Great love

THE Tzu Chi Foundation, the Taiwanese Buddhist Great Love humanitarian organization, invited me to Leyte last week for a visit to their housing project in Barangay San Jose, Palo. Palo was one of the sites of great tragedy wrought by typhoon Yolanda, in November 2013. There is a mass grave in front of the rebuilt Palo Cathedral where numerous bodies were buried as an emergency in the aftermath of Yolanda.

Under blue skies and gathering of cumulus clouds, Leyte looked bucolic beside the sea from the air. But the truth is the trauma, both physical and mental, that people in Leyte underwent with Yolanda, will take decades, if not a generation, to become distant history and memory.