Lifting the spirits of the suffering people

I’m not a big fan of celebrity visits and I certainly never thought that any celebrity visit would ever inspire me or make me emotional. But that was until today. UNICEF Philippines Ambassador Gary Valenciano was visiting – a famous singer – and it is hard to describe what he gave the people here that went through so much suffering, but let’s start at the beginning.

It started with the probably most bizarre situation I encountered here until today, when we just briefly stopped at the graveyard in front of San Joaquin church in Tanauan. If this graveyard doesn’t give you goosebumps, nothing ever will. Tanauan was literally wiped out by the typhoon and around the heavily damaged church there is only destruction. Children’s graves are decorated with toys, some have photos, some have just a simple cross, and one has the eleven names of an entire family just written on a cardboard. So he is getting out of the van and walks through this really shattering place when of course after maybe a minute the first people start to recognize him – in this case a group of cash-for-work workers in UNDP shirts. Already the joy in the faces of these people was moving. So they walked towards him and were standing with him and chatting when that very second a guy with a black bag and a shovel approached and started digging a hole literally two meters away from this happy scene. You could immediately smell the decay. Another victim of the typhoon was put to rest, almost three months after the typhoon. I was wondering where they found him or her after all this time. It was just surreal.

But that was just the start. In the afternoon we had planned to take him to a Day Care Center that had just reopened this week in the same city of Tanauan, to meet some mothers and their children. So we drive towards the center and immediately realize that this is not going to turn out as planned: That Day Care Center was packed to the rim with people, screaming and shouting, we could hardly get him from the van to the building, although we had the city police and many other helpers with us. Actually, people were just everywhere. It was unbelievable. We had actually planned to take him from there on a walk to the “tent city” which is an evacuation center on the campus of the local Elementary and High Schools. But that was impossible. And when we arrived by car, there were thousands of more people. Literally the whole city was there, it was unbelievable. The Mayor had set up a small sound system and Gary gave a spontaneous performance that turned into a 45-minute concert when we had to stop as it started getting dark. To see the joy in the faces of these people that went through so much suffering was unbelievable. Maybe this was the first moment of joy for them since the darkest moment of their lives. It was quite obvious that many of them could not believe their eyes: The biggest superstar of the Philippines here, in their wiped out city, singing for the people who are since living in tents, next to the emergency water bladder, in a UNICEF shirt. You could literally feel the energy and the spirit that he gave these people back. On the next day, it was again the afternoon that was just humbling. We took him to the high school in Tacloban where we had arranged for him to meet with a group of selected students. But if you thought that yesterday was crazy, you had to experience this. The whole campus was packed and the kids just freaked out. Watch this!

 

Hope you watched it to the end to see how the girls go back to class the second he passed. We could hardly get him around the school and to the Library and you couldn’t hear a word anyways. And then this group of students was waiting for him. We had given them the liberty to do whatever they want with their time with him and what they did was just astonishing. They had among themselves selected three students to tell their stories of the typhoon.

But it was so loud from the outside and all the screaming that you couldn’t understand a word! So they just put a chair in front of Gary and let them tell their story directly to him. The first boy actually broke out in tears. The second one was close to doing so. The third student, a girl, told him that when she was up to her shoulders in the water that she prayed to God and promised him that if she would survive this she would do everything to graduate and become a good person. You could feel how special this moment was. The screaming and craziness on the outside and here the students in this most intimate situation with one of the superstars of the Philippines who is actually listening to them, to their stories. Then two boys sang one of his songs to him. It was moving. Finally, after almost an hour of listening to them, he asked if he could also sing a song for them. He picked a very spiritual one and within seconds, half of the students were in tears. He walked around and hugged them. That made even more students cry, and in the end all of us had tears rolling down our cheeks. Even now that I write this, I have to take a deep breath. Also here, you could downright feel what this moment meant for each and every one of these 30 students – and the hundreds outside.

I can only repeat it: To see the joy in the faces of all these people – children, teenagers, adults, just everyone – that this man came to visit them and their shattered lives and bring them a message of courage and give his time to sing to them and listen to their stories, was something that I will truly never forget. I am humbled and honoured that I had the chance to meet this truly magnificent person and experience these really unbelievable moments in the faces of the people of two cities that are just trying to get a grip on how to rebuild their lives.