Today and tomorrow will continue to be mostly logistical, but by 5am on Sunday we should arrive in the disaster areas, frustrating but it’s a process…

We had a good meeting with with Al Dwyer. He told us that the Emergency phase is really over and most of the military has already pulled out as well as many NGOs. While this may seem like we missed the boat (excuse the pun), another argument can be made that all that means is we moved from the emergency phase where we would be moving dead bodies to the recovery phase where we can join in where others left.

He describes the Philippines emergency as being different than others where he had a shared experience with Oscar and Barry. He describes response to Yolanda as one of the most responsive EVER. He says the international community brought $680M to the area in only 3 weeks and the Philippines government which HAS money and HAS infrastructure and is more prepared to address these kinds of issues than many of their counterparts, is addressing it from within and they have also committed $1B to addressing the situation. They have also already established the new building standards that will be required and rules to follow. His example was that in only 3 weeks, the Philippines is in the position Haiti was at after 8-10 months and as a result recovery will be much faster than predicted.

The UN is about to publish their strategic response plan (12/9-10) and the Philippine government will follow with their own plan and when these are produced next week, the official emergency phase will be considered over.

What does this mean? It means certain communities have been saturated with aid, but he agreed there are many that are a bit more removed and were equally badly hit and there has been no real response. These people are unserved and desperate. There are real issues with agriculture and job retraining, big issues with children’s mental health and educational needs (but hard for us to help because if you do not do this work as a registered NGO you can be arrested – due to rules to protect the community against traffickers in children).

In all, he thinks there is big opportunity for assistance but he feels it is in picking a smaller fishbowl and dealing with that underserved area rather than getting into a pissing match with the big boys providing aid to the town names you hear about on TV. This could work very well because it is the model Oscar followed when he was in Sri Lanka.

After our good meeting we spent considerable time flying south to the City of Cebu. Cebu was not heavily affected in the North but there are a number of communities in the south that were hard hit. We arrived and spent the afternoon collecting supplies and trying to make arrangements to get a car, driver, security, a spot on the ferry for the van and tickets for all. This required a series of half a dozen meetings to arrange and negotiate prices so we don’t end up spending our nut on the process rather than the relief.

Unfortunately all the ferries are full so we cannot get out of Cebu until 10pm tomorrow night and we will sleep in the van on the overnight ferry arriving there at 5am on Sunday. We will use tomorrow to find doctors to prescribe the medications we have been asked to bring, get those meds, gather construction supplies and fill our bus with needed items. We meet tomorrow at 6pm with our driver and guard to start that process.

Not surprisingly, the costs of our project are considerable. We struggled with the costs of the guard for example because we have heard conflicting reports of safety as more and more systems are coming back on line. At a cost of less than $70 per day plus lodging, it seems foolish to not get a guard, but those numbers add up over 11 days and it is hard to commit so much of our funds to an item like that which we may have no need for. We have agreed to take the guard for 4 days and then reassess whether to send him home.

In addition to Manny’s brother, we were also able to see some old friends the Velesos who hosted me when I was last here in the late 80s and they are well, were not affected by the storm and it was great seeing them and catching up – they have not changed at all and we fell right into the same rhythm from when I left 25 years ago.