Surigao Families Got New Hillside Lots. The Water Pipe Stops Two Kilometers Downhill.
Coastal villages in Surigao del Norte were relocated uphill after the last typhoon season. The relocation plan forgot the water lines.
Families moved off the Surigao del Norte coast last year are walking back down to the shore every morning. Not to fish. To fetch water.
The relocation sites sit on higher ground, the kind of elevation that should keep a household dry through the next storm surge. The lots came with concrete pads, tin roofs, and a barangay signboard. They did not come with a water connection.
The pipe ends where the budget did
Local officials in coastal Surigao have spent the past two years moving households out of low-lying sitios flagged by hazard maps. The logic is sound. The shoreline has been chewing through stilt houses for a decade, and DRRM offices have the photos to prove it.
What the relocation packages skipped is the part that turns a lot into a home. Water district lines run along the old coastal road. Extending them uphill costs money no one budgeted for. So the new houses sit dry while families haul jerry cans up a slope on foot or by habal-habal.
A walk back to the sea, twice a day
The shore is where the deep wells are. It is where the neighbors who refused to move still live, sharing their pump for a small fee or for free if you used to be a neighbor. It is also where the boats are, for the men who never stopped fishing because nothing uphill pays.
So the relocation, on paper a one-way move, is a daily loop. Kids walk down before school. Mothers walk down after lunch. Old men sit by the old houses because their knees cannot do the climb twice.
The hillside lots fill up at night and empty out by 6 a.m.
What the plan counted, what it missed
Resettlement programs in the Philippines are usually measured by lots distributed and structures built. Housing agencies report those numbers cleanly. Water connections, electricity hookups, and the cost of a tricycle ride to the nearest market sit in a different column, or no column at all.
Advocacy groups working on climate displacement have flagged this gap for years. A household is not relocated when the roof goes up. It is relocated when the household can live there without commuting back to the place the government just declared unsafe.
The gap shows up in school attendance, in the price of a 20-liter container, in the diesel a habal-habal driver burns going up and down the same hill twelve times a day.
The bargain on the signboard
The signboard at the entrance of one relocation site lists the partner agencies and the year the project broke ground. It does not list a water schedule. The families who live there did not ask for one because the answer is already in the walk.
If the next typhoon season comes before the pipe does, the houses on the hill will hold. The families inside them will be down by the shore, filling containers, when the surge arrives.
