A Parade of Lights float |
At
the city center, Tacloban City throbbed with life. People were
walking around even late at night. New restaurants and cafes
scintillated at the dark corners, some interesting enough to catch
attention. Small carinderias billowed with smoke from their grills.
Young people gathered around new bars. New hotels had also opened,
while the Santo Niño Church had been refurbished.
It
has been almost two years since super typhoon Haiyan, locally called
Yolanda, ravaged many parts of the Visayas in early November 2013,
particularly the capital of the province of Leyte and the hub of
Eastern Visayas.
International
and local aid response was immediate and overwhelming, ameliorating
the effects of widespread devastation, which included deaths pegged
at around 6,000. Continued aid enabled communities to recover,
particularly Tacloban City.
“When
you go around the city, [you will see that] business has bounced
back, especially in the downtown area. The people are moving on, so
to speak. Malls have opened, have become better. Hotels are open.
It’s booming, in a way. Lalong
dumami—more
restaurants, more hotels, more stores. New contractors are coming in,
building the houses. Volunteer tourism brings people, also boosts the
economy. They spend money here, rent houses here. The housings, may
ginagawa pa.
We will get there eventually. Every couple of weeks, may
tinu-turnover
na
bahay.
Unti-unti
[we
will get there],” revealed Tacloban City councilor Cristina
Gonzales-Romualdez, actress-wife of Tacloban City mayor Alfred
Romualdez.
Additionally,
she estimated the recovery to be at 80 percent. And one very apparent
proof of that recovery is the recently held Sangyaw Festival.
“Everyone
is really excited. The symbol of having a big fiesta is not because
we want to celebrate big and all that. For me, it’s really… ang
tawag namin paglaum,
hope. It brings hope to the people that yes, we’re back on our
feet. Yes, this will help our tourism, help our economy,” she
explained. “Holistic ang
approach ‘to. ‘Di lang ‘yung psyche
ng
tao. ‘Di lang ‘yung psychologically
it will help them feel na, yes, we’re back on our feet. Forget the
past, let’s move forward. ‘Yung
economy
natin.
Any cultural event boosts our economy. They encourage the tourists to
come in, focus attention to our city, we hope. [When] we boost the
economy, it helps the people. It’s a win-win situation for
everybody. ‘Yung
mga tao tuwang-tuwa. Nakalimutan nila ‘yung nagyari.”
Sangyaw
Festival is the transformation of a more traditional and religious
fiesta in honor of Santo Niño de Tacloban, the city’s patron
saint. It was created by the former First Lady Imelda Marcos in 1976,
taking on an old term in the Eastern Visayan language of Waray-Waray,
sangyaw,
which means “to announce” or “to herald” a news. The festival
though was discontinued in 1986 and was revived in 2008 by Marcos’s
nephew, Alfred Romualdez.
As
Sangyaw Festival, it has become a motley event incorporating cultural
and social activities, entertainment and fairs as well as traditional
and religious events, lasting from a few weeks to almost a month, but
always culminating on the day of the fiesta on June 30. Tacloban’s
feast day for the Santo Niño, or the Infant Jesus, is different from
the rest of the country, which celebrates it on the third Sunday of
January. Tacloban’s feast day commemorates the return of the Santo
Niño de Tacloban icon on June 27 after miraculously surviving a
shipwreck during a voyage in 1889. Another story tells about the
transfers of the image between the barangay
of
Buscada of Basey in Samar and the sitio
of
Cancabato, now Tacloban City. It is said that Cancabato would borrow
Buscada’s Santo Niño icon, which was bigger, for its fiesta. As
Cancabato community grew bigger, there were talks of retaining the
image. When the Santo Niño went missing in Buscada and later found
in Cancabato, it helped decide where it should be placed. Every June
27, the transfer of the Santo Niño image is reenacted, called
Balyuan rite, on San Pedro Bay with a procession on the sea from
Basey to Tacloban City.
The
Sangyaw Festival coincides with the festival of the province of
Leyte, the Pintados-Kasadyaan Festival of Festivals, also in honor of
the Santo Niño. The Pintados Festival was first celebrated on June
29, 1987. Then Leyte governor Remedios Petilla introduced another
festival in 1996, the Leyte Kasadyaan Festival of Festivals. The
Pintados and Kasadyaan festivals were later merged together. In
recent years, rivalry developed between the Sangyaw and the
Pintados-Kasadyaan, being associated with two of Leyte’s biggest
rival political clans.
But
according to Romualdez, the rivalry is just perception. “I want to
look at it in a good light. We’re thankful that we have two
festivals and two parades. The bigger, the better. Talagang
boost
sa
economy.
Wala
naman talagang away.”
Indeed,
during June, Tacloban City is riddled with many activities and events
with the two festivals. Sangyaw Festival is developing to be a bigger
event through the years except in 2014, after Haiyan struck.
“‘Yung
fiesta
last year, it was really, really low-key. We were still in the
mourning stage. If you live in Tacloban, it’s still fresh in our
minds, but of course, we want to leave that behind and move forward.
There’s really nothing we can do. Babangon
na lang tayo and
move forward. It happened, and we learn to be resilient,” she
recounted.
Resiliency
was the theme of this year’s Sangyaw Festival, celebrating how
Taclobans survived the tragedy and how they are recovering.
“We
want to be more resilient. We bounce back,” Romualdez, who chairs
the city’s Committee on Finance and Tourism, added.
Said
to be a grand comeback of sorts, the Sangyaw Festival, with almost a
month of celebration, was bigger and had more events and parties.
There were concerts featuring Jaya on June 27; Pokwang, Chokoleit and
Michael Pangilinan on June 28; and Rocksteddy on June 28.
Another
Sangyaw highlight was a beauty pageant, which is de-rigueur in any
Philippine festivities. About 5,000 attendees were said to be at the
Tacloban Metropolitan Arena or Astrodome for the Miss Tacloban
pageant. About 30 people died in the Astrodome, where many people
also sought refuge, from Haiyan storm surges. But last June 27, the
venue was filled with cheers as 18-year old student of the Asian
Development Foundation College, Reena Vivienne C. Pineda, was crowned
Miss Tacloban, who said that “Resilience is seeing Taclobanons with
their smiles back on their faces again. It is about standing here
again in the Astrodome celebrating life after Haiyan.”
“People
are happy that we are going back to normal. It’s really for the
people,” said Romualdez, who was thankful for the support of the
sponsors, such as private business companies, for funding many
aspects of the festival.
The
centerpiece of the Sangyaw Festival was the Parade of Lights on June
29, attended by thousands of people. About 20 floats by different
barangays,
schools and private companies paraded down Tacloban’s main streets
— Justice Romualdez, Rizal, Imelda and Real — all blinking with
light-emitting diodes. They were accompanied by dancers and
merrymakers, competing for people’s attention as well as for
prizes.
The
Parade of Lights was conceptualized by Cristina and her husband five
years.
“We
want to do something different,” she related. “The old fiesta was
similar to any other fiesta [in the Philippines]. Gusto
naman namin medyo kakaiba.
You don’t want to be a copycat; you want to be unique. We want
something that’s Tacloban’s very own. The Parade of Lights is, I
think, the first in the Philippines, something different, something
new. It was also inspired when we went to Disneyland and we saw
that.”
“Symbolically,
we want to be the light to the region,” she added.
Scintillating floats during the Parade of Lights of the Sangyaw Festival |
A Parade of Lights participant in luminous costume |
The big perya near the Tacloban City Astodome |
The newly renovated Santo Niño Church of Tacloban City |