In June, Canberra man Jem Natividad moved back to his native Philippines but through the wonder of the internet was still working for Transit Bar in Civic as its entertainment manager, booking bands and DJs online for the popular nightspot.

So far, so good.

Then Typhoon Haiyan hit on November 8 and the 34-year-old, used to the comforts of middle-class Canberra, found himself deep in the misery and desperation of a disaster zone. "I'm not used to seeing dead bodies. I'm from Canberra, you know?" he said plainly. "I stopped counting after 50."

Last weekend, the former Canberra Grammar student completed a 48-hour odyssey into the heart of the typhoon's destruction, in Tacloban City, searching on foot for an acquaintance's family members to determine if they were alive while carrying 12 kilograms of food in a backpack to deliver to them, as well as an all-important mobile phone.

He has provided a remarkable eyewitness account of the dire circumstances of the survivors, living without food and clean water in almost impenetrable mounds of rubble and rubbish, with aid agencies showing a minimal presence.

And where even the youngest survivors of the typhoon show a heart-breaking pragmatism.

"One of the family members was a 10-year-old girl and I told her I would come back in a week or two and I asked her what she wanted me to bring back," Natividad said from his base in Manila.

"She said, 'We really need things like clothes and rice.' I said, 'You don't want books or toys?' And she said, 'No, we don't need those.' And then she said, 'Can you bring my brother's underwear?' And then the little boy said, 'We need plates and cups.' His sister said, 'No, it's more important we have food.' She said it with no emotion, so matter-of-factly."

Aid agency CARE says an estimated 13 million people have been affected by the typhoon, with more than 4000 people confirmed dead. More than 2 million people are living unprotected in the open, with a further 2 million people unable to return to their homes.

Natividad moved from the Philippines to Canberra with his family in 1986. His mother Violeta and step-father Bill Carolan live in Nicholls. Bill Carolan had been an attache to the Australian embassy in Manila.

Natividad shifted back to Manila earlier this year. His sister Hazel De-Vera had a housekeeper who had family in Tacloban City but had no contact with them since the typhoon. Natividad made the decision to fly to the city, the capital of the province of Leyte, about 580 kilometres south-east of Manila, to try to find them. He caught one of the first resumed commercial flights direct from Manila to Tacloban City last Saturday morning.

He believed most of the people on the flight were on missions to find family members. "The plane went really silent as soon as we went low over the city and could see the devastation. Generally people chatter and that, but I looked around and basically everyone was in shock and had red, watery eyes," he said.

The airport was an indication of what was to come. The iron roof peeled back. Buildings without walls. Rubble everywhere. Confusion. He had the names of the family members he was searching for, a hand-drawn map and a general idea of the location of their neighbourhood, about 3.5 kilometres from the airport. His backpack held rice, tinned fish, chocolate, water and a local delicacy, diniguan. He had given himself 48 hours to find the family because "I knew I could stay awake for 48 hours and still have my senses". The added complication was the area had its own dialect, of which he had only a rudimentary grasp.

"There was some transportation at the airport, guys on bicycles and with side carts. I didn't really want to take it," he said. " I had food with me but all the news reports I heard were that people were pretty hungry and desperate so I didn't want to gamble it. I thought walking was a better idea for some reason. I also didn't know really where I was going."

He had tried to prepare himself mentally for what would confront him but days later, back in Manila, it sounded like he was still trying to process it.

"I was actually in Tacloban three weeks ago, before the typhoon. I didn't recognise the place," he said. "The smell was definitely in your face but that disappeared after about three hours because I got used to it. It's primarily garbage, the smell of water that has been stagnating for eight days. The hygiene just didn't exist. People were defecating, peeing wherever. And everything is a wreck.

"I walked around for like four hours, asked about 100 people, 'Hi, do you know this area?' I got to the area, started asking, 'Hi, do you know these people?' I had just the names and was hoping I was pronouncing them right.

