9. Dynamic Resilience of Ayta Community: Creative Rehabilitation After Mt. Pinatubo’s Eruption, 1991

The 1991 Eruption of Mt. Pinatubo (1745 m) in western Luzon was the biggest in size in the twentieth century. Damages caused by the volcanic explosions and ash falls, as well as by rampaging lahar flows (landslide flood of wet volcanic debris) during successive rainy seasons, reached an astronomic figure, spreading over five provinces in central Luzon. Eighty thousand houses were damaged and eight thousand more were totally destroyed. Far more than 1 million people suffered from the damage of loss of their properties (Mercado and Pineda, Socioeconomic impacts of the Mount Pinatubo eruption. In: Newhall C, Punongbayan R (eds) Fire and mud: eruption and Lahars of Mout Pinatubo Philippines, Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, Quezon City, 1996). Over one hundred thousand people were forced to live in evacuation centers or tent cities temporarily, and many of them eventually moved to settle down in 20 resettlement sites (11 for lowland Christians and 9 for highland Aytas) provided by the government and some others to voluntarily arranged sites by NGOs or by themselves. For detailed information on Aytas lifeways before and after the eruption, please see Shimizu (Pinatubo Aytas: continuity and change. Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, 1989; Past, present and future of the Pinatubo Ayta. In: Hiromu S (ed) After the eruption: Pinatubo Aytas at the crisis of their survival. Foundation for Human Rights in Asia, Tokyo, 1992; The orphans of Pinatubo: the Ayta struggle for existence. Solidaridad Publishing House, Manila, 2001).