When reading any disaster report, regardless of the magnitude of the devastation, it’s not difficult to keep the suffering at arm’s length. In fact, I find it surprisingly easy to lose myself in lists and numbers, especially when the casualties are higher than I can really comprehend. What does it actually feel like when a storm kills more than a thousand people in your hometown? When a raging river washes away an entire neighborhood in a single night? When a drowning person calls to you for help and you are not able to save them? These thoughts are too frightening. I have realized it is not something I can truly grasp, without having directly experienced it myself. I have been to Cagayan de Oro a few times now, a city in northern Mindanao that was badly hit by tropical storm Sendong in 2011. However, it was only on my last visit that we went to the Isla de Oro, one of the ‘ground zero’ neighborhoods. Two years after the storm, it was like a ghost town. Not a single other person...

When the 7.2 earthquake shook the island of Bohol on October 15th, the majority of its 400-year old churches were instantly reduced to a pile of rubble. As we creep forward for a closer look, we notice the still intact church bell protruding from the heaps, like buried treasure slowly revealing itself. Wandering through the ancient ruins of Rome, you realize that nothing in this world was truly built to last. But while I can accept the centuries slowly chipping away at stone and marble, it is much harder to wrap my head around the complete collapse of this church from one moment to the next.  There is something peculiar about this place, a little eerie but also mesmerizing. My colleagues from the Peace and Equity Foundation light a candle in the nearby tent serving as a makeshift church, before we all pile back into the mini-van. Generators Although dramatic, the damaged churches are only one part of the story. On an island where many depend on the tourism, an earthqua...

As the windy mountain road takes us higher and higher into the Cordillera of northern Luzon, the air gets thinner, the panoramic vistas more spectacular, and my breakfast increasingly eager to make a second appearance. Occasionally we roll down all the windows, to let the characteristic scent of chicken manure waft in through one window and out the other. Needless to say, I’m loving every minute of it. When my colleagues and I arrive at the meeting hall, the cooperative of Atok coffee farmers warmly welcomes us with a cup – more like a large vat, actually – of coffee; freshly brewed from their own harvest of 100% Arabica beans. What I find especially charming is that one of our hosts leads me to the window to point out the exact mountainside where this particular cup of coffee I’m enjoying was grown, picked, processed and roasted. We have all heard stories of cacao farmers who have never had the pleasure of tasting chocolate, but the same cannot be said for the coffee growers of ...

“Christmas in the Philippines starts in October,” I was enthusiastically informed while making my initial travel arrangements over e-mail. When my departure was subsequently postponed to November, I couldn't help but feel slightly disappointed at missing out on this curious October holiday, seemingly unique to the Philippines. “After all, I’m going there to work, not just for some party” I consoled myself in a ridiculous bout of righteousness. Fortunately, I could not have been more mistaken. In hindsight, I can only laugh at my foolish underestimation of the Filipino appetite for Christmas. If you were to liken our celebration to a gluttonous sprint, the starting pistol sounding on the eve of the 24th, we take off in a sudden burst of speed, only to collapse at the finish line on New Year’s Day, hung-over and exhausted. Christmas in the Philippines, however, seems to fall nothing short of a marathon.  As far as I can tell, the warm-up starts in September, the pace starts to...

Walking through Manila you wouldn't guess that elsewhere supertyphoon Haiyan has caused chaos and destruction. Until you open a newspaper. Every inch is dedicated to the typhoon and its aftermath. Everything that seemed important before has now been pushed aside. All the news is about aid. Day after day, I am touched by the stories. In particular, I'm impressed with how people are helping each other. In the office of our partner organization, the Peace and Equity Foundation, are piles of stuff that people have donated. There are hundreds of bags of water, food, rice and soap on the patio. Unfortunately, some water bottles broke and some food got soaked. To prevent the rice and the soap from mixing, we took all the stuff out of the bags and sorted everything. Quite a job, but how could we complain? With sweat running down my back I took a little note from one of the bags. A typed letter to wish the receiver courage in these difficult times and a small prayer for their fam...

In the urban landscape that materializes below my fifteenth floor window each morning, the first thing to emerge is always the familiar yellow glow of the McDonalds on Katipunan Avenue. Although I would never freely admit it, in addition to being slightly repulsed by this universal symbol of fast food, I find its presence somewhat comforting. Here in Manila, where I don’t speak the language, where I need help with the simplest of tasks, where I’m quite foreign in every way imaginable, it is a relief that the McChicken at least tastes nearly the same. With a polite hello ma’am from the security guard, I step outside my building into the un-airconditioned outdoors. Now that I’ve been walking up and down these streets for the past few weeks, my skin no longer tingles with the uncomfortable sensation that people are staring at me.  There’s no doubt I still look rather different from my fellow pedestrians, but for the moment I’ve become just another person getting on with their...