Category: Philippines

Since last Saturday, Goducate has been setting up tent schools or putting tarpaulin on schoolrooms that lost their roofs in the villages in North Panay that were hit by Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda). There are four teams going round doing this.

At each school where these structures are set up, a Teachers’ Appreciation Day is held. The teachers deserve the appreciation because many have themselves lost homes, yet they turn up to teach under very difficult conditions. Each class appoints a representative to say words of appreciation to their teachers, and the students sing for their teachers, and present their teachers with thank-you cards that they have made and flowers they have picked up from the roadside. In addition, the Goducate massage team offers the teachers some stress relief.

The teachers have been touched by the gestures of appreciation, in some cases to the point of tears.

In the aftermath of Super Typhoon Yolanda, one of the critical needs that surfaced was safe water for the affected persons.  When Mr. Jan Daniel, country director of Water Missions International (WMI), communicated his organization’s interest to partner with Goducate in providing safe water to the typhoon-affected households in Western Visayas, this opened the door to more effective community development partnership.

On Jan 17, Goducate and WMI representatives signed the Memorandum of Agreement that defines the strategic relationship between the two organizations.  Not only will Goducate monitor the operations of the 17 Living Water Treatment Systems (LWTS) that WMI has installed in Panay and Negros Occidental, but it will also be responsible for transferring the LWTS to more needy communities after the disaster-response period.  In addition, the Goducate-trained CDWs will be deployed to areas with LWTS to help the community attain holistic and sustainable development.

Most of the households in Western Visayas are still reliant on untreated spring, rain, or surface water and from personally made dug-outs and tube wells.  Results from WMI water analyses showed traces of impurities and presence of the bacterium E coli in some samples taken from community wells and other common drinking sources.

Each LWTS can process untreated water into safe drinking water at the rate of up to 3,000 liters per hour.  The system has three big filters for clean water processing and a chlorinator that is able to neutralize any microbial presence in water.

WMI’s headquarters is in Charleston, South Carolina, USA.  It operates 10 country programs in South America, Africa, and Asia and has served 49 different countries on 5 different continents. Through the Goducate-WMI partnership, more people suffering from water-borne diseases in rural Philippines will soon have access to clean and safe water.

One way by which Goducate is helping the victims of Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) that devastated large swathes of the Philippines in November 2013 is to provide temporary shelters for schools in north Panay that were damaged. North Panay is the area near the Goducate Training Center in Iloilo.

There are two approaches to providing these shelters. For classrooms that lost only their roofs, Goducate provides tarpaulins to serve as the roof. We call these “wrap-around tents”. The school teachers and parents put up bamboo and wooden rafters, and Goducate works with the locals to put up the 32×22 ft tarpaulins

When the walls and posts of roofless classrooms are structurally poor, as assessed by the engineering team from the Goducate Training Center in Iloilo, Goducate provides a “tent school”. The Goducate team has designed the tent schools to provide sufficient ventilation and insulation from the heat.

The Goducate team has been busy at the Goducate Training Center making these tent schools. We are fortunate to have people with the necessary skills to make these tent schools. When the Goducate Training Center was being built, we decided where possible to employ people from the neighboring villages and train them in various construction skills. One of them learnt welding and has since become a contractor for concrete and steel works. His team has been employed to help make the tent school. One tent frame can be made by 3 people in 4 days. The tarpaulin roof and wall are made by a separate team, so the manufacture of a complete tent is finished in 4 days. A tent takes 4 people 1 h to assemble.

Our target for phase 1 of our relief work is 25 units by the end of January. As of Jan 15, we had 5 full tents (which have been assembled on site) and 10 frames. Work will be speeded up in the coming week with more workers on the job.

We will soon be launching the Goducate Tent Schools with a teachers’ appreciation day to commend teachers for their hard work and resilience during the recent crisis.