SIDEBAR: Spinning a good project
by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism
AMONG THE scores of projects launched in the wake of super typhoon Yolanda, one assisted the victims in a direct, meaningful way: the reconstitution of the civil registry records of a targeted 100,000 persons.
The project involved the civil registration and reconstitution of identity documents for the survivors of Yolanda. The free legal documentation services sought to give the survivors the necessary papers to access public services, for both the young and the old.
SIDEBAR:
by Fernando Cabigao Jr.
A FEW weeks after Super Typhoon Yolanda rampaged through Eastern Visayas in early November 2013, the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) found itself caught in a swirl of controversies regarding the repacking and delivery of relief goods.
SIDEBAR: Tacloban City
by Malou Mangahas
DISASTERS USUALLY bring people together, but a few weeks after Yolanda, a video that seemed to highlight a political divide amid tragedy went viral.
In particular, it showed Interior and Local Government Secretary Manuel ‘Mar’ Roxas III berating a sad-sack Tacloban City Mayor Alfred S. Romualdez, telling him in so many words that certain twists in political history would make helping his city a bit complicated.
SIDEBAR: Yolanda’s Nightingales
by Che de los Reyes
FOR SOMEONE just hearing the stories, they sound like episode after episode of the “Walking Dead” TV series. But what Jermaine Bayas and other aid workers witnessed in Tacloban in the Yolanda aftermath was stark reality.
“People were walking aimlessly, their faces blank,” Bayas says of what he saw right after the super typhoon finally calmed down and for days after that. “They would pass you by. Then after a few hours or so, you would see them again, still walking. They did not seem to know what they were doing nor where they wanted to go. Were they looking for someone? Where they supposed to go somewhere?”
SIDEBAR
by Charmaine P. Lirio
TACLOBAN CITY – THEY MAY or may not have suffered considerable loss when Typhoon Yolanda plowed through Tacloban City and other areas in central Philippines, but friends Trisha Torres and Vanessa Salazar look too busy to think about any tragedies. The pair happens to be freshman entrepreneurs and most of the women’s time these days is devoted to tending to their thriving burger joint.
Sidebar
NO LESS than the home province of Budget and Management Secretary Florencio ‘Butch’ B. Abad, head of the architect agency of the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), received the largest allotment releases from the program, based on per capita releases or what each resident in a province could have gotten on average.
Sidebar
NOTHING IN the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) has ever been easy or simple, but the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) seems to have complicated matters even more for projects it was (and is still) supposed to fund.
Sidebar
THE STORY of the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) has been debated using various frames.
President Benigno S. Aquino III has offered the “right vs. wrong” frame, saying that “even our most vociferous critics grant that DAP has benefited our people.”
Sidebar
by Rowena F. Caronan and Karol Ilagan
IT TOOK a peeved senator, who was being accused of corruption, for the public to be inadvertently introduced to what is now known as DAP or the Disbursement Acceleration Program.Yet almost a year after Senator Jose ‘Jinggoy’ Ejercito Estrada — now in jail for alleged plunder — gave his privilege speech that led to the […]
Sidebar
by Julius D. Mariveles
HE WAS born to one of the old-rich families of Negros Occidental in the sprawling Hacienda Binitin in the town of Murcia, but Roberto L. Montelibano does not consider himself a sugarcane planter.
Instead, he thinks himself as a businessman, although like many other hacendado clans in the province, his family built its fortune literally on sugarcane — a grass proficient in making sugar — which their workers plant, harvest, and load for milling into sugar that is exported abroad or consumed in-country.
