Taking you on a drive through a city picking itself up

Over the last weeks many people asked me "How does it look like in Tacloban in the meantime?" and from the perspective of what I had witnessed when I arrived in early December I usually say "It's getting a little bit better every day, the city is picking itself up step by step, every day a little bit."

I decided to take a couple of videos just filming from the car when driving through the city, and actually now looking at it a few days later, it strikes me how terrible it still looks like, despite all the perceived progress.

I therefore want to take you on five approx. 2-minute rides through different areas of Tacloban, so you can see it with your own eyes and think about how you would answer the question how Tacloban is doing 100 days after the typhoon.

This is the neighborhood of San Jose, on the way from the airport to the city. This was just a mountain of debris when I first arrived, in the meantime you can see some business activity going on and some sense of normalcy returning... well, by typhoon destruction standards.

(Sorry for the soundtrack, that's what happens when you don't pay attention to the car radio)

 

 

This one is actually still pretty terrible... the neighborhood of Magallanes, just North of the Astrodome, here you can really see the destruction that the water brought along and how people are struggling to rebuild their lives, especially since the Government has declared a no-build zone 40 meters from the water...

 

This one is a bit outside Tacloban on the way to Palo. You can see all the destroyed coconut trees that used to be the livelihood of the people here...

 

 

This one has the infamous Astrodome evacuation center in it.

 

 

And finally, along the neighborhood Manlurip School, where I met Edegario.