Philippines diary: In the line of fire

With Marge and Baby at Sabang’s underground river

I spent most of my sixth week in the Philippines on the island of Palawan, at a UNICEF-supported training session for journalists from the troubled region of Mindanao, where a civil war between government forces and Islamic separatists has been raging with greater or lesser intensity since the late 1960s.

Parts of Mindanao are notorious for the kidnapping and murder of Westerners but the province is equally dangerous for journalists. In recent years, there has been an increase in murders of journalists throughout the Philippines, most of which go unsolved. This had already earned the Philippines the dubious distinction of being the second most dangerous country in the world for journalists after Iraq.

We arrived in Palawan a few days early to do a bit of sightseeing, in particular to visit the famous underground river at Sabang, a UNESCO world heritage site. From the outside, the river looks unremarkable, just a low cave mouth at the edge of a sandy blue-green pool. Once you pass under the rocky archway, however, you are transported into another world. Within a few minutes the cave is pitch black, with the distinctive clicking sound of swifts and bats echolocating all around you in the dark.

The underground river is navigable by boat for 8km, although we only travelled about half of that distance, passing through a massive ‘cathedral’, with a vast high roof far above us and huge stalagmite pillars along the walls. Armed with a flashlight, our guide interspersed popular science that wouldn’t have been out of place on a David Attenborough show with well-rehearsed jokes about the shapes of the rock formations. He pointed out one stalagmite that looked vaguely like a naked woman. “We call that one Sharon Stone,” he quipped.

The landscape of Palawan is even more striking than that of Camarines Norte. Tall limestone cliffs tower over lush green paddy fields like vast statements of natural power, akin to Manila’s skyscrapers and malls lording it over the slums. We passed wood and bamboo houses raised on stilts, partly for ventilation and partly to provide shelter for livestock during the not infrequent rains. Outside, farmers were laying out rice grains on cloths along the road to dry in the sun.

Training days

Antonio Manaytay, 44, is a journalist in Mindanao

The media training started on Monday morning. Run by Probe Media Foundation, a partner of UNICEF, it aimed to provide 28 Mindanao journalists with training on ethical reporting of children and to introduce them to issues around children’s rights. After a previous training session and workshop in Davao City in September, the journalists returned home to record their own stories on children’s rights – some in print or on the web, others for radio or TV.

The Palawan workshop was a chance for the journalists to share these stories and get feedback from each other and a panel of experts. The stories presented included child labor in Batang Kalabaw, school bullying in Davao, solvent abuse in Zamboanga and children affected by armed conflict in Marawi.

What we didn’t know until Monday afternoon was that, as the delegates began presenting their work, back in Mindanao 26 of their colleagues were shot dead, along with 31 local politicians and observers, as they tried to file nomination papers for a candidate in local elections next year.

The killings took place in Maguindanao, on Mindanao Island, and were linked to tensions between rival clans vying for political office in the elections next year. “Never in the history of journalism have the news media suffered such a heavy loss of life in one day,” Reporters Sans Frontiers said, condemning the “incomprehensible bloodbath”. As a result, literally overnight the Philippines overtook Iraq to become the most dangerous place for journalists on Earth.

We were all shocked and upset by the killings but the incident also underscored the importance of UNICEF’s work supporting journalists in Mindanao. Two of the participants at the training session had been invited to cover the Maguindanao event and would have been killed too if they had gone. Another delegate had staff members among those killed. If nothing else, just holding the workshop had saved two lives.

I had also been due to go to Mindanao the week after to report on UNICEF’s work with children affected by conflict. Unsurprisingly, the trip was cancelled – I was both disappointed and a little bit relieved but determined to do my best in Palawan.

I interviewed Marge about the thinking behind the training. “The Philippines has one of the freest media in the world but unfortunately it also has one of the highest incidences of journalist killings,” she said. “The challenge is for journalists to express themselves freely without fear of being punished or killed because of their views.”

In addition to running these kinds of workshops, UNICEF Philippines regularly monitors how children are portrayed in the media. “The most common problem is denying a child’s right to privacy,” Marge continued. “Sometimes in sensitive cases like sexual abuse, the child’s face is shown on TV or their real name is used, which makes them easy to identify. Children can also be made to relive difficult experiences and their stories can sometimes be sensationalised.”

The boatman’s call

Rodney, 13, works as a ferryman on the Olutanga straits
© Inside Mindanao/Antonio Manaytay

Despite their worries back home, most of the delegates remained in good spirits during the session. Once again, I was put on the panel of experts and asked to comment on the work. I felt like a bit of a fraud but did my best to highlight child rights issues and give constructive criticism of the style and content of the pieces. At the end I was asked to hand out awards and received one myself for being ‘Mr Brilliant’ – a reference to my British vocabulary, which causes much amusement here. Marge also finds words like ‘chirpy’ and ‘mozzie’ hilarious.

