‘Yolanda’ aftermath from afar

Water, water, everywhere? The poet would just see bodies. And debris.

In the Philippines, the images from Supertyphoon Yolanda (Haiyan, internationally) have been so devastatingly apocalyptic, 3.4 million Filipino Americans in the US remain on edge.

The death toll crosses 4,000. But no one believes it.

“Get international help to come here now, not tomorrow, now,” survivor Magina Fernandez said in one early televised report. “This is really, really like bad, worse than hell. Worse than hell.”

Personal communication is slow in coming.

If it hasn’t come by now, it is likely too late, and the only way to communicate is prayer.

Relatives in the US and around the world have turned to social media sites like Facebook, all while waiting for that phone call, that text, that special communication from an unaccounted for loved one.

While the Third World is in rubble, the First World was in the dark.

In her home in San Francisco, California—the state where half of all Filipino Americans live– Janet Alvarado waits.

Alvarado, 52, the executive director of a Filipino American historical project that preserves images of Filipino American life and connects Filipino Americans to Tacloban’s main region, Leyte, has heard from just one family member.

But that’s just a single strand of a large-extended family in the Philippines.

Alvarado was born in the US but her mother, Norberta Magallanes Alvarado, 94, immigrated to the U.S. in 1940s from Tacloban.  Like many Filipinos, Norberta Alvarado came with only one of her younger brothers, meaning that there are many relatives still living in Tacloban and the surrounding area.

“My mom is so worried,” Janet Alvarado said. “She just gets up every day and prays.”

The first positive sign came when another cousin in San Francisco, was able to confirm on Facebook and through text messages that her cousin Ruseli and husband Nonoy Gula, were both able to leave Tacloban safely this weekend.

“She said they just couldn’t stay,” said Janet Alvarado. “It smelled too much like death.”

Another set of cousins, Dino Magallanes and  a younger relative, were okay too. But Alvarado said they were on a motorcycle on the road from Bileran to Ormoc, another part Leyte. Alvarado said that trip normally takes an hour, but in the aftermath of the storm took five hours.

“They said there were just too many bodies all around,” Janet Alvarado said about her cousin’s experience. “The bodies were just piled up on the road.”

Now the focus is on finding another cousin from Tacloban proper.

And no one has heard from him.

“Armando is an engineer in his late 50s,” Janet Alvarado said. “His daughter Inday is missing too. Where they are? We just don’t know. We haven’t heard.”

They still haven’t.

The typhoon has changed everything. The good feeling about the Philippine economy has blown over. The struggling country boasted a first quarter GDP growth of around 7.8 percent, outpacing China, as well as India, Thailand and Viet Nam. President Benigno Aquino, with an aggressive pro- business and clean government platform, seemed to be getting the country back on its feet.

But even then, the government mentioned its vulnerability to natural disaster.

Sure enough, Yolanda, the third major typhoon to hit the Philippines in three years, comes at a huge financial cost.

At approximately 44 pesos to a US dollar, the Philippines has about $500 million to take care of infrastructure issues.

The personal needs of the population will have to be made up from individual Filipinos throughout the world. The country’s 10 million overseas workers already provide the Philippines with $24 billion in remittances.  It’s much needed when a third of the Philippines lives in poverty, existing on $2 a day.

The US government has already committed $20 million to help in the aftermath of the typhoon.

But Filipino Americans will also be counted on to pitch in, perhaps even more than they already do.

It’s the other part of the anxiety about that first-post storm phone call relatives are hoping comes soon.

The Philippines was tough enough when it was dry.  Adding water to the country’s economic situation only exacerbates the country’s despair.

Emil Guillermo is an award-winning Filipino American journalist, and former host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” who writes for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.