So Long, Sweet Philippines

Before I left the All Hands Philippines base in Tacloban, I was given a chance to stand up in front of the group and say a few words about my experience. On the verge of bursting into tears, I ended up delivering a watery-eyed speech about how All Hands wasn’t just building structures, but building a future as well. Since I’ve returned to the States, I’ve had some time to reflect on my experiences and think about what I’ve learned from my month abroad. So, if I was coherent and had thought about what I wanted to say more, this might be what my goodbye speech could have sounded like:

When I signed up to volunteer with Project Leyte, I thought I was signing up to volunteer on a construction site for a month, doing hard physical labor for six days a week, but the reality is that All Hands does so much more than that. And that’s because the reality is that the devastation felt from natural disaster does not go away after a house is built. It doesn’t go away after we finish a school, a campus for an NGO, or an evacuation center. It takes more than just building structures to help the people of the Philippines, and the volunteers at Project Leyte are doing just that.

You’re building laughter. You’re building smiles. You’re building skills and careers for the local workers we train and work with every day. You’re building friendships and community. You’re showing up every day with a positive attitude in the pouring rain or the scorching sun, and you’re building trust. The community we work in trusts that we will show up six days a week and work our hardest, even when other organizations have left. It’s been over two years since Typhoon Yolanda struck, but All Hands is still here.  Rather than throwing up a few buildings and leaving, we’ve become a part of the local community, and in return the community trusts us to work with them to make a difference.

We build this trust when a kid at Camansihay exchanges names with us, and then you remember their name the next time you meet. We build this trust at Streetlight when we talk to the local workers and hear their stories about the typhoon and then laugh as they joke about having five wives while asking how many girlfriends you have back home. We build this trust on Tuesdays and Thursdays when we bring a laptop and a projector to different areas and show a movie, giving a cinema experience to children who can’t go to the movies much or even at all. We build this trust when you visit a local worker in the hospital after a serious accident or attend a local’s birthday party on New Year’s Eve. The people in the community trust that All Hands doesn’t believe to be the whole solution, but we know that working with the locals, we can be a part of it.

That’s why we’ve designed an environmentally sustainable septic tank for the classroom we’re building. That’s why we hire and train those impacted by the typhoon to set them up with skills than can be used to support themselves even after we finish projects. That’s why we’re working with other nonprofits to create buildings that they can use to empower their organizations to provide their own aid to the community. We understand that response and recovery is a blanket term that means more than just building houses, and we’re prepared to do our part.

When I first came to Tacloban, I met a woman in the airport, and during our conversation I mentioned that I was volunteering with All Hands. Because of the work that the organization has done and the place it has taken in the community, she went out of her way to have her brother-in-law drive me from the airport to the mall to buy a mattress, walk through the mall to help me pick one out, and then drive me from the mall to the All Hands Base all on his own time. This community trusts All Hands, so remember that every time you put on that blue t-shirt in the morning, you are part of something incredible and impactful. After more than two years, #WeAreStillHere, and you are still here, so keep on doing what you’re doing, because it matters. The work you do matters, and it’s making an enormous difference.