OVER THE Christmas break, different units of the Loyola Schools community initiated efforts to help victims of the tropical typhoon Sendong, which left Northern Mindanao reeling with widespread flood and damage last December 17.
Through the Disaster Response and Management Team (Dream Team), donations both in cash and in kind were collected from December 17 to 29, which were then shipped to Xavier University (XU) in Cagayan. Cagayan de Oro was one of Sendong’s worst hit areas.
The Dream Team is the Ateneo de Manila University’s official relief operations arm, composed of both administration and student representatives.
Sanggunian Vice President Gio Alejo said that the plans for relief operations were already discussed the morning after the flashfloods. “[On] Saturday morning, we were already convincing the administration to start relief efforts. We decided that we’d do it by cash donation drive to target the goers of simbang gabi.”
For the entire run of simbang gabi, the Dream Team accepted and collected donations at Xavier Hall, while in-kind donations were repacked at Cervini Hall.
Council of Organizations of the Ateneo (COA) Dream Team representative Nikki Alcantar said that getting the venues was easy because they were working with the administration. She added that the volunteers were a mix of staff, students, and administrators.
The Ateneo partnered with Cebu Pacific Air for the shipping of the donations and the transportation of psychologists from the Psychology department, who taught trauma debriefing sessions to facilitators from XU’s Psychology Department and Guidance Counseling Office.
Post-Christmas break efforts
After conducting relief operations, the Ateneo started helping out in rehabilitation plans for the displaced victims, which included a thousand students from XU.
Alejo explained that the Ateneo decided to raise funds convertible to gift certificates, which will be used to purchase school supplies for donation. The Office of the Associate Dean for Student Affairs connected COA to the Office of Student Affairs of XU.
According to Alcantar, there were three different efforts put together for the gift certificate drive. There was the COA booth at Kostka Extension, the pledge cards for Sanggunian block and course representatives, and, finally, the room-to-room collection done by the Ateneo Resident Students Association.
She added that the council had already culled around P10,000 from the gift certificate drive alone, excluding the pledge cards given to the block and course representatives of the Sanggunian. If the 8,000-strong Ateneo student body would pitch in the effort, the target fund could be raised from P500,000 to P1.3 million. The funds would be used to shoulder costs for school supplies and uniforms, which a lot of students lost to the typhoon.
COA planned to delegate P1,300 per affected XU student. This amount could be reached if each Ateneo student would contribute P162.50. “[The donation amount is] less than a Venti cup of Starbucks… That could go so far. [Not only can we] give them school supplies, but we can even give them uniforms,” Alcantar said.
From relief to rehabilitation
According to XU President Fr. Bobby Yap, SJ, XU’s Board of Trustees decided last December to donate a five-hectare real estate property of the university in the uphill town of Lumbia as a relocation site for Sendong victims. It would be the staging area of bank houses and tent cities providing temporary shelter for around 500 families whose houses were washed away by the typhoon. Each hectare could hold a hundred houses occupying 50 square meters each.
Yap relayed that as of January 18, the first 50 to 100 families could already occupy the site, outfitted with electricity and water utilities.
While the victims are staying in the temporary site for three to six months, XU, together with several public and private groups, would start planning the six-hectare permanent resettlement area adjacent to the temporary site.
Aside from 600 houses, the master plan for the permanent resettlement also includes development roads, drainage and sewage systems, and community facilities like multi-purpose halls, health centers, classrooms, places of worship and playgrounds in open areas. To also assist the victims in augmenting income, livelihood projects and transport subsidies are also drawn in the plan.
To help the developers build the resettlement area as an environmentally friendly community, the group of Ateneo School of Science and Engineering Dean Dr. Toby Dayrit has already designed electricity and water filtration systems sustained by solar energy.
According to Yap, the rehabilitation plan was also drawn to decongest the public schools in Cagayan de Oro, which served as evacuation centers during the calamity.
Challenges
While COA President Kenneth Abante recognized the students’ efforts in giving immediate help through cash and in-kind donations, he also pointed out the more difficult problem of sustaining their interest and support in helping the victims after the typhoon.
“[Volunteerism] gets hard during the sustaining part. Helping is good. But one thing I observed, even with previous typhoon efforts, [it that] it gets so hyped up and then it dies later on,” he said.
He added that consistency in helping remains a problem, as a lot of people would only help when the urgency arises: “The concern of being consistently there, that’s something I don’t see yet. A lot of people just help when it’s very, very urgent. It’s not a sustained kind of volunteerism.”
Alcantar also echoed Abante’s sentiments. “During the simbang gabi, we’ve been promoting it—the whole Sendong [fund drive]—because it was still fresh, so people were giving out a lot. Right now, people would think, especially the students: ‘Oh, we gave already in December. Why give more now?’”
She deemed that the main problem is the visibility of help. “We had to make people really feel it, [that people in Cagayan de Oro] may come from afar, but they’re still in need. Let’s consider the Sendong victims as Ondoy victims. We know what happened in Ondoy, so let’s help them,” she said.
