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Reluctant Return Home for Flood Victims
IRIN
November 10, 2009
Philippines
In the lakeshore community of Muntinlupa, outside Manila, elderly women queue to receive relief items from IOM
Seventy-two year-old grandmother Jovita Ramos's arthritic hands could hardly stop shaking as she stood in line for assistance.
Her home in Muntinlupa District - just an hour's drive south of Manila in Luzon island, the worst-affected of all the islands - is still flooded six weeks after the first of four typhoons hammered the Philippines.
Like many of her neighbours, Ramos, her two children and four grandchildren were evacuated to a temporary shelter after tropical storm Ketsana. The ensuing flooding washed away entire communities in Manila and outlying areas, including Muntinlupa, a city of 500,000 on the banks of Laguna de Bay.
Now they have begun returning, but face new challenges.
"It was so difficult living in the evacuation centre. Food and water were difficult, and my grandchildren who are still little often got sick," Ramos said, clutching a crude staff to keep her balance.
"So we decided to return here, but our house is still under water," she said.
Ramos's close friend, 70-year-old Armando Anciaga, said many of his relatives in the lake-shore slum of Putatan in Muntinlupa also had no choice but to return.
Most of the families traditionally relied on fishing in Laguna de Bay, a heavily silted 90,000-hectare body of water around which developers erected poorly-planned housing estates in recent years.
"We may have angered the lake, and it is now reclaiming land that in the past it once owned," Anciaga shrugged, adding that the last major flooding to have hit the area was in 1972, but on a much smaller scale.
"Now we have to rely on donations and help from the outside. But one day, they will also tire of giving, and what will happen to us then?" Anciaga said.
His two adult sons and their wives have gone to Manila in search of work, leaving him to care for four young children whom he said had not eaten a proper meal in two weeks.
Exactly a week after Ketsana, Typhoon Parma battered northern Luzon Island, causing heavy damage to agriculture and dumping more rain on already flooded areas.
A third Typhoon, Lupit, spared the country in late October, but days later, Typhoon Mirinae caused additional havoc.
Nine million affected
More than 1,125 people died from the typhoons, including 167 who succumbed to leptospirosis, a flood-borne disease caused by exposure to water contaminated with rat and other animal urine.
According to the country’s National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC), more than nine million people were affected by the back-to-back storms.
The UN launched a flash appeal for US$74 million for one million people in immediate need of assistance, but as of 9 November, only 36 percent of the total had been pledged or received.
President Arroyo has set up a special reconstruction committee to find ways of draining flooded areas, which experts have warned would probably remain flooded well into next year, directly affecting over one million people living near the lake.
Many homes remain flooded six weeks after Ketsana struck
"Transitional communities"
Ida Mae Fernandez, project officer for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said the agency was now looking at setting up "transitional communities" to provide semi-permanent shelters in devastated areas.
"Through the camp coordination/camp management and emergency shelter clusters of government, the IOM continues to discuss the exact feasibility of this strategy, applied in the current situation, because setting up of transitional communities means constructing transitional shelters - which may take more time than what we have, in terms of immediately and urgently alleviating the situation of communities still under water," Fernandez told IRIN.
"While it was not an inherent concern in the affected communities before Ketsana, now after Mirinae, the longer the water stays, the higher the risk," she warned.
"The cumulative effects of weekly rains and floods have increasingly and seriously impacted communities' and families' capacities to recover quickly," she said, adding that the current scenario posed "real challenges to the disaster planning continuum".
As of 9 November, more than 130,000 storm-displaced continue to live in more than 400 evacuation centres in Manila and outlying areas as well as elsewhere in Luzon, the NDCC reported.
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