The quality of the journalistic pieces varied – partly due to the varying levels of training and experience – but the best pieces were powerful and moving accounts of children’s lives in Mindanao. One of the stongest print pieces was an article on child labour by freelance journalist Antonio Manaytay, 44, from Zamboanga. The article, which he wrote for news website InsideMindanao.com and the Zamboanga Sibugay Tribune, focused on children who work as ferrymen, rowing adult passengers across the straits that separate Olutanga Island from the mainland.

“Thirteen-year-old Rodney Balagot appeared too small for a boy of his age,” Antonio wrote. “His bony sun-tanned arms paled in size to the paddle he gripped with his hands, safely guiding the motorized boat carrying his six passengers to dock.” Three years ago, Rodney’s father died and he had to drop out of school to help his mother support the family. He has been working as a ferryman since then, making around ten trips a day across the straits. “But I don’t stop dreaming of returning to school one day,” he told Antonio.

Antonio was inspired to become a journalist after ten years working on conflict resolution and community development in the NGO sector.”I feel that there are important stories to be told,” he explained. “Children’s rights issues in particular are not being reported, or are being misreported.”

When he got an email from a colleague about the training course, Antonio was immediately interested. “I thought this training was a good opportunity to learn new skills and sharpen my tools,” he continued. “Since starting the course, I’ve learned a lot about media ethics and how to approach the stories of children.”

Before the conference finished, I wrote a story about the training in the context of the massacre in Mindanao, and posted it on the UNICEF website and Facebook. Our moderator, Ariel, was from the Philippine Press Association and asked for a copy to send to their member newspapers. I’m used to writing at a greater distance from the breaking news, but this time I felt like a proper journalist – and proud to be one.

“No story is worth dying for,” said Jewel Reyes, a TV reporter for ABS-CBN in Zamboanga, who has received death threats from the Mindanao terrorist group Abu Sayyaf. However, for these journalists there are plenty of unreported children’s stories worth living for.

Philippines diary: Iron man

A detail from the promotional flyer for the Timex ‘Iron Man’ race
© Timex/RunRio

Sunday 15 November began early, as I met Gina at 4:45am to get a taxi to Fort Bonifacio, the starting point of Manila’s Timex ‘Iron Man’ race. Part of the proceeds of the race were donated to a UNICEF school project.We started at 5:30am, just as the sky was starting to lighten. The first half of the race was easy enough, despite climbing a flyover with sweeping views across the slums and skyscrapers of the city. Things got trickier on the way back though, as the sun brought with it a noticeable increase in heat and humidity, but I finally sprinted across the finish line in 58 minutes.

After a quick change of clothes, the sporting theme continued with the world welterweight title boxing match between Filipino Manny Pacquiao and Miguel Cotto, the reigning champion. I’m not normally a huge boxing fan but it was impossible not to get caught up in the enthusiasm for the event.

The importance of this match for Filipinos cannot be underestimated: Pacquiao is a national hero with an amazing life story. He started off as a street child, similar to those I met in Binondo, skipping school to help his single mother sell vegetables on the roadside in General Santos City, Mindanao. Even with his help, his mother still wasn’t earning enough to feed six children, so Manny left home at 14 to go to Manila, where he worked as a laborer and became an amateur boxer.

Fast forward 14 years and Pacquiao’s face glowers out of the cover of Time Magazine, as he aims to become the first boxer in history to win world titles in seven different weight categories.

For the first two rounds, the fight seemed equal but it all changed in the third round, when Pacquiao knocked Cotto down with a flurry of blows. The venue erupted as everyone cheered wildly, threw confetti in the air and hugged their nearest neighbor. The fight continued into the twelfth round, but it was increasingly obvious that Pacquiao had won the belt and world record he sought.

Chain of command

Twelve-day-old Danica receives her BCG vaccination
© UNICEF Philippines/2009/Andy Brown

Back in the office, I spent my time getting the website ready for the 20th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), an event with huge significance for UNICEF.

I also visited two projects: one on immunization and another on children living and working on a rubbish dump in Payatas. For the immunization project, I visited a health centre in Manila where mothers, and in some cases grandmothers, brought their babies to receive vaccinations against diseases like measles, diphtheria and tuberculosis.

