Vultures

My heart went out to Tacloban again when I read our story about the schoolchildren of Manlurip Elementary School going back to school. It was both a happy and sad occasion, the happiness owing to the fact that the children were able to go back to school after the devastation of “Yolanda,” and the sadness to the fact that not all of them were.

Grade 2 teacher Arlene Restor gave voice to the mixed feelings when she welcomed 32 students back but missed the rest of the 67 she used to teach. “I just hope and pray that they just left the city and nothing bad happened to them.” School principal Elenita Montalban added: “We don’t expect all students to come to school today, as we were informed that many of them left the city. Some went to Samar, to Cebu, to Manila. Only around 50 percent of them returned to school.”

Yolanda blew off the school’s roof and crumpled some of its walls; classes are now being held in a tattered building with tarpaulin for temporary roof. The kids were aglow with smiles, though, armed with the recuperative powers of youth and the school supplies that came with the relief goods United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon brought.

Still, the adults carried the scars of trauma. Milet Labrado, 42, said she wasn’t taking any chances, being there to watch her six-year-old boy as he played with his classmates. “The school is near the sea. We ourselves survived Yolanda by clinging to each other. I still see my neighbors in my dreams being pulled away by the waves.”

The Department of Education reported that 100 pupils from Manlurip and two other elementary schools in the area died in the superstorm.

This is the context in which I see the news about the possibility of kickbacks in the building of temporary shelters for the homeless of Tacloban. The shelters are 203 bunkhouses that have been built in Leyte and Eastern Samar, each bunkhouse consisting of 24 rooms, each room housing one family. Each room is the size of two ping pong tables. The whole project seems to be, at least metaphorically, full of holes.

I myself have no complaint about a room the size of two ping pong tables housing an entire family, a Pinoy family consisting of anywhere from 5 to 15, possibly more if you’ve seen the hovels in the slums of the metropolis, never mind Leyte and Samar. In fact, if you’ve seen the ragged figures huddled underneath bridges, stretching out bedraggled lives under the mercy of the elements, you know a room the size of two ping pong tables is a luxury. I’ve lived in one just a little bigger, though it had a second level, and know it’s so.

But you look at the pictures of those structures, which are just wood slabs and a flimsy roof stitched together, and you’d be hard put to understand how each of them could cost close to a million bucks. Observers, including priests and constructors, estimate it to be less than a couple of hundred.

More to the point, why build temporary shelters for the homeless a couple of months after Yolanda struck? Why not build permanent ones as part of the rehabilitation of the place? The DPWH says the bunkhouses will be occupied for at most half a year by the displaced. Quite apart from the kickbacks, that is a wasteful way to go about things. The emergency is over, notwithstanding that the situation remains desperate. And what happens to those temporary dwellings built at a cost of close to a million per dwelling afterward?

Ping Lacson, the reconstruction czar, says an administration congressman and a Comelec official may have colluded with DPWH officials to mount the thing, which carries a kickback of 30-35 percent. He is currently investigating them. Well, it would help if he hurries it up, notwithstanding the difficulties he says the DPWH is placing in his path. There’s where he may justify government’s choice of him for the job, notwithstanding that he has no credentials as a reconstructor, notwithstanding that he has credentials only as an investigator.

It would help if in the next few days he names names and shows exactly how the scam was mounted, if it was indeed a scam. If this can be done at the level of building temporary abodes, imagine what can be done at the level of building permanent ones. Until then, the law may only suspend action and the public may only suspend judgment.

The task has a sense of urgency to it, as Lacson himself points out. “There’s only one word to describe these people—amoral. It’s profiting from the misery of others.” He’s wrong only about the “amoral”: That means something beyond the ken of right and wrong. What it is in fact is immoral, something deeply wrong, something utterly lacking in conscience, something thoroughly walang kaluluwa.

Look at the spectacle of the kids trooping back to school, lacking the company of former classmates, some of them having gone to parts unknown, some of them having gone to the grave, and see if that’s not so. Look at the spectacle of a people trying to retrieve parts of their tattered lives, tattered hopes, tattered dreams, many of them still seeing the faces of those they knew or loved, wrenched from their grasp and lost forever, and see if that’s not so. At a time when the world is rediscovering its generosity, its humanity, its bond with everyone taking this common and all-too-brief journey on earth, you do something like this? That is unforgivable.

There’s a pecking order in animals that consigns one to the lowest rung for feeding on the carcass of the dead. But animals are just animals, it’s just their nature to do certain things, it’s just their instinct to do unsavory things. But human beings who feed on the carcasses of the dead? They’re the lowest of the low.

They’re the real vultures.