day after the flood 3

Volunteered at Red Cross Shaw Boulevard Sunday. An old dormmate, Kaye invited me. Arrived late evening and was immediately put to work packing canned goods and rice in plastic bags. There were a lot of young people there. My guess is they were students from a nearby university. They were very well dressed and fresh-faced.

After about an hour, they told us that a Red Cross canter would be delivering and distributing goods to a village in Marikina "where the action" was. Kaye and I decided to go. Volunteers filed into five cars and waited for about an hour before we actually left. We were part of Team D. Apparently Sir D directed a quite highly acclaimed independent film about a gay boy growing up in the Philippines. He speaks slowly in a bit of a confused manner.

In our car, someone asked to begin a prayer. The girl assigned to lead the prayer whined a bit and then began to ask for everybody's safety. She then prayed that "sana the people we help will be touched by what we give them." I did a bit of a double take.

We arrived at the village at about 12 midnight. The roads were wet and dark and filled with abandoned cars. There were other volunteers there who I had seen preparing to leave when I arrived at Shaw. I think all in all there were about 50 of us.

We waited again and some of the volunteers passed the time gossiping. I got angry at one group who were singing and dancing outside the darkened village. It was irritating to see that some people still did not seem to grasp the magnitude of the floods. For some, it seemed like it was a field trip. They did not seem to appreciate that there were people trapped in their homes where outside they were singing, "Tonight's going to be a good night..."

After about another hour, Sir D gave us our instructions. When rescuers brought people out of the village, we would meet them and guide them to the van where the relief goods were held. We would then escort them to a documentation team to record their names and contact numbers. Then, we were to bring them to a waiting military truck that was supposed to take them to an evacuation center. The military truck never materialized.

A few people began to straggle out on their own. Sir D's instructions did not seem feasible in the situation. Instead, while they were being documented, another volunteer would run to get them food and water. Some people who left the village were picked up by relatives while others returned inside the village after getting enough food for their families. One elderly lady was carried out by a Coast Guard man and put into a waiting ambulance. It took some time for the ambulance to leave though because they were blocked by news vans interviewing senator and Red Cross chairman Dick Gordon. I wondered if that's what they meant when they said that's "where the action was."

Another Coast Guard team entered the village with a boat and we waited again. After a while, some volunteers said they were going in. I picked up a box of bread and carried it in knee high floods to a commercial building about one block from the guardhouse. There were about 10 of us who went in. On the second floor of the building, there were about 20 people camped out in offices. Most were sleeping.
A village official who was with us demanded that they wake up because "the volunteers took the trouble to get here." I found that a bit upsetting.

One lady told me that they were not really residents of the village but had sought refuge in the building from nearby. She had two young boys with her, one who was mentally disabled but seemed to be enjoying himself. Another woman asked me if we had medicines for coughs and betadine for cuts. All we had was food but I told her there was an ambulance outside and we would come back.

I went back out of the village and approached a lady in a Red Cross shirt to tell her that people inside were requesting medicines. She told me to coordinate with the ambulance. Another team was going in and I asked a volunteer with a first aid kit to drop off the medicines at the second floor.

At about 3 a.m. most of the volunteers had already left. There were about 16 of us left. More people were coming to the van, not necessarily from inside the village but from nearby areas. It was difficult to come up with an effective system to distribute the goods and make sure there was enough to go around.

Sir D told us that when the goods ran out, we should never tell people that there was no more food. Instead we were to tell them that another van was on its way. Some people waited, including a pregnant lady with a sick girl. Others left. We waited about four hours for the next van to come back. It was about 8 a.m. Monday.

The goods in the van had not been packed yet so six of us sat inside unpacking and repacking the cans and noodles before immediately handing them out again. A man with a baby tapped on the window asking if there was a place where someone could give his child a checkup. The ambulance though had not come back. All we could do was give him some extra bottles of water.

There was a limited supply of water so we tried to make sure that families with babies were prioritized. It's next to impossible though to ensure that this was the case.

When the food ran out again, we were told to tell people that another batch of supplies would be arriving at the village's clubhouse and to proceed there.
After about another hour, a team prepared to go back in to rescue someone. We joined the van entering the village and they dropped us off at the clubhouse where we packed some more goods and distributed them. Inside was a little bit more orderly although the supplies were even more limited. We finished distributing the goods in less than an hour.