A few months later, in July 2014, I joined the International Disaster Volunteers, an NGO that had been operating in the field since the start of the disaster. I helped rebuild a school, working as a bricklayer among hundreds of children. Some of them had lost their parents, friends, relatives, and homes. During the heavy rains of another typhoon that occurred that month, I served food to soaked children that had nothing but the air they breathed. I could not avoid seeing my childhood in their eyes, comparing my dreams with theirs. On one of my last days there, with a thousand thoughts in my head about the climate, our future, their dreams, I reached the Lun Tad school in Palo, a few kilometers south of Tacloban. I entered the crowded Grade II classroom and wrote on the blackboard: “What’s your dream?”.

I collected the childrens' answers and took their portraits, some of them shown here.