As residents in the South once again clean up from heavy storms this week, we offer this report from CBF field personnel Cindy and Ryan Clark in the Philippines from their relief work in the aftermath of severe flooding in Cagayan de Oro, which is translated “City of Golden Friendship:”

Ryan and Cindy Clark with their local contact in Cagayan de Oro, Rev. Raul Ramon Roa, director of Kagay-an Evangelical Disaster Response Network, left.

We traveled Jan. 5-9 to Cagayan de Oro to provide pastoral support to volunteers and psychological first-aid training to teachers and ministers. After hearing that CBF would be funding a disaster relief project at Cagayan do Oro following December’s Typhoon Sendong, we called a meeting of Bukal Care and Counseling Center (BCCC.) Bukal had taken a small team down to Cagayan de Oro the week before to assess and train pastors in debriefing techniques. This first trip was funded by Springhill Baptist Church in Virginia.

The original plan of the trip was to debrief and do crisis response training with public school teachers and local pastors in the mornings and give pastoral support and debriefing to survivors still living in shelters around the city.

Plans changed when the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the morning we left that all religious groups offering conseling and debriefing must cease their activities.  We were told that WHO did an assessment and discovered that religious groups claiming to be doing psychological support were actually directly evangelizing traumatized persons. One specific activity of groups was showing Christian oriented films at night designed to influence a conversion experience.

Our local contact, Pastor Cleto Bacarro, went ahead and scheduled the crisis response training at Grace Christian School, a private school that became an emergency shelter the night of the storm. During the story, the school’s administration and staff jumped into action providing emergency aid to hundreds of people who were fleeing the rising flood waters.

Early in the morning of Jan. 6, we conducted training of 65 teachers and pastors in psychological first aid at Oro Christian Grace School.  Our local contact at the school was Jeanette Li, the vice principal.  She was quite wonderful in accommodating us.  In the afternoon we facilitated debriefing in small groups.

Later that day, we got a tour of Isla de Oro.  Located on a sandbar inside the river basin, about 1,500 people from this area are still missing or are confirmed dead.  There we talked with the Philippine National Police who were securing the area.  They had found a dead 1-year-old the day before, three weeks after the storm.

A home destroyed by flooding from Typhoon Sendong in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines.

We also talked with the owner of a house, one of only a handful, that was still standing after the storm.  He told of the night of the storm and how about 10 families, about 60 people, climbed into the large mango tree in his yard. The local media are calling this tree the “tree of life.”

The morning of Jan. 7 we continued with crisis response training at Cagayan Gospel Church and were joined by an additional 25 ministers from the areas from various churches and non-governmental organization’s.  Cindy taught a unit on working with traumatized students using developmentally appropriate activities which would allow the students to process their trauma and help the teachers transition back into the school’s curriculum. Ryan taught on the grief process, giving everyone a framework for understanding the emotional process at work after trauma.

It is difficult to describe the different levels of trauma among directly affected and indirectly affected survivors.  Everyone agrees that the water rose so quickly that they barely had time to react.  Typhoon Sendong had intense wind, but everyone was surprised at how little rain was falling in Cagayan de Oro. There are hundreds of thousands of people now who have stories of how their homes and churches were flooded. There are a few hundred stories of parents who were not able to save all their children. Everyone knows of someone who they haven’t heard from.

The fliers of photos of missing children plastered all over the shelters are heartbreaking.

I spent time with one pastor whose nephew was found floating in the ocean on a 5 gallon water container 16 hours after the storm had passed. His nephew is alive and reunited with him mom in one of the shelters.

That evening we visited the Tent City set up by the Philippine Navy and donated by the Shelter Box Foundation and Rotary Club International.  There were 400 shelters with 300 families relocated there. The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) had just taken responsibility for the community where about 3,000 people were now living. Officials were expecting about 1,000 more from shelters.  They were still installing electricity as the sun set.

By “chance” we ran into a little girl at the tent city who’d been involved at Pastor Cleto’s church. She took us to her family’s tent. The Bulisac family had been relocated to the tent city an hour earlier. They were disoriented and recovering from a chickenpox outbreak in their shelter. We spent time with the family who was overwhelmed by our visit – feeling a little less lost in the sea of identical white tents. They had water but no food and didn’t know when dinner would be distributed. Our team shared with them a bag of bread, fruit, and four chicken dinners with rice. This is all we had since we weren’t expecting to encounter hungry people at the tent city.

We had several conversations with officials who were frustrated that government agencies and NGO’s were not able to solve the problem of housing. Quality of life at the tent city is better than in the shelters, but neither are permanent. There are still about 8,000 families who need to be relocated to permanent housing, which doesn’t seem to exist yet.

I also spoke with several frustrated relief workers who were angry and broken hearted at the national and local governments inability to respond in a timely manner and coordinate with all the NGO’s offering aid. It had become common knowledge that the severe leptospirosis outbreak that is currently killing people would have been easily prevented if the prophylactic doxycyline had been distributed instead of sitting in boxes.

On Sunday morning our team members were distributed among different churches. Cindy and I went to Home Church which is pastored by Cleto Bacarro. It was their first day of worship in their new space. After worship we provided two sessions of small group debriefing.

Our team made the decision for three members to stay a few more days in order to coordinate with the WHO and offer some support to Iligan City, about two hours away.

Our trip by the numbers:

• 7 member team – Ryan Clark, Cindy Clark, Joel Aguirre, Celia Munson, Becky Taylor, Jehny Pedazo, and Alma Villacarlos
• 300 meals served
• 1,200 snacks given
• 10 Family Relocation Kits  (large kits for setting up a household) distributed
• Training of 80 teachers and ministers
• Debriefing of 140 pastors and teachers, plus an additional 23 pastors in Iligan City

Joel Aguirre is our Baguio Filipino contact person and the director of the CPE program at Bukal Life Care and Counseling Center.  For all practical purposes, he was the team leader.  He also pastors West Baguio Baptist Church.  He did CPE in Temple Texas and was ordained at Meadow Oaks Baptist Church in Temple, Texas, a partnering congregation of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

For more on the Clarks’ work, join their group on Facebook. For more photos, visit their Facebook album from Cagayan de Oro.

To become more involved in CBF Disaster Response Ministries, “like” the Facebook page of the Disaster Response Community.