Twenty years of hard work, patience and slaving themselves to provide for their growing family and building a house was what preoccupied Christopher and Nimfa Arcala of Calape Bohol, all of the half of their lives.
Prior to a debilitating bout of arthritis, Christopher, now 56, earned a meager income as a construction worker, working odd jobs being a helper to becoming a rough carpenter when times demand for it. Now, with an illness that keeps him from working, he has become another dependent, even as his kids are now slowly becoming independent.
His wife Naomi, doubles up as a housewife and a neighbourhood errand, doing odd jobs from cleaning yards, to laundry.
What is left of their daily wages, they pool to buy sack after sack of cement, or tin cans of river sand, a few hollow blocks every now and then and some lumber. To build a house for their kids was what Christopher dreamt of..
It was hard, slaving yourself in hard work, often leaving the kids at home to older siblings, if only we can provide for the food and whatever the growing kids need, Naomi candidly shared.
For her husband Christopher, if only there were better options for getting their needs supplied, he would have gone to that, but then he has to do whatever he can. Which is not much.
The family bore kids, nurtured them through childhood, even as they also witnessed how their house grew from a flimsy quilt of light materials, to one with hollow block walls and poured concrete floor.
Like a classic Boholano house, the Arcala house, a few square meters fitting a small lot in Barangay Santa Cruz, grew with yearly mini renovations.
This year, it may be a wall finishing, or a few tin sheets, a hollow block division to separate a room from another, or a kitchen expansion. Small changes funded by the little savings the family spares.
These throughout the years, or when elder siblings have to leave home to start their own families.
And then they were slowly able to put up the beginnings of the second floor, block after block, nail after painstaking nail years, and the house slowly took shape.
Until December 2021, when the family became united again for Christmas, that fate would hand the family another rotten card.
My elder sister just had given birth, and everyone was excited.
Since then, the Arcalas have stretched a blue insulated sack as aroof to what was their home.
That day, the local officials told us to go seek safe shelter, and we went to a neigbor’s house to wait it out for the storm to pass. It was a sturdy house and we were with other families there, Nimfas said.
The said house was a few meters from their house, and at 10 PM, she saw that their house has lost its roof.
By midnight, the whole second floor was blown off, the hollow block walls only hinting the presence of a house there.
The Arcalas were among the nearly 900 families that would totally lose their houses that night.
As to the Provincial Disaster and Risk Reduction Management Council, some 7,559 houses in Calape alone were also partially damaged that night.
What my parents saved for 20 years, was gone in three hours, Lee Christopher said.
Now, the kitchen is what has become the family’s living, dining and bedroom in one, the family stepping off a dripping tarpaulin when the rains would come.
Losing their house and the savings their parents invested in the last two decades, Lee Christopher, now a junior high school student in town, has wished he could help.
As with other families, the Arcalas received some form of financial assistance from the government, but with some few thousand pesos, the help is barely enough to but for their food needs now that the typhoon has also affected their parent’s livelihood.
I wish I could help, but then, how can I, a student still struggling to get through online class?, he asked,
In Bohol, over 200,000 houses have suffered the same fate as the Arcalas house.
According to the National Housing Authority, they have released some P55 million in assistance to those families which have lost their homes during the storm.
The sum was based on the reports submitted by LGU sources, who were supposed to validate the number of houses which were either totally or partially damaged by the typhoon.
Even then, that the government can afford to give to victims would just be barely enough for a small hut which can keep families safe.
For Lee Christopher and the thousands of Boholanos who have totally lost their hoes, December 16, they may have already sought ways to rebuild their lives, but then, for families like the Arcalas who have also lost their capacities to earn, they could only hope that the government can put up a better system of assistance to the victims of disasters, knowing that the Philippines lies in the belt where these calamities pass. (rahc/PIA-7/Bohol)
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