A typhoon of dreams
On 8 November 2013, the super-typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest on record with winds exceeding 300 km/h, hit Southeast Asia, in particular the Philippines. It washed away the city of Tacloban on the Leyte Island in the eastern Visayas, Philippines. It caused tremendous damage - more than 6,000 people were killed, thousands of homes were destroyed, over 14 million Filipinos, including nearly 6 million children, were affected. The event had a huge resonance in the climate change community, which happened to be gathered at the time in Warsaw for the COP19¹. The Philippine delegate, Yeb Sano, held a touching talk that was broadcasted worldwide. In tears, he told the world about the devastation brought by the typhoon and asked those present to take action.
A few months later, in July 2014, I joined the International Disaster Volunteers, an NGO that had been operating in the field since the start of the disaster. I helped rebuild a school, working as a bricklayer among hundreds of children. Some of them had lost their parents, friends, relatives, and homes. During the heavy rains of another typhoon that occurred that month, I served food to soaked children that had nothing but the air they breathed. I could not avoid seeing my childhood in their eyes, comparing my dreams with theirs. On one of my last days there, with a thousand thoughts in my head about the climate, our future, their dreams, I reached the Lun Tad school in Palo, a few kilometers south of Tacloban. I entered the crowded Grade II classroom and wrote on the blackboard: “What’s your dream?”.
I collected the childrens' answers and took their portraits, some of them shown here.
¹ 19th Conference Of the Parties of the United Nation Framework Convention for Climate Change, held in Warsaw from November 11 to November 23, 2013