Aid helps typhoon widow to support family with tiny store

A tiny store that sells hard candy, coffee and shampoo may seem a cruel consolation for Philippine typhoon widow Jennifer Pulga, but it keeps her with her children, and for that she is deeply grateful.

Pulga's husband, Richard, 27, was among the more than 7,350 people who died when Super Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest storms on record, razed dozens of farming and fishing communities in the central Philippines.

The couple lived in an isolated farming village and Richard was badly injured after winds exceeding 300 kilometers an hour tore down a coconut tree, crashing it into their bamboo house and on top of him.

Richard's death left her with a baby daughter and 6-year-old son but no way to support them.

Pulga did not want to return to the farm and could not have done so if she did, with their home and all the coconut trees that had given them a meager income destroyed in the storm.

Three months after the disaster, Pulga was living with her elderly mother-in-law, herself a widow, in a nearby tiny mountain village.

The mother-in-law's house was made of solid concrete bricks, but the roof was badly damaged in the typhoon and still in need of repair.

With no income, the four of them survived on aid from local and international charity groups.

But the aid in such a remote village was much less than in more heavily populated areas affected by the typhoon, and it was about to run out.

Luck turns

"I was going to have to leave my children and work as a maid somewhere," Pulga said.

"But I needed to stay with my children. I needed to protect them. There is just the three of us now, so they mean so much to me."

She had grown up poor in the countryside, and her only previous work experience outside of the farm was a short stint as a maid in the nations' capital, Manila.

Finally, with that prospect looming, Pulga's luck changed.

A Filipino living in the United States read an article about Pulga and sent her 21,000 pesos ($470) to set up a small store outside her mother-in-law's home.

The store is barely bigger than a dog kennel, with the roof just a sheet donated nearly a year ago from an international aid group.

Pulga earns an average of 50 pesos a day from the store, selling hard candies to children, and sachets of coffee, shampoo and other household items to her neighbors.

"This means so much to me because I can support my children, we are earning enough for our daily expenses," Pulga said.

The store has not been a panacea for her grief.

"Every night I dream of Richard, and I am so sad. I lie in bed and cry," Pulga said, with her 14-month-old daughter, Irish, on her knee. "Sometimes I feel I am going crazy."

Looking after the store helps to distract her from these dark moments, particularly the half-hour trek to the nearest town to buy supplies.

"I'm enjoying being a businesswoman," Pulga said, a rare smile emerging.

More good news arrived last month when a French aid group, which similarly read about Pulga's story on the Internet, sent the equivalent of $1,000 to fix her mother-in-law's house.

The combined donations are extraordinary in a region where hundreds of thousands of typhoon survivors are enduring similar poverty without any financial aid.

Still the money offers no long-term financial miracles and her shop is the most fragile of lifelines.

"I don't know what we would do without it," she said.

(China Daily 11/04/2014 page10)