I also saw Manila’s main cold room, where the city’s vaccines are stored, and met Rolando, the cold chain manager for Manila. An engineer by trade, he is now the Philippines’ leading expert on storing and transporting vaccines. He’s spent the last twenty years ensuring that they’re kept at exactly the right temperature to preserve the delicate biological material inside each tiny vial.

Rolando told me about the challenge of delivering vaccines in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Ondoy. “We had to use military trucks and boats to get the vaccines to the evacuation centres,” he said.

Below the poverty line

My second project visit of the week was to Payatas, Quezon City, where a community of 200,000 people live alongside, and in many cases work on top of, the city’s main rubbish dump. Driving into the slum settlement, you cannot escape the spectre of the dump, which looms above the ramshackle houses like a sacred mountain to some twisted deity.

The town is a stark illustration of the economics of poverty. The main road is lined with ‘junk shops’ that buy plastic, metal, paper and glass by the kilo, for sale to massive recycling plants in southern China. The junk shops take all the profit and none of the risk, typically turning over millions of pesos a year while paying a pittance to the desperate dump workers.

Children risk their lives every day scavenging the dump site for the quantities of recyclable materials needed to make a living. They are at risk of diseases such as respiratory infections, pneumonia, diarrhoea and tuberculosis. The dump itself is unstable and parts of it can collapse in heavy rain, burying workers and their homes beneath the rubbish.

There are also dangers from the vehicles and machinery. “The sister of one of our students died recently after being run over by a garbage truck,” Helen from UNICEF’s partner organisation Kokkyo Naki Kodomotachi says. “The driver didn’t see her because she was so small. She was only nine years old.”

In the last year, things have got even worse for these children and their families. The global economic crisis has caused many of the Chinese recycling plants to close, reducing demand for the scrap materials. The junk shops have responded by slashing their prices by up to half. This means the children have to spend twice as long on the dump site and carry twice as much rubbish up the hill to the junk shops, just to earn the same meagre amount.

“Tin cans have gone down from 25 peso to 15 peso per kilo, plastic cups from 12 peso to 5 peso and clear plastic from 2 peso to 1 peso,” Helen says. By way of comparison, a single can of Coke costs 25 peso in a 7-Eleven store in Makati city.

The living conditions are scarcely better than the working environment. Slum houses, often made of materials scavenged from the dump, are crammed together right up to its edge. The border between the dump and the town is porous and the rubbish finds its way into the town, where it lines the streets and clogs the waterways. The town does have electricity but no running water or proper drainage. The smell of the dump lingers over everything, getting into clothes and hair, so that even those children who are lucky enough to go to school face discrimination from their peers.

“Hard up families live in Payatas as an option to survive,” UNICEF’s Jess Far says. “These are the poorest of the poor.”

Alternative learning

Michelle, 16, attends a UNICEF-supported education session in Payatas
© UNICEF Philippines/2009/Andy Brown

UNICEF is supporting Kokkyo Naki Kodomotachi (KnK), a local NGO that provides alternative learning sessions for children in Payatas whose parents can’t afford to send them to school. They have two classrooms: one by the old dump and one by the new, larger dump. This is partly to make it easier for the kids to come to class from work but also for a more sinister reason. There are gang wars between rival factions working the two dumps and children get caught in the middle. One family we visited has a daughter with brain damage caused by a stray bullet from a gang-related shooting.

We visited both centres. The first centre was holding an elementary class, although you wouldn’t know it from the age of the children there, many of whom were already teenagers. In the afternoon, we saw a high school class at the second centre, where Michelle, 16, delivered a presentation about Ghandi. Encouragingly, children who attend regularly can sit an exam and get a qualification which is now recognised by the department of Education as equivalent to a high school diploma. Less encouragingly, the pass rate is around 25 per cent.

“I’ve been coming to the learning sessions for ten months,” Michelle says. “I liked reading the story of Gandhi because it made me realise that you have to strive to be able to reach your dreams. I’m very thankful to KnK for giving me the opportunity to complete my studies and to integrate with other students.”

The visit made a deep impression on me. In the UK, we’re used to thinking of recycling as a good thing and of course in many ways it is. But now every time I put my rubbish down the garbage chute in my apartment block, I think of a child picking up my empty water bottle and putting it towards their next kilo of plastic, for their next two pesos.

Happily, the week ended on a high point as Philippines President Gloria Arroyo signed a bill making child pornography illegal, in a major victory for UNICEF and other child rights advocates. UNICEF Philippines has been campaigning on the issue for several years and had specifically called for the law to be passed before next year’s national elections.

I was able to write this up as the lead news story for the website, as we marked the anniversary of the CRC on Friday. Much work remains to be done on child rights but it was a timely reminder of what has been achieved by UNICEF and its partners in their ongoing struggle to achieve a world fit for children.

