A ship is stranded in the middle of a village in Tacloban, the Philippines. (JP/Nadya Natahadibrata)

Cramped tents, shattered buildings, fallen trees were still in sight just a few meters from Tacloban'€™s newly refurbished Daniel Z. Romualdez airport.

It is almost one year since Typhoon Haiyan, also known by the locals as Yolanda, struck Tacloban, the provincial capital of Leyte in the Philippines.

'€œOur house went down when my husband was about to leave it and join the rest of the family at the shelter,'€ said one Yolanda survivor, Rosita, 74, as she tried to hold back tears. '€œHe didn'€™t survive.'€

It took time for Rosita to recover from the trauma and she traveled frequently to Cebu in the southern part of the country whenever the weather turned bad in Tacloban.

Nonetheless, with help from the government and NGOs, she was able to rebuild her house early this year and start a new chapter with her children and grandchildren.

The typhoon, which made landfall on Nov. 8 last year, claimed the lives of more than 6,300 people and caused damage of US$13 billion.

Almost one year after the typhoon struck, the city, with a population of more than 200,000, has started to rise to its feet again.

Crowded food stalls, newly refurbished bank offices and the city'€™s hustle and bustle are signs that Tacloban is slowly but surely recovering from the devastating typhoon.

A schoolboy smiles from his classroom at Bilsig Elementary School in Tacloban, the Philippines. The school was shut down for more than two months following the disaster.
Leyte provincial governor Leopold Dominico L. Petilla said that even though the agriculture-based city had made a remarkable recovery, tough challenges still remained.

'€œHonestly, I didn'€™t think we would be able to fully recover. Yolanda has made a big scar on our people. It'€™s very traumatic for the people,'€ Petilla said.

He said, however, since early this year, the residents had started to return to their jobs, work on their barns and adjust to new things and new life after Yolanda.

'€œThe bigger damage, despite the damage to infrastructure, has been the damage to the people,'€ Petilla said. '€œWhat we are trying to do is to get the people to manage their trauma and overcome it,'€ he continued.

He said, however, that the forthcoming visit of Pope Francis in January next year, had brought a new, more positive, spirit to the people.

During the visit, the pope is scheduled to preside over a mass in front of a vacant space near the airport, then meet people who survived the typhoon and supervise clinics for the poor, as well as resettlements.

'€œThe pope'€™s visit will definitely make us stronger,'€ Petilla said.

According to Petilla, by August this year, around 40 percent of all infrastructure in Tacloban had been repaired, with the rest still in process.

Almost 3,000 families have been relocated to permanent and transitional shelters, and 1,000 more are expected to be relocated to transitional shelters from tents provided by UNHCR and other aid agencies by November.

Data from the city administration shows that 6,633 existing businesses have secured licenses to operate since January this year. That number accounts for 80 percent of the total 8,295 businesses that had been operating in the city prior to Yolanda.

A further 80 percent of the 266 financial institutions, including banks and remittance centers, that operated in 2013 had also secured licenses to operate as of August.

Schools have also started to resume operation, including Bilsig Elementary School in Leyte province, which was wiped out when the typhoon hit.

The school principal, Wilma Bayaya, 46, said that schools had been shut down for more than two months in the area following the typhoon.

'€œThis school was used as an evacuation center just before the typhoon hit,'€ Bayaya said. '€œThe typhoon was very violent and two of the school buildings were completely destroyed; people were killed, including children,'€ she said, as she showed a group around the partly rebuilt school buildings.

Bayaya said that the school had received assistance from UNICEF, as well as from the government'€™s community-driven development program KALAHI CIDDS-NCDDP, which helped with reconstruction.

KALAHI-CIDDS received $3 million in assistance from the Japan Fund, managed by the Asian Development Bank, which was partly to rebuild schools, including Bilsig.

Though the situation has been improving in Tacloban, raising awareness for people to evacuate remains a challenge in the hazard-plagued city.

'€œWe experience five to six typhoons every year,'€ Bayaya said. '€œWe no longer thought it was necessary to evacuate when the warning came,'€ she continued.

Ed Co, the deputy regional project manager of KALAHI CIDDS-NCDDP, said that by early November last year, news had already been spread about the impending typhoon.

He said that the governor appeared on television instructing residents to immediately evacuate, but most people shrugged off the warning.

'€œIt [Yolanda] happened 100 years ago. We didn'€™t imagine it could happen again. Not all the residents took the warning seriously,'€ Co said. '€œWe should no longer underestimate announcements before disasters.'€