Where did the shelter aid go? refugees ask

By Ephraim Aguilar
Guinobatan, Albay

TEDEA HERRERA HUNG three plastic buckets under the dwelling’s thin iron roofing to protect her children from leaks when it rains. Made of coconut lumber and thin, peeling plywood, the cramped room, measuring two meters by four meters, has bare ground as floor but no windows.

“All I want is a decent and permanent house to stay, for me and my children,” the 43-year-old woman said. Her house was swept away by gushing floodwaters in Barangay Travesia when Supertyphoon “Reming” roused lahar from Mayon Volcano’s slope in 2006. Over 1,000 people were killed or missing.

Herrera is among thousands of people still homeless after major typhoons caused massive devastation in Bicol that year. Villagers from Travesia occupy what is called “transit shelters” at the San Francisco Oval in Guinobatan town in Albay, prior to their relocation elsewhere.

Cynthia Nierva, 39, could not forget what President Macapagal-Arroyo promised them during one of her visits to the province after Reming: “Lahat kayo may bahay, papasok na lang kayo. Susi na lang ng bahay ang kukunin ninyo (All of you will have houses. You will just get the keys to your houses).” She pointed at the same grandstand where the President spoke.

“That was what Madam told us, but why are we still suffering up to now?” she said.

A year and a half since Typhoons Reming, “Milenyo” and “Seniang” struck the region, more than 3,000 families have not yet moved to the new houses promised by the government.

Project snag

Even Ms Arroyo’s deputy spokesperson, Anthony Golez, admitted a snag in the implementation of the core shelter projects covered by P7 billion worth of calamity funds for Bicol. Being the worst-hit, the region received 70 percent of the P10-billion Calamity Assistance and Rehabilitation Effort (CARE) fund apportioned through the General Appropriations Act of 2007.

Golez, executive director of the Bicol CARE Commission, was in Guinobatan on May 16 for a public hearing of the House special committee on Bicol recovery and economic development. The meeting assessed the repair and reconstruction of schools, damaged roads, bridges, flood control facilities, and resettlement projects.

Most of the government agencies had high accomplishment rates, Golez said, except for the Department of Social Welfare and Development and the National Housing Authority (NHA), which are responsible for housing and relocation.

Following the onslaughts of Reming, the National Disaster Coordinating Council recorded 232,968 destroyed houses in Bicol, 114,394 of them in Albay. But as of May 14, government data showed that only 237 housing units had been completed under the core shelter assistance project of the DSWD.

Only 9.3 percent of the 2,536 units have been funded or 5.8 percent of the 4,100 target. Construction of 1,319 units is still ongoing, said social welfare officer Marissa Paeste, who is in charge of the DSWD-Bicol’s disaster management.

Slow land dev’t

One of the main factors that delay the construction is the slow land development, Paeste said. “Many of the sites are still unfit for construction. The lands are not yet flat. There are still coconut trees to be uprooted.”

She said the local government units and the NHA were responsible for land acquisition and site development. But the housing agency’s regional director, Alberto Perfecto, said his office was not all to blame.

“The construction of houses could be started even if the sites have not yet been fully developed, which is what, in fact, many organizations helping in the relocation had been doing,” Perfecto said.

He reported that the 10 resettlement sites in Albay was already 49 percent complete but bad weather conditions were causing a time lag. “It has been raining the past few months and the soil type in Bicol takes two to three days to dry,” he said.

Site development includes the surveying and clearing of land, building road networks and constructing drainage systems and waterlines.

Perfecto said P240 million of the total P500 million allotted to the NHA under the CARE funds had already been spent.

Corruption charges

Herrera, the refugee, said she was not surprised by allegations of corruption and misuse of calamity funds. “Corruption in the government cannot be avoided. We don’t see what [government officials] are doing secretly, but it’s up to them,” she said.

Too hot at daytime and too cold at night, people in the transit shelters complain, just like in the tent cities they had previously lived for at least 10 months. These conditions have made their children sickly.

Due to Bicol’s erratic weather, slats curl in the plywood walls of the transit shelters while rusting holes gape in the iron sheets that the refugees plug with plastic sheets, sack cloth, scrap wood, and tarpaulin posters of politicians—remnants of past elections.

The little space is just enough for sleeping. Save for the walls, there isn’t anything by way of boundaries. One can hear a neighbor’s baby wailing.

San Francisco Oval, officially known as the Albay Sports Complex, is now far from the athletes’ training ground it was meant to be. It is surrounded by makeshift latrines, while the swimming pool is soiled and filled with accumulated raindrops.

Community life

Despite its depression, the place breathes its own life as a community. One neighborhood created a string of improvised kitchens right in front of the shelters’ doorsteps. Another put up sari-sari stalls while still another earned extra from weaving abaca baskets. Other occupants raise fighting cocks.

“Nagaayos ng electric fan, rice cooker, water jug, plantsa, sandal, at Shellane” is written on the wall of one dwelling.

Since the water source is a common facility, mothers wash clothes in groups and their children take a bath together. Almost everywhere are clotheslines, some clipped with pieces of underwear.

In April, Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri passed a resolution “directing the appropriate Senate committee to conduct an inquiry” into the alleged misuse of the CARE funds.

Dredging debris

In Albay, critics are opposing the multimillion-peso dredging projects of the Department of Public Works and Highways. River channels from Mayon’s gullies are heavily silted after Reming swept down volcanic debris, causing lahar flows.

The Roman Catholic Church’s Social Action Center pushed for a labor-intensive method of dredging, meaning that it would be carried out by the public instead of private contractors, so the people could earn from it.

But Golez said he had never heard of any anomalies involving use of the CARE funds. “No dredging project had been approved under [the] CARE, as far as I know. Unless the project has been renamed,” he said.

Critics also allege that funds for the resettlement projects have been misused, causing the delay in the construction of houses. All concerned agencies denied the charge.