Philippines diary: On the road

The author with schoolchildren at Paaralang Elementary School
© UNICEF Philippines/2009

My fourth week in the Philippines was dominated by a three day trip to Camarines Norte, a province south of Manila. It’s one of the poorer parts of the Philippines and where Typhoon Santi made landfall last week. For both reasons, it’s a prime target for UNICEF’s work. My manager, Angela, has been given responsibility for this province, so she was on a fact finding mission, while my role was to report on projects we’ve funded there.

As we left Manila, our flight passed over the flood plain by Laguna de Bay, southeast of the city. We were in a small plane, and flying low, so this time I could clearly see the flooded fields, with hedges, trees and the occasional rooftop rising above the waterline. I watched small speedboats navigate their way across the flooded fields and past the rooftops. I realised that nature had resculpted the landscape, creating a new shoreline. In one place, a village had been cleft in two, with one side now on the coast and the other on a new island in the expanded lake.

After landing at 7am, we had a two-hour drive to our final destination, so I took the opportunity to catch up on my sleep. I woke up just as we arrived at the Provincial Government building, which was decorated with a banner reading ‘Welcome to Camerinas Norte, Ms Angela Travis and Party’, then had the slightly disconcerting experience of meeting and greeting the Vice Governor while still half asleep.

Cam Norte is one of the poorest provinces in the Philippines, unlike Cam Sur which gets tourist income from the surfing crowd. Nonetheless it’s a beautiful place, with cloud wreathed mountains rising out of a wide green land, fringed by long white-sand beaches and deserted tropical islands. The concrete and iron of Manila have given way to traditional buildings made of wood and bamboo and the population is enlivened by the occasional indigenous community of pre-Malay people, related to Australian aborigines.

Our project visits began the next day, with a whistle-stop tour of five schools in the typhoon-affected region. In one village, we arrived to find the TV channel AVS handing out aid in a large basketball arena. It was a somewhat surreal affair and very different to a UNICEF distribution. Speakers had been set up, blasting out pop tunes such as ‘We Will Rock You’, soldiers stood guard with semi-automatic weapons and the survival packs were handed out by celebrities, including ‘Action King’ Robin Padilla, the only person in the indoor arena wearing sunglasses. My colleague Baby is a big fan of Robin’s so I took a quick photo of the two of them, which is destined for pride of place on Baby’s Facebook page.

Several of the schools we visited had storm-damaged buildings, but the image that stood out for me was at Paaralang Elementary School, where hundreds of flood-damaged textbooks had been put out to dry in the sun. They were on every available surface, carpeting the pathways, lining the stone walls and piled high on desks and chairs.

Practice what you teach

Krista Angeli Delica, 16, organised a collection among fellow students
© UNICEF Philippines/2009/Andy Brown

As well as looking at the damage to schools, we also wanted to see what was working. In Jose Panganiban High School, I met members of the ‘student government’, part of the Child Friendly School System established by UNICEF.

In a secret ballot six months ago, Krista Angeli Delica, 16, was elected President of the student government. After the region was hit by the recent Typhoon Santi, she organised a collection among fellow students to help buy food and clothing for those affected. “I got involved with the student government because by serving other students, I find self contentment and fulfilment,” she said.

The government also runs projects with money raised from parents, businesses and local government. They are currently fundraising to repair the school’s hand washing area, which was vandalised, and for additional medicines cabinets. “So far we’ve solicited funds for six medicine cabinets but our target is for 60,” Krista says. “We need first aid materials in the school for when pupils get sick or injured. At the moment they have to go to the nearest clinic.”

All in all, the students were an incredibly bright, eloquent group and had as many questions for me as I had for them. Admittedly some were about Harry Potter but most were about UNICEF and its work. I was even put on the spot by one girl who wanted to know what I thought was UNICEF’s greatest achievement. I came up with the significant reduction in HIV transmission from mother to child in recent years.

After the schools, we visited a counselling group for breastfeeding mothers. Breast milk gives babies all the nutrients they need for the first six months of life and helps protect them from disease. However, in the Philippines, many mothers spend hard-earned cash buying formula milk instead of breastfeeding, putting their babies’ health – and sometimes their lives – at risk. This is largely due to misconceptions and the aggressive marketing of infant formula by milk companies.

“Nine out of ten mothers in this area breastfeed,” Herminia Icatlo, the rural health midwife at the Vinzons breastfeeding group, says. “But working mothers often mix feed, so their babies don’t get the best milk all the time. Sometimes they don’t prepare the bottle properly or use contaminated water, so the baby gets diarrhoea.” In extreme cases, this can be fatal.

