Help 4000 Odette Victims Have Food, Water, Power

There’s no doubt rebuilding damages from devastating typhoons is no mean feat.  Such is the feeling after Typhoon Odette pummeled communities in Bohol late last year.  It’s good the recent typhoon locally known as Agaton never inflicted serious damage to life and property in Bohol that  just has started to rise.

Together with local NGO partner Conserve Bohol, the initial relief activity focused on distributing food packs and water right after they typhoon in service communities in the municipalities of Trinidad and Talibon .  With GlobalGiving’s support, local partners were able to procure construction materials like GI roofing sheets, lumber, hollow blocks and cement allocating them to priority households  whose houses were severely mangled and flattened.  

One of the important repair work done is rebuilding the community-managed rice mill infrastructure handled by farmers belonging to Talibon Trinidad Farmers Association (TTFA).  Most communities are rice farmers and the rice mill is one big thing valuable to them. Being community-managed, this facility  provided  farmers with affordable milling rates compared to commercial ones.  This greatly reduced their post-harvest processing cost aside from sense of community ownership.   

TTFA was a strong farmers organization that asserted their land claim rights and was successful in other advocacies like reducing land rents and sharing of produce among others for many years.   These achievements  regrettably earned the ire of the  military, local police including the local government as they insinuated the group must have been influenced by the local communists rebels. 

Sadly though, bereft of any humanitarian considerations, police swamped the area where reconstruction work of the rice mill was going on, inspected papers and told local community members the town Mayor  has ordered the closure of  the facility.  Backed by years of struggle against intimidation and harassments like this one,  the community continue the rebuilding work and closed ranks to protect the facility from the assault of the military.

This mirrors the sad reality of the Philippines poor be it in rural and urban areas.  They are fighting a two-pronged struggle, one from the onslaught of natural calamities and second from state power that red-tagged groups and peoples organizations that voiced out their disenchantment and critique of governments neglect to provide genuine programs to uplift them from poverty.

With 20 typhoons visiting the country each year being on top of vulnerable countries to climate change,  we continue to survive and rebuild communities as we gear toward building things much better.  Meantime, houses have to be repaired, hungry victims should have enough food and water and basic utilities such as electricity and on-line connectivity should be immediately restored.  Hope most community members get settled before the next typhoon comes.