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 earthquake o