There are currently around 200 breastfeeding counselling groups in Camarines Norte and UNICEF is supporting many of them with training and materials. “We teach mothers how to breastfeed and tell them about nutrition and protecting their baby’s health.” Herminia says.

On Wednesday morning, we visited two early learning centres, including one run by a remarkable 66-year-old teacher in a UNICEF t-shirt, who refuses to retire. There was a moment of unintentional comedy at the community-based centre, when a small boy stood up in front of the class and sang a song he’d picked up from the local radio. The lyrics, which are highly unsuitable for nursery school, discuss the relative merits of gay and straight relationships. Somewhat surprisingly, he was allowed to complete his performance, concluding that boyfriends are best.

One of the paradoxes of the Philippines is that it’s devoutly Catholic but very open and accepting of different sexualities, certainly by regional standards. Perhaps this is because Filipinos have adapted religion to their local environment, in much the same way as they have language and the ever-present jeepneys.

Touch me not

Twelve-year old Caridad (not her real name) at a home for abused children
© UNICEF Philippines/2009/Andy Brown

In the afternoon, we visited a halfway house for abused and trafficked children. Emotionally, it was the toughest project visit so far. We met twelve-year old Caridad (not her real name) who was raped by six neighbours in her village four months ago. Her mother reported the incident to social services and Caridad was brought to the halfway house for her own safety, while the men were prosecuted. Caridad wants the men to go to jail. “We have the medical certificate as evidence against them,” her social worker Arlene says.

Despite her traumatic experience, Caridad is obviously happy at the halfway house and is very affectionate with Arlene, one of two social workers there. “I like living in this house,” Caridad says. “There are lots of things to do, like cooking and arts and crafts. Every day we decide our own menu and cook it together with the other children. I also like making decorations from recycled materials like drink bottles and crisp packets.”

The halfway house, which due to limited funds is the only one in its province, has dealt with a number of cases like Caridad’s in recent months. In another case, social workers discovered that several children between the ages of 12 and 16 had been trafficked to work as child prostitutes in bars in a nearby mining village, where there had been a gold rush.

Thankfully, the children were rescued from the bars by social workers and brought to the halfway house. Treatment was arranged for four of the children, who had contracted sexually-transmitted infections. Social services in their home towns were contacted, so that the children could be returned home, and a court case was also brought against the bar owners.

“The children didn’t know they were going to be sex workers,” Arlene says. “Their families were told they were going to be waitresses or dish washers and they were promised a better life. But when they arrived in the town they were told: ‘You have food and shelter, now this is what you have to do to pay for it’.”

The halfway house provides a range of services for children, using supplies and educational materials provided by UNICEF. “When the children arrive, we provide them with clothes, medical assistance and food,” Arlene says. “We then do group and individual therapy and some basic education. Many of these children haven’t been to school and don’t know how to read and write.”

Caridad hopes to return home and go back to school once her court case is over. “When I grow up, I want to be social worker or policewoman,” she says. “I want to help other people, like the social workers here have helped me.”

We need to protect the identity of at-risk children, so I obscured Caridad’s face in most of the photos. Before we left, however, I took some normal photos of the children smiling and fooling around together, which I’ll print and send to them when we get back Manila. It’s a small gesture but I feel that it’s important to give something back to these damaged but remarkably strong children.

All in all, Camarines Norte has opened my eyes to a range of issues in the rural areas of the Philippines. As always, I’m left with an enormous admiration for the people UNICEF works with and the amazing work they do, often on low wages and with little recognition. I hope that some of my articles can help to change the latter.

Philippines diary: In the path of the storm

Arries Tejo, 15, at an evacuation centre in Cubao
© UNICEF Philippines/2009/Andy Brown

At the end of last week’s diary, I was heading home on Friday night with the tops of the tower blocks disappearing beneath a shroud of rain and cloud, the wind starting to whip up and a distinct sense of trepidation as Typhoon Santi stormed directly towards Manila.

I’d witnessed a hurricane before, in Cuba in 2005. That time, I remember spending half the night in a hotel bar in Havana, drinking rum and playing cards while the wind beat on the boarded up doors and windows. It was like something out of John Huston’s 1948 film noir classic, Key Largo. The next day, the street outside was flooded waist deep and you could see waves crashing over the sea wall and against the lighthouse in Havana bay.

This time, the storm was due to pass directly overhead in the early hours of the morning. As a precaution, I moved my bed from under the window to behind a wardrobe in the lounge area. I slept through most of the night but woke up at 6am, with the wind rattling the windows and the electricity out. I took a quick look out of the window to see trees bent almost double but still rooted to the ground. There was, thankfully, no sign of further flooding.

