A place called home

BOHOL, Philippines – Is it ever an easy choice to leave a place when the land you called home carries both opportunity and peril?

For Gloria Melia, the decision to stay can often be construed as crazy, but to a family that has spent 20 years building their lives around the place they call home, it is never an easy choice to leave – even if your neighbour is a 10 feet wide fissure.

Her family sits on top of what is now a danger zone; her house oddly survived the earthquake with only visible cracks on the half concrete walls. Light gleams inside what was a once a full wall, like a scarred wound that reminds Gloria every day that they survived. She’s had to make do with minor repairs she could afford, one often in the form of make shift poles rested against the walls to avoid it from crumbling. To her the house is their pride, and she intends to keep it intact.  

Unlike her neighbour’s houses, all of which were mostly destroyed by the earthquake, Gloria has seen no need to transfer to the evacuation camps. Gloria is thankful she and her family survived. They still have the house and her land. For her, others deserve more help than she does, even if she’s in a tight fix herself.

The fissure may have spared Gloria’s house, but it did not spare her livelihood, like some others in Barangay Baguhan, Inabanga. Their lives have been sustained by small scale farming with a small portion of arable land for crops like corn. All that now has been wasted as the fissure cut across their land, swallowing most of her harvest. Only a small portion of land is still usable, albeit to use it poses some risk. 

Gloria won’t move yet. She says they will make do with what they have, even if life gets harder. She never hesitates to give a smile, saying “kaya ra” which means “we can handle it.”

The earthquake changed everything in one day. But Gloria is resolved that it won’t destroy the house they worked so hard to build or the land they farm on. Gloria’s resilience echoes the Bohol-anons indomitable spirit. Their stubborness and pride helps them to deny that their lives and homes were shattered by a quake, and allows them to move on. 

There are many people like Gloria. They are labelled as IDPs (internally displaced people). They struggle now in temporary and dangerous places, but will soon have to move out. For them, the question of where is just as important as their safety.  

Numerous humanitarian agencies have worked closely with the provincial government of Bohol since day one of the disaster, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), for example, has co-lead the profiling of families like Gloria to help them settle in evacuation camps and, ultimately, to find permanent shelter for them.

The tragedy of Yolanda (Haiyan) has somehow made the tragedy of Bohol invisible, but in reality there are still huge challenges that need to be met, and far little attention is being provided in this once island paradise.

The road to recovery is laden many obstacles, such in the case of Gloria Melia. It is not simply about finding a relocation site, it is about finding a place that allowed them to continue with their lives, as it was before the earthquake began. – Rappler.com

Giano covered an IOM area assessment in Bohol. He is a former Rappler intern.