"When I got to the neighbourhood, basically the neighbourhood guy spoke to me for about half an hour asking me questions, because Filipino neighbours are quite protective. If you're a stranger coming out of nowhere, they're not going to go, 'Oh, yeah, it's that guy there.' They asked 'Who are you?', 'What are you doing?' And eventually they grabbed one of the relatives. He was the oldest brother they brought out first and again I had to ask him questions to make sure it was him and explain to him why I was there."

It was the housekeeper's son. Natividad rang her immediately and put her on the phone to him. The mother and son had actually not spoken to each other for seven years, such were the restraints of poverty and distance.

"She was quite elated. She was thankful. There were definitely tears," Natividad said.

The family of eight – five children aged three to 12, the parents and an uncle – were living basically within the rubble in a room two metres by three metres, knocked together from dumped timber, iron and advertising tarps. They had survived the storm and the rising waters by going to a neighbour's house that was better built, standing on a table, then getting into the roof, and then basically standing on a high wall from morning to night, waiting for the flood to recede. They had been warned by a neighbourhood leader the typhoon was coming and told to evacuate to another part of town.

"I couldn't quite understand as to why they didn't evacuate. But they there were glad they didn't because in that area they were told to evacuate to, a lot of people died."

Their home had been torn apart by the winds. There was nothing left except mounds of debris, tossed together like pick-up sticks. Natividad said the lack of food was desperate.

"They didn't eat the day of the storm because they were on the wall. They spent the next two days just trying to find food and they couldn't find any. So on the third day they finally managed to get some coconuts and bananas. On the fifth day they managed to find some wet rice. And on the seventh day, that's when they finally received some relief goods. That equated to three kilograms of rice plus two tins of sardines for the three families who live with each other. I think it was like 13 people," he said.

"I was there on the eighth, ninth and 1tenth day; they didn't get any more goods. During that time, I saw a truck giving out rice right near the airport. I didn't see anything else. We walked around the city on the ninth day, trying to find rice to buy. We kept hearing there was rice to buy. We couldn't find any.

"We managed to buy some chickens though. I think all the looting and stealing was done. Granted, throughout the night, I did hear a lot of gunshots. I don't know what that was about."

The father of the family was a pedicab driver probably earning the equivalent of three or four Australian dollars a day. His livelihood, such as it was, is gone. The mother of the family lost her sister, brother-in-law and their three children in the typhoon. Yet Natividad said they were if not quite sanguine, then resigned to their plight, simply waiting "until it gets better".

"It's funny about Filipinos. Even talking to the mother about her sister, life moves on," Natividad said. "Like, that's the overarching thing.

"In the neighbourhood, people were helping each other to make their makeshift homes. People just moved on. They're not sitting around crying into their hands or anything like [that]. The kids were playing around like they would any other day. The mother was walking around and sweeping like she would any other day. It's the environment that's crazy. They're living in a garbage dump; it's not even rubble."

Natividad said he saw little evidence of aid agencies getting food and other help through to where it was needed. Water was being sourced from broken mains. He said the main devastation was off the main roads, and those areas seemed to be ignored.

"For the 48 hours I was there I saw four obvious foreigners [in the more isolated areas]. At the airport I saw a lot of goods sitting there. Things didn't seem to be going anywhere," he said. "At the airport there were probably 40 marines, and they made a really big show of standing in front of us and picking up garbage. It was a real kick in the guts. It just seemed wrong when there were people elsewhere who had received one delivery of food in 10 days."

Natividad and his friends are now coordinating their own informal aid relief. They have received donations from family and friends. A fund-raiser at Transit Bar, which he coordinated, raised $6000 for CARE Australia. After a brief respite back in Manila, Natividad was back on a plane this week to the Western Visayas region after hearing about a village of 1000 people which had received no help at all. Again, he was taking food, not knowing what awaited him.

"I can do it. That's all," he said. "I am able to do these things. I can catch a flight out and be somewhere else in a couple of hours. But not everyone has that privilege."