By 10am the storm was over and I was checking in with UN Security. I also spoke to Martijn, my colleague from the education department, who told me that the head of UNICEF Philippines, Vanessa Tobin, had already been on BBC News. Once the power was back on, I was able to do a bit of research and put together a news story for the website.

According to early reports, slum houses had been destroyed by strong winds Taytay, Rizal province, leaving around 5,000 people homeless. There were also reports on local radio that one man had died while crossing a river in Rizal, and another had drowned when his home was washed away in Manila.

“The reports from Manila are not as bad as had been expected,” Vanessa said. “But we are getting reports from the South, particularly around Bicol which was hit in 2006 by mudslides, that there has been heavy rain and significant damage there.”

After the flood

A young girl displays her colouring at the evacuation centre
© UNICEF Philippines/2009/Andy Brown

Next week, I’ll be visiting the province of Camarines Norte, partly to assess the damage caused by Santi, but in Manila the focus remains on the victims of Tropical Storm Ondoy.

On Wednesday, I visited an evacuation centre in a former basketball court in Cubao, Quezon City. The centre is currently home to around 40 families, down from 100 in the immediate aftermath of the floods. When we arrived, it was still hot, humid and crowded. The families live literally on top of their belongings with their clothes hanging to dry from the basketball hoops above. They are either waiting for new homes or for the Government to provide transport back to their home towns in the provinces.

For the last five weeks, Arries Tejo, 15, has been living with his mother, three brothers and two sisters in Barangay Bagumbayan evacuation centre. “After the storm came, we were trapped in our house by the flood water,” he said. “We had to wait until the next day for the water to go down enough for us to leave. Then we carried out our belongings and walked to the evacuation centre.”

In many ways, Arries had a lucky escape. “Our house was next to the concrete wall of a factory,” he explained. “After we left, the wall collapsed and destroyed all the houses on our road. Now we have to wait here for a new house.”

UNICEF is working with local charities to provide child-friendly spaces, education and psychosocial support to children like Arries in the evacuation centres. In Barangay Bagumbayan, we have partnered with Lingap Pangkabataan (Caring for Children), a faith-based organisation that was already working in the area with street children, indigenous communities and the victims of child trafficking.

Staff at Lingap saw firsthand the impact of the disaster on children in the area. “After the flood the children were traumatised,” Project Officer Rexan Dayad said. “Some of them are orphans; others have been left behind by their families. Many of the children have no access to healthcare and cannot go back to school because they have lost their school supplies and uniforms. There are children that sleep on the streets, even during the afternoon, because there are no activities for them. We are advocating for their rehabilitation.”

At the evacuation centre, Lingap outreach workers ran several sessions simultaneously. One group of girls got crayons and colouring books, while boys listened to a story, then learnt and sang songs. Older children took part in a more advanced music group with xylophones. A fourth group made birds out of coloured clay. “These activities allow children to rediscover their world in a protected and supervised environment,” Project Coordinator Cathyrine Eder commented.

There is still a lot of work to be done, particularly with children and families who were unable to get to the evacuation centres. “In those areas we haven’t yet reached, there are children who are afraid their community will be flooded again when it rains hard,” Cathyrine added. “Every time it rains they start putting their things on plastic bags. There are also children who wake up in the middle of the night because they’re having nightmares.”

Pied Piper of Manila

Carlos stands in the courtyard of Casa Manila, a reconstructed
Spanish colonial house. © UNICEF Philippines/2009/Andy Brown

The next weekend, I got a chance to do a bit of sightseeing. I met up with Martijn and Silje, my colleagues from Holland and Norway respectively, to go on a walking tour of Intramuros, the old Spanish fort at the centre of Manila. Our guide was Carlos Celdran, the self-styled ‘Pied Piper of Manila’, famous for his irreverent and theatrical take on Filipino history. Lonely Planet describes him as “the best thing to happen to Manila tourism in decades”.

Carlos arrives outside Manila Cathedral at 9am in shorts, an immaculate white shirt and top hat, with a stereo playing patriotic music. He’s small man with a larger than life character. Martijn says there’s a Dutch word that translates as ‘pleasantly insane’ which sums him up, however I’m sure it’s at least partly an act. The tour is as much stand up comedy as anything else, with Carlos changing characters for different periods, swapping his top hat for a military cap and glasses or Uncle Sam hat, as befits the narrative.

Carlos takes frequent pops at Catholicism, a potentially controversial approach in such a devout country. He tells us that in Tagalog, the word for ‘heaven’ comes from the Malay for ‘sky’, while the word for Hell is the Spanish ‘Inferno’. “This tells us that there was always Heaven in the Philippines, but Hell arrived with the Spanish.” he jokes.

