A survivor of Typhoon Haiyan. Arlynn Aquino EU/ECHO, Leyte, Philippines, November 2013. Flickr. Some rights reserved.One year after Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, Teresita, with no money but with a handful of prayers, dared to travel from Samar to Manila in search of a job. Her house is a few kilometres away from San Juanico Bridge, which connects Samar and Leyte where Haiyan made its landfall. Her house, along with her family’s small coconut plantation, was washed away when the water drowned the city.
In Olkaria, Naivasha in Kenya, the Maasai indigenous people have been evicted for a geothermal power plant, a clean energy project. Similarly in western Kenya, forest dependent Sengwer indigenous peoples have been accused of being the cause of deforestation and have been evicted from the Embobut Forest.
Whenua — the Maori word for land, also means placenta. There is a tradition in Tuvalu where women who give birth bury the whenua and the pito (umbilical cord) of the baby and plant a tree on top, signifying the relationship between the child and the land of their birth. This is why the people of Tuvalu, unlike their neighbors in Marshall Islands and Fiji, are hesitant to relocate and leave their land. Their land is their culture; their land is their language.
