Every project folder I've built since 2014 carries the same name: Tacloban Regenesis. The name came before the work that lives inside it, and most of that work, in different forms, has been about the same thing.
In November 2013, when Typhoon Yolanda made landfall, I was a programmer in Manila. For a few hours I thought I had lost my father. I hadn't, but my aunt and uncle barely survived, their home was gone, and the stories that came afterward made staying at a desk in Manila feel less and less like an answer.
I'm a Christian, and I prayed about it. The reply that came back was an old line from John 21: feed my sheep. For the next year I did what someone in Manila with a job and a network could do — sent money, sent tools, sent equipment, asked friends and family to help, moved what I could from where I was. By the end of 2014 it wasn't enough. I told the Lord I had given what I could. The answer came from the next verse of the same chapter: do you love me more than these? Feed my lambs.
I resigned from the programming job and moved to Tacloban. My wife and our months-old child followed a few months later. Sheep had been the broader flock; lambs were the youngest, the ones who can't yet feed themselves, and the work changed shape to match — less about sending help to where it was needed, more about being where it was needed.
That's where the two convictions I carry came from. The first is the fragility of life: that what we love can be taken in a day, and any honest response to that fact has to include doing what we can to protect it. The second is stewardship — that we are stewards of this earth, and that honoring the creator means both not destroying what we've been given and not leaving it alone. Stewardship that withdraws isn't stewardship; it's just absence.
The work that's followed has mostly sat at the intersection of technology and community in places that don't get the first wave of either. Systems for under-resourced schools. AI literacy for Filipino teachers and students who would otherwise be on the wrong side of the next literacy gap. Tools built around Filipino values that haven't traditionally translated easily into software. The specific projects are elsewhere on this site; what holds them together is the same folder name underneath.
I live and work in Tacloban, where my family has been since 2014. The work here has taught me things I couldn't have learned from a distance, and the domain name on this site — banezglobal — names what came after: those lessons aren't only ours, and they aren't only Tacloban's. Everything that lives at this address is some attempt to carry what we've learned here outward, to wherever it's needed.