From the Independent Producer Project on KCRW.com, I'm Bob Carlson, and this is unfictional.

In 2013, Aurora Almondra was a brand new foreign correspondent arriving in the Philippines,

but she was immediately put to work.

There was a siege in the southern part of Philippines Muslim rebels sort of siege the city for a month.

Then there was an earthquake the next month and then the month after that Typhoon Hyon hit.

It was the strongest typhoon to make landfall in recorded history.

But it was also in a part of the Philippines that was used to being hit by major storms.

But this one was so strong that it took down all of the communication lines to Laita and Sammar, which were the two island provinces that were the most hard hit.

Several hours after the typhoon had already hit Manila, we had no idea how bad it was once the first bits of news from local reporters

started rolling in it was incredible how devastated the area really was

Four million people were displaced and over 7,000 people killed.

It was shocking and it doesn't matter where you are,

there's no way you can be prepared for walking by hundreds of bodies a day or like seeing an entire city

reduced to debris. There's no there's just no preparation for that and I'd covered Hurricane Sandy. This was well beyond the range of my imagination

before I saw it.

On this episode of Unfictional,

Aurora Ullmandral goes back to find out what happened to some of the survivors of the typhoon, how their lives were twisted and disrupted, even after the storm had come and gone.

We've partnered with the Ground Truth Podcast to tell the story of

Filipino women and girls forced to sell themselves to fix with the storm and

broken, pulled into the sex trade, sending money home to help

rebuild their family's lives. If you went with a guy for one night, what what can you

do with that money?

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