Philippines’ traumatised children need help

Karl Wilson, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: October 18. 2009 1:58AM UAE / October 17. 2009 9:58PM GMT

Children have shown signs of clinical depression, such as a lack of appetite, in evacuation centres such as the one above. Bullit Marquez / AP Photo

MANILA // As the Philippines braces for yet another typhoon, aid workers are grappling with a shortage of trained professionals to deal with the growing number of people suffering from trauma, especially children.

Back-to-back storms in recent weeks have battered the Philippines, killing almost 800 people, displacing millions and causing the worst flooding in Manila for more than 40 years.

As relief goods pour in from around the world, the number of people suffering from trauma is increasing and will continue to increase well after the storms and typhoons have gone, aid workers said.

“Children are especially psychologically vulnerable to disasters,” said Tamara Tutnjevic, from World Visions Asia Pacific region.

“Can you imagine what it is like for a young child to lose their house? To see their friends or family members killed? And then to watch their parents unable to provide for them? Literally everything a child knows about their world is turned upside down,” she said.

Celeste Lumasac, a teacher with the University of the Philippines in Baguio, said the situation, especially among children, is causing a real problem for aid workers.

“Kids just sit in evacuation centres looking at the walls, saying nothing. Their mothers are worried because they don’t eat,” she said by telephone.

“The problem is there are just not enough trained professionals to go around. Many of the people coming into Baguio now are tribal people who have lost everything. They have lost everything and are beyond shock.”

A government social worker who could not be named because she is not authorised to comment, said: “We just don’t have enough trained professionals in this country to deal with the trauma these people are going through.

“The focus is on relief – food and shelter – but there is little attention being paid to the psychological impact this disaster is having on those caught up in this tragedy.”

Typhoon Lupit – the Filipino word for cruel – was hovering off the central coast of the main island of Luzon yesterday packing winds of up to 120kph, according to the weather bureau. It was not expected to make landfall until late today or tomorrow.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s press secretary, Cerge Remonde, said the president had ordered the National Disaster Coordinating Council to start moving equipment for rescue operations as well as relief goods to the areas that the typhoon may hit.

The Philippines is still recovering from Tropical Storm Ketsana in late September and the October 3 landfall of Typhoon Parma, which lingered for a week, drenching Luzon island.

The two storms killed 773 people and affected the lives of more than seven million people. The latest typhoon could spare the saturated northern Philippines and veer north towards Taiwan early this week, or it could track the same devastating path as Parma, Nathaniel Cruz, the government’s chief forecaster, said yesterday. He said Lupit was slowing down over the sea east of Luzon, where it could gain further strength.

Health officials say 1.7 million people exposed to floodwaters in and around metropolitan Manila were being threatened by leptospirosis, a disease spread by water contaminated with urine of infected animals. The disease has killed 90 of 1,027 reported cases, Francisco Duque, the Philippine health secretary, said.

In northern Benguet province, where at least 288 were killed in Parma-triggered landslides, police officers were going house to house to tell people to leave the affected communities before the latest storm, the provincial governor, Nestor Fongwan, said.

World Vision has opened a number of centres for children traumatised by the storms in the Philippines to give them a safe environment where they can play and to try to get them to focus away from the distress around them, Ms Tutnjevic said.

Similar centres were set up in the aftermath of recent crises, including in Myanmar, the Darfur region of Sudan, and Pakistan.

“Children who do not get help could end up traumatised, both in the short and long term,” Ms Tutnjevic said. “In the short term, they can be overwhelmed by all the changes and fears, perhaps withdrawing into silence, and experiencing vomiting, diarrhoea, sleep disorders. They can also become more aggressive or be unable to participate in play.

“In the longer term, children could find it difficult to manage their emotions, lose interest in school, friends and social activities, and have long term developmental problems.

“Young children up to the age of four could suffer regressed development, going back to thumb sucking, suffering nightmares or developing tics and begin stuttering,” she said.

In a number of the worst affected areas in northern Luzon many teachers are now undergoing stress-training to help their students overcome trauma.

In La Trinidad, Benguet, many pupils were afraid to go back to their classrooms after they were used as temporary morgues.

“This has had an impact on many children,” Ms Lumasac said.

“They simply were terrified to go back to their schools … they are afraid of the dead.”

One school was turned into a temporary shelter for victims with the exception of three rooms, one of which was used for wakes, and the library, which became a command post for medical teams that cleaned and embalmed bodies found in the debris. At least 74 bodies were processed in the library.

Coffins were stacked near the library while 40 body bags, which had been washed, hung over the school’s fence.



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* With additional reporting by the Associated Press