Category Archives: Philippines

PayPay Barangay

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While conducting our initial livelihoods assessment in Daan Bantayan municipality (in Northern Cebu), I met this lovely couple, Amelito and Mary-Ann Bantilan, who live in PayPay Barangay (PayPay village). I was really struck by their story, and by their incredible resilience and optimism in the face of such a catastrophe, so I thought I would share it with you.

Amelito is 42 and a fisherman who lives in PayPay village. He has a small paddle boat and a net, both of which were damaged in the storm, though he is still able to use them to fish (his boat has a small hole in it, so he can’t go out too far). His net has some holes in but is still just about usable. He normally fishes in the morning and evening, and catches around 4kgs of fish per day. He keeps back a small amount of fish to feed his family  (he has a wife, Mary-Ann, and 7 children, 3 boys and 4 girls) and sells the rest of his catch.

Amelito Bantilan, 42, Fisherman in PayPay, Daan Bantayan

Amelito Bantilan, 42, Fisherman in PayPay, Daan Bantayan

His wife usually sells the fish on their street, going door to door selling fish to their neighbours and small local shops (called Sira Sira shops) that are run out of people’s houses. Continue reading →

The one with even more excitement…

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So, when I last posted on here, I was busy setting up a Situation Room at work, bustling about supporting our team with the Typhoon Haiyan response in The Philippines. Since then, a lot happened very fast.

My colleague P was already out in Manila, and the scale of the disaster rapidly became apparent in the media, so we were all hands on deck.

There were all sorts of dramas – things like the media reporting that it had been 6 days and no aid had come through, people were starving etc. What they don’t mention of course is that all the roads were blocked, and a second tropical storm came through, leaving the airport underwater, and the seas were too rough for a lot of boats to come in, so naturally it’s incredibly hard to get any aid in anywhere! But that’s not quite as interesting as a headline…

Anyhoo, rest assured we were all working as hard as we could, and on Thursday night P emailed me to say that she thought they might need me over there too. So on Friday morning, I got up early, checked my email, and found that sure enough, I had been approved to go, with instructions to get on a plane as soon as possible.

I spent the whole of Friday 15th bustling about at work filling in HR forms, medical forms, insurance forms, and writing up some handover notes so they could backfill my post while I was on secondment, and after getting poked, prodded and vaccinated, I was deemed fit to travel and booked onto a flight for Saturday morning. Continue reading →