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Sendong: One Month After
After one month of typhoon Sendong, the DSWD in Region 10 has reported that they have assisted 47,238 families with 283,283 persons in Misamis Oriental which includes Cagayan de Oro City. The city is one of the hardest hit of the flooding that occurred on December 16, 2011.
Cagayan de Oro still has 24 evacuation centers and 913 families from these centers have already been transferred to the 10 Temporary Tent Shelters in various parts of the city while the permanent sites are being prepared and worked on.
There is now a total of 34.9 hectares of land that is being worked on as permanent sites. These include
Calaanan Permanent Site (9.4 hectares)
Lumbia Permanent Site (5 hectares):
Taguano, Indahag Permanent Site (8 hectares) c/o Cong. Rufus Rodriguez
Indahag Permanent Site (9 hectares) c/o City Government of Cagayan de Oro
Balulang (3.5 hectares)
When completed these lands will be able to accommodate more than 6,000 families. Records at DSWD10 show that there are 8,363 families with Totally Damaged Houses 5,564 families with
Partially Damaged Houses.
Meanwhile, Balsa Mindanao, a citizen-led mobilization for disaster response and to advocate for climate justice, reports that a month after the Sendong disaster, some survivor children are still having nightmares that they drowned themselves from the floods.
Children and grown-ups go through a stress debriefing to help them get back to no live niormal lives. Several groups have voluntered to assist in this service. Photos supplied by Balsa Mindanao
A 19-year-old man is also seen running almost daily to the site of their house that was wiped out by the flood, still searching for his missing parents. While a 61-year-old woman is now having bouts of severe depression after she lost her husband and daughter and six grandchildren who are all missing until now.
These are just some of the cases documented by Balsa Mindanao’s volunteers who conducted psycho-social therapy sessions among adult and children survivors in the cities of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan last January 14-15. The volunteers were comprised of psychologists, guidance counselors, social workers and some psychology and social work student interns coming from the different Mindanao regions.
More than 300 children were given psycho-social therapy sessions in Cagayan de Oro and Iligan Cities where activities such as group play, drawing and group-sharing were launched. There were also one-on-one sharing for those who suffer severe trauma and depression. For the adults some 170 were given psycho-social sessions in Cagayan de Oro and Iligan.
To date, some of the said volunteers for are still in the Cagayan de Oro following up serious psycho-social cases including adults. It is to be recalled that a man had earlier committed suicide in an evacuation site in Cagayan de Oro City due to depression upon knowing that he could not avail of a house for rehabilitation.
Social worker and volunteer Girlie de la Cerna of the Children’s Rehabilitation Center-Southern Mindanao Region said that psycho-social problems are always expected from calamities like Sendong.
She added, however, that psycho-social problems should be seen within the whole structural context saying that wanton environmental plunder by big business ventures such as mining and plantations have caused disasters resulting to psycho-social problems.
The said psycho-social volunteers were among the more than a hundred of volunteers who rendered psycho-social and medical services for the 3rd wave of Balsa Mindanao’s Mission for Sendong survivors. Among them were nuns, pastors, religious brothers, teachers, students, nurses, and doctors and some representatives from various organizations and institutions.
Balsa Mindanao is now preparing for the 40th day of the Sendong disaster on January 25 and the 4th wave of the Sendong Mission which is the rehabilitation phase this coming February.
DSWD, on its part, said that 2,095 individuals have been debriefed by its social workers and volunteer psychologists.
In another development, Environment Groups warn of “Environmental Apocalypse” if Big Mining & Plantations are not stopped
“The tragedy of Sendong not only demonstrates government failure in climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction measures, but it is most especially the catastrophic effect of decades of export-oriented, extractive, and ecologically irresponsible laws governing use of our lands and natural resources,” says PANALIPDAN Mindanao spokesperson Sr. Stella Matutina of the Benedictine Sisters.
The group -- a network of advocates for the environment and national patrimony --- pointed out an obvious irony that while the national government has blamed illegal logging activities for forest denudation in Northern Mindanao, it continues to permit large-scale logging operations by approving six (6) Integrated Forest Management Agreements (IFMAs) that cover 53,578 hectares of forest areas in the region. Government data show that it has approved 298 Community-Based Forest Management Agreements (CBFMAs) covering 213,770 hectares with several of these CBFMAs given the go-signal to conduct logging through Resource Use Permits. “Worse, these legal logging operations have been exempted by the Aquino administration from Executive Order 23 or the total log ban.”
“The series of disasters we are witnessing today emphasizes that Mindanao’s environment has reached its threshold, a saturation point that will only bring about more destruction in communities where there are big mining, logging, mega dams, and large tracts of agribusiness plantations,” says Matutina.
“The large-scale environmental destruction is due to the large-scale extractive industries being pushed by existing government policies and programs that promote foreign investments. We are seeing an environmental apocalypse not caused by nature’s wrath but by capitalist greed and government corruption.”
PANALIPDAN Mindanao believes that the tragedies of Sendong, the Pantukan landslides, and the recent Agusan, Bukidnon and Surigao floods are clear indications that the allocation of 1/3 of Mindanao’s total land area to large-scale foreign mining, logging, and other economic enterprises are taking its toll on human lives and ecological balance.
Under the current administration, more than 730 mining agreements and permits have been awarded to multinational and transnational corporations.
The group urges the Aquino government to learn from the lessons of Sendong, Pantukan and of previous major disasters exacerbated by climate crisis. “It should now be all too clear for our policy makers that the unabated plunder of our national patrimony connects to the overall global warming and climate change problem. The confluence of national and global environmental plunder has led us to this point of destruction and deaths.”
“We press for reversal of national laws and policies that follow a development framework based on extraction, exploitation and export; imperialist plunder of the environment, aided by monopoly of landholdings and resources, and government corruption -- the three social ills that we must eliminate in order to reverse the path of destruction that we now see in our midst.”
Panalipdan vowed to continue advocating for alternative laws that safeguard people’s welfare and environment such as House Bill 4315 or the People’s Mining Bill, while it lauds the people’s victory in opposing destructive mining operations of Xstrata-SMI's copper-gold project in Tampakan, South Cotabato as shown by the recent move of DENR to deny issuance of environmental clearance for the largely Swiss-owned mining company.
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