-so-good roads, destroyed through years and years of government neglect, traversing mountains and hills, and rivers and plains.

But in the town proper, the main form of transport was “depadyak”—which was a bicycle equipped with a small sidecar just enough space for one adult. Thus there was hardly any pollution in the town. It was practically heaven for all of us.

When Yolanda hit the Philippines last year, we in RCMD knew that Dolores would be out of the radar for relief operations of the government and NGOs. We called up Mayor Ewit to ask her what we could possibly do to help the town folk. What would the people of Dolores need the most after the Yolanda devastation? She said that they would appreciate fishing boats, because their fishing boats were mostly swept away by the supertyphoon. Our effort to raise funds for the fishing boats eventually became known in our club as the “Dolores boat project.”

We initially raised enough money for 100 small boats, known in the Waray-waray language as “subiran,” for distribution to the fishing folk of Dolores, particularly those in a small island called Hilabaan (literally meaning “long island”). The people of Dolores actually helped in building the boats, supervised by a barangay captain named Reynaldo Catuday, who learned the boat making techniques from his father and grandfather. The sourcing of raw materials for the initial batch of 100 boats was a big challenge for Catuday and Mayor Ewit. They had to order the materials all the way from the Bicol region, because all the stocks in nearby towns were already sold out in the aftermath of Yolanda. Catuday and his eager helpers of Dolores town folk had to build all the 100 boats in one month.

Last March, finally, some four months after Yolanda, we went back to Dolores to distribute the boats, complete with the stenciled names of the donors, plus the small Rotary International logo. In the footage shown by the international news outfit CNN in its reports on Hagupit, I actually saw the boats tacked away safely between houses whose roofs were all blown away. It was hard to miss the bright colored boats of RCMD.

One of our members who moved back to Germany, sent this inspiring message to the club regarding the Dolores boat project: “It is great to have a project with direct contacts in the affected areas along with the knowledge that our help will go one hundred percent where it is needed.”

By the way, according to the people of Hilabaan in Dolores, where RCMD also rebuilt the school building destroyed by Yolanda, plus a village of some 50 new houses with the funding support of the employees of Estee Lauder Company, no other organization went to their town after Yolanda except the Rotary.

This time, in the aftermath of Ruby, when the last we heard about Dolores was that it was cut off completely—with no passable roads and no electronic communications—hopefully the poor town folk could get a tiny bit of the rehabilitation funds to be released by the Aquino (Part II) administration. Hopefully.