Nothing is sacred. US General McArthur, who ‘liberated’ Manila from the Japanese at the end of the civil war by carpet bombing the city, contributing to the deaths of 150,000 civilians, comes in for a particularly savage mauling.

Even the Philippines’ national hero, Jose Rizal, whose 20 foot statue dominates the lobby of my office, his giant quill poised in mid air, gets a gentle ribbing. Carlos says Rizal was chosen as national hero by the Americans because he was a writer, not a revolutionary, and above all safely dead – having been executed by the Spanish in 1896 for writing two subversive novels Touch Me Not and The Reign of Greed. This is true but only in the same sense that Karl Marx was a writer not a revolutionary. After all, Rizal’s ideas and subsequent execution were the trigger for the first nationalist uprising against the Spanish.

Rizal remained an intellectual to the very end. “I am most anxious for liberties for our country,” he wrote on the eve of his execution. “But I place as a prior condition the education of the people so that our country may have an individuality of its own and make it worthy of liberties.” Inspired by our history tour, I later bought a copy of ‘The Noli’, as Rizal’s first novel is popularly known by Filipinos, to read on the road next week.

During the tour, Carlos sums up Filipino culture with the metaphor of the ubiquitous jeepney. These are clapped-out American jeeps, covered with Catholic slogans and Chinese good luck symbols. Like the Filipinos themselves, they’ve taken something from every culture they’ve come into contact with but combined it to make something uniquely their own.

Philippines diary: Learning the hard way

If my first week in the Philippines could be described as relatively uneventful, the same certainly can’t be said for the second. I saw a school reopening for the first time since the floods, I met street children in Chinatown, watched the government being held to account over child rights and ended the week barricaded in my flat in the path of an oncoming typhoon.

My week started at 5:30am on Monday. I was up, not necessarily bright but certainly early, to go to Pinagbuhatan Elementary School, which was opening for the first time following the devastation caused by Typhoon Ketsana. For children who had been through the stress of losing their homes and in some cases loved ones to the floodwaters, it was to be a welcome return to normality.

It took us a while to find the school and by the time we arrived the assembly had already started. Hundreds of children in clean and pressed uniforms thronged a large courtyard in the middle of the school. I was summoned to the stage and made my way through a press of small bodies to the front.

Again, perhaps by virtue of my status as a celebrity foreigner, I was asked to address the school. Feeling a bit of a fraud, I complied. I haven’t had to speak in front of so many children since I ran as the Labour candidate in my own school’s mock election back in 1990. This time, my speech was far shorter and much less political.

Towards the end of the assembly, the children were presented with school kits in UNICEF backpacks. Finally, my colleague Arnaldo from the education department, universally known as Ar-ar, led a puppet show for the children, with four puppets in the style of Sesame Street. It was great fun but there was also a serious point to the exercise, as Ar-ar explained to me later.

“Children love puppetry and are very receptive to it,” he said. “So this morning, before the assembly, we talked to the children about their experiences and how they felt. We put all of that into the story of today’s puppet show. We also talked to the teachers about using the puppets later on to tackle health, nutrition, water and sanitation issues.”

After the assembly, I interviewed the Principal, Iluminado Leno. “All our classrooms were damaged in the flood, along with the canteen and the clinic, and all the equipment was swept away,” she said. “We sent teachers to the evacuation centres to continue lessons wherever possible. We are happy and surprised by how many pupils came back today and hope even more will come tomorrow. This will help them forget their distressing experiences.”

Finally, I tried to talk to some of the children but they were too shy to say much. I think I need to work on my interviewing technique. Ar-ar recommends using puppets! One thing that strikes me is the contrast between the UK, where a lot of children take school for granted and can’t wait for a chance to skip it. Here the opposite is true. Filipino children really value education and will overcome great barriers to get it, as I was to see even more starkly the next day.

“After a disaster, children are sent to evacuation centres and often they’re just sitting there all day with nothing to do,” Ar-ar said. “When we asked them how they feel, the children would say ‘I miss my teachers; I miss my classmates; I lost my school bag; I want to go back to school.’.”

Under pressure

On Tuesday, I hooked up with Jes from UNICEF’s child protection department and went to see an amazing project that’s bringing education and life skills counselling to Manila’s most vulnerable people: the street children.

The project is run by a local charity called Childhope Asia Philippines, which operates out of an old Spanish colonial villa. The Spanish ran the Philippines for over 300 years, from 1571 to 1898, and are not remembered fondly for it. Much of their architectural legacy was destroyed in the battle for Manila between the US and Japan at the end of the Second World War but a few building like this survived.

