Op-ed: How do you build resilience?

I went to the Philippines to learn about natural disasters. As a disaster management researcher focused on South-east Asia, I was chasing big events: typhoons, earthquakes and calamities. Instead, I found resilience in a brownout.

For those who are fortunate enough to not know, a brownout is a milder version of a blackout. Instead of a complete power outage, you get a drop in voltage, which causes the lights to dim. In the Philippines, brownout has become the colloquial term for any power outage, after the frequent electricity disruptions during the ’80s and ’90s.

One night, as I was having dinner at a friend’s wooden house in a coastal fishing community, just a few metres from the sea, we were plunged into darkness. Within seconds, the family had lit a candle, and the children began creating shadow dogs, rabbits and hearts with their fingers. Minutes later, happy shouts rang out from outside.

“They’re playing volleyball. Want to go see?” The younger children leapt up, and I followed.

“Look at the stars,” they began to sing, pointing upwards. “Look how they shine for you.”

Above, constellations shone bright in the cloudless night sky. Below, young people had gathered to play volleyball by the light of their mobile phones. It felt almost like symmetrical little lights coming together in the dark. Watching them adapt, I found myself thinking about what it means to be resilient.

It seemed to boil down to three things: relationships, reinvention and being real.

Relationships are your safety net

Just as the brownout forced people out of their houses and to lean on each other, resilience is built through the safety net of relationships. Despite the hardship the community faced, I saw a culture of residents reaching out for help – and also reaching out to help.

One neighbour, Rona, whose house was spared from the brownout, supplied electricity from her home-based generator to charge the community’s mobile phones. As a home-grown business owner, she drew on her vast networks to reach out to others.

The close relationship between the residents is apparent, even in the day-to-day. Christian and Rommy, college students who had been sponsored through an educational scholarship by a local non-governmental organisation (NGO), routinely taught younger ones how to navigate school, do chores, and behave.

Separately, a 15-year-old teenager from the community once told me that she did not have friends, only family. As it turned out, she counted the whole village as her family!

It takes a village

In this community, where brownouts were frequent and could last for hours on end, I saw flexibility and tenacity in action. This reminded me of former Meta CEO and author Sheryl Sandberg’s book Option B, where she talks about resilience as what remains when Option A is unavailable. In fact, what I witnessed was a pivot not only to Option B, but also to Options C, D and E.

The community improvised new ways to cope, like the shadow games and volleyball matches by phone light.

In small- and medium- sized disasters like fires, the mothers who gathered would often pass information via what is colloquially known as tsismis (gossip), reinventing the same channels used to spread news in everyday life.

In the aftermath of Typhoon Tino, two talented young musicians I knew – a guitarist and a drummer – had their homes washed away. Yet, they reinvented themselves with the resources available to them through the NGO: The drummer became a guitarist and the guitarist became a pianist!

Showing emotion doesn’t mean you’re weak

Growing up, I used to think that resilience meant choosing to keep calm and carry on, whatever happened. To grin and bear it. However, I noticed that in the village, a full gamut of emotions was on display: joy, sadness, frustration and anger, often expressed creatively through singing, dancing or drawing. As a friend said, “Singing is our way of coping with life.”

In the course of my research on disasters, I’ve learnt from this practically. Alongside field notes, I began to develop a journal of “feel notes” to stay in touch with my own emotions. Naming my feelings and becoming aware of my patterns made me more resilient, not less.

I’ve learnt that resilience is not the absence of feelings, but acknowledging them in full – and having them seen and heard by others.

The community’s resilience does not erase the need for help and support from the outside. It takes both external relationships and infrastructure, and the strength from within, to make people resilient.

While the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines resilience as the ability of an object to return to its original size or achieve success after a setback, I noticed it could be something more. In this fishing village, resilience is allowing the changing circumstances to lead people to a new version of themselves.

Not every circumstance can be bounced back from, but it can offer us a chance to move forward – you just have to look for small wins in everyday life.

Joanna Hioe is a writer, musician, and researcher. Her mini documentary series, Just One Door Away, explores how low-income fishing and farming communities respond to small, medium, and large-scale disasters.