When evacuees who sheltered at a school in a badly flooded suburb of
Manila were told on Friday to return to their homes, Luzviminda Limas
worried where her family would sleep.
Her home is a 24-square-meter box that has a rough concrete floor and
a tin roof, with no ceiling. The lower half of its walls is made of
flimsy cinder blocks and the upper half of warped cardboard and
tarpaulin.
The Marikina River, normally about 200 meters from her house, was
swelled by torrential monsoon rains, and the water reached within
centimeters under the roof of her house. It deposited thick mud
half-knee deep as it receded early Thursday.
A 54-year-old widow, Limas said the floods brought back memories of
the 2009 deluge when she was huddled under an umbrella with one of her
daughters and her 4-month-old grandson on the roof of a nearby daycare
center as typhoon floodwaters destroyed her home.
When the water rose early last week, Limas hustled her family to the
same elementary school in Nangka village where they found emergency
shelter in 2009.
School prepares to open
More than 7,000 evacuees sheltered at Nangka Elementary School in
Marikina City during the recent floods. But principal Marciana de Guzman
said they were told to leave so the school could be prepared for the
resumption of classes this week.
Limas works doing laundry and shares her home
with her two unemployed daughters and their husbands—one a mini-bus
driver and the other a laborer who is currently out of work. Each of her
daughters has two children, one only 8 months old.
She worried where everyone would sleep on Friday night when they return home because everything was wet and muddy.
Her daughter, Venice, was collecting cardboard boxes to use as sleeping mats.
“I wish we could have a new home, one that has
decent walls not made of cardboard,” she said. “We have nowhere to go.
If we had money, we would leave this place.”
Resettlement
Her community is a resettlement site for
hundreds of poor families in Marikina, the “shoe capital” of the
Philippines, said City Council member Judy Magtubo.
Magtubo said many of the shoemakers who lost
their livelihood had not yet recovered from the devastation of the 2009
floods, which was then the worst flooding in the metropolis in 40 years.
The torrential monsoon rains that lasted from
Aug. 6 through Aug. 8 forced more than 360,000 in Metro Manila and
nearby provinces to flee their flooded homes and seek shelter in
schools, churches and government buildings. At least 77 people died,
many from drowning.
Nowhere to go
“They have no homes to return to, they have no food, they have no clothes except what they are wearing,” he said.
Residents using anything from shovels to pieces of plywood scraped the debris off the floors of their houses and the pavements and gathered them into mud-caked piles of garbage on the side of the street.
“It’s really an eyesore when we saw it from the helicopter,” Ramos said. “There will be no more rescue. It’s now ‘Operation Cleanup.’”