At the villa, we met one of the charity’s outreach workers. Butch, 47, is a real character. In combat shorts and t-shirt, he still retains some of the style and attitude of the street child he used to be. Butch never knew his parents and ran away from home after his grandmother died. He ended up on the streets, where he led a gang, sold drugs and acted as a pimp for other boys. By the time he was 17, he realised his life had to change.

“We were a group of eight kids and I was the leader,” Butch said. “I was street smart and didn’t trust anyone. But these people, the social workers, they were persistent and really got to know the group. So I said ‘I’m going to try this. Why not? I have nothing to lose’.”

While other street workers educate the children with regular classes, where they learn things like basic maths and literacy, Butch concentrates on counselling, helping individual children work through their problems.

“There is a lot of abuse on the streets,” he says. “In my area there are a lot of market vendors who think that street children are the dregs of society. So they don’t think these kids have rights. Every day, the kids get sick from pneumonia, skin disease and tuberculosis. They are hungry and have to look for food all the time. They don’t have good friends and there are lots of vices around them.”

Butch is strongly motivated to do this kind of work. “It’s more than payback,” he says. “I feel an obligation and responsibility to take care of other people. Certain kids have the inner strength but they need some support from the outside.”

As the light started to fade, we headed into town to the square outside Binondo Church in Chinatown where the street children congregate. We got out of the car into a busy square, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of Manila street life. We’re immediately surrounded by a crowd of excited children who clearly know Butch. They make us press our hands to their foreheads, which is a form of blessing.

Despite their blackened bare feet and ragged clothes, the children seem happy and outgoing. There’s none of the shyness I saw at the school. Several of the kids want me to take their photos and strike up tough street poses. This attitude is belied, however, by their child-like enthusiasm to see the pictures.

One of the other street educators starts a class right there in the street and the children’s attention is diverted. If anything, they’re even keener to learn than the children at Pinagbuhatan Elementary School. As the class starts, other children race across the square to join in.

Afterwards, I talk to Mary (not her real name), 12, who lives and works with her family on the streets of Manila. She helps her mother sell cigarettes outside Starbucks in Binondo (Chinatown) and looks after her younger brothers and sisters. She has been out of school for two years and is under pressure from her peers to sniff solvents. “I don’t want to sleep on the streets anymore,” she says.

After counselling from Butch, Mary is attending the alternative learning sessions, where she is showing academic promise. She’s now decided that she wants to go back to school. “I like learning maths, Filipino and how to take care of my body,” she says. “I want to be a nurse and help people who are sick, like the people who got ill after the last typhoon.”

We’re just round the corner from Starbucks, so afterwards we go and meet Mary’s family. I tell her mother how smart Mary is and show her some of the photos. Later on, I get prints made which I’ll give to Butch to pass on to the children.

This is without a doubt the highlight of my visit so far. I feel overwhelmed by a jumble of conflicting emotions. I’m upset for the children and what they have to go through but inspired by their resilience and by the work that Butch and the other street educators do. Also in the mix is the slightly selfish thrill of getting a really strong story. This is what I love most about my job: finding and telling the stories of these kids, hopefully to inspire others to take action, whether by donating, campaigning or fundraising for UNICEF.

Could do better

On Wednesday morning, I went to a forum to see the Philippines Government and a coalition of non-governmental organisations present their reports on how the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has been implemented in the Philippines. The consensus seems to be that although the Government has made progress on passing laws to protect children’s rights, it has failed to implement many of them effectively. One particularly shocking practice that is still going on is executing children in some parts of the country for being ‘communists’.

The forum was held in Club Filipino, another colonial era building. Our event is somewhat overshadowed, and at one point literally drowned out, by an event held by Senator Francis ‘Chiz’ Escudero, who plans to run for President next May. He gave a statement to journalists that he was leaving the Nationalist People’s Coalition. In the Philippines, politicians are only loosely aligned to political parties and it’s not unusual for them to jump ship ahead of an election.

On a personal level, my major triumph this week is mastering the jeepneys. I needed a bit of local help to start with but I now know the main routes around Makati and roughly where to get on and off (it’s an inexact science). I also discovered that if you sit towards the front, you’re expected to pass money back and forth between the driver and other passengers. In the Philippines, everyone’s a bus conductor.

I’m already over my word length so I will tell you about the typhoon next week. Suffice to say that I went home on Friday night with the tops of the tower blocks disappearing beneath a shroud of rain and cloud, the wind starting to whip up and a distinct sense of trepidation as Typhoon Santi stormed directly towards Manila.