Media coverage of super-typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) has been massive and the international response extraordinary.  The Filipino people are enormously grateful for the financial and practical aid so readily given by the British government and NGOs and the heart-warming generosity of the British public.

Haiyan made landfall on the east coast roughly halfway down the Philippine archipelago.   The islands of Leyte and Samar taking the brunt of the typhoon and the unusual sea-surge.  The destruction wrought on the city of Tacloban, the capital of Leyte province, has been seen across the world.  The typhoon tracked westward causing major problems of the islands of Bohol and Cebu, parts of Negros, northern Panay and northern Palawan.  Storm surges also affected coastal areas of northern Cebu, north-east Panay, northern Negros and the south of Masbate.

I am from the island of Panay and I have a modern, strongly constructed house in the city of Iloilo which is towards the south of the island. Most of my close family live there.  Mercifully, the typhoon has not caused too many problems.  No deaths, trees uprooted, relatively minor damage and so on.  

But of course not everywhere has been so lucky.  I was born and brought-up in a village inland and further north, and where we still have our farm. Barangay Lu-ag (a barangay is roughly equivalent to a British village) is one of the 47 barangays that make up the Municipality of Duenas. Lu-ag has a land area of 0.97 square kilometres and a population of around 434 (2010 census). The principal economic activity is agriculture and most of the citizens of Lu-ag are subsistence farmers and/or labourers, working on the land or at any casual work that they are able to find.

As a result of the typhoon 63 of the 112 homes in Lu-ag were totally destroyed.  In the wider municipality there was as least one death, flooding, widespread destruction with hundreds of people seeking shelter in evacuation centres.  The parents-in-law of my eldest nephew live in Concepcion on the north-east tip of Panay.  This is where Haiyan made landfall on the island, their concrete house was destroyed and they lost everything including all their money (many people in the Philippines use cash and do not have bank accounts).  I count myself lucky, there are many, many others with far more distressing stories to tell.  The nature of this super-typhoon and the havoc it has wreaked means that few people in or from the Philippines will be unaffected.

The Philippines will continue to need help for quite some time to come and full recovery will take years.  If you are able, please make a donation, however small or large, to the UK Disasters Emergency Committee. 

Ariel Lanada
Chairman, Filipino Community of Oxfordshire
14 November 2013