Ceritalah | Six years since Typhoon Haiyan, why are thousands of Filipinos still waiting for help?
- Visayan city resident and mother of six Richelle Alvaraz, whose home was destroyed in the storm, still lives in a makeshift hut
- She is among 6,000 people in Tacloban who are still waiting to be moved to permanent housing, despite constant government promises
For 30-year-old Richelle Alvaraz, a mother of six and a resident of the Visayan city of Tacloban – the most severely affected location in the republic – the typhoon (dubbed Yolanda in the Philippines) with its 380km/h winds and unprecedented storm surges will never be forgotten. Literally: because despite countless government promises over the past five years, Alvaraz is still waiting – along with thousands of others – to be relocated to permanent housing.
Sitting in the makeshift hut she calls “home”, the sad-eyed single mother (her husband is in jail for what she alleges is a trumped-up drug charge) can still recall the eerie silence in the hours just before the storm hit the city of 240,000 some 880km to the southeast of Manila.
“We knew it was coming. The government had warned us. But there wasn’t a sound at 3am. By 5am, however, everything had changed.”
“I was running towards higher ground with my children. I even had to swim as the water caught up with me. I told my children not to look back. The sounds of the waves and the howling wind were unmistakable. I couldn’t make out what was going on around me – only my neighbours’ screams. Some of them helped me get my children to safety, thank God.”
