Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Philippines typhoon survivors still waiting for news of missing

The National (United Arab Emirates) via AFP: In the grieving, grey wastelands that were once bustling towns on tropical Philippine islands, thousands of typhoon survivors are enduring an agonising wait of hope and denial for news of loved ones.

Nearly 1,800 people are officially listed as missing after Super Typhoon Haiyan swept across the central Philippines just over a month ago, and not knowing what happened to them is for some relatives nearly as painful as confirmation that they died.

... The government insists it is doing all it can to find the missing but the magnitude of the response needed is overwhelming.

The number of people confirmed killed is 5,936, and just the task of dealing with the dead has been too much to handle properly, with countless bodies having been dumped into mass graves without being properly identified.

Amid the chaos, there are haunting messages for the lost. Churchgoers browse lists of missing people and look at posters appealing for help that are pinned up to the entrances of cathedrals....

An aerial view of Tacloban after the typhoon, shot by DFID - UK Department for International Development, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

No comments: