MANILA (AlertNet) - Joyce Alcantara hardly knows what is worse -- being forced from her house by the Philippines' heaviest flooding in 40 years, or the prospect of giving birth in one of hundreds of evacuation centres sheltering the homeless in Manila.
More than a week after Typhoon Ketsana unleashed a month's rain in a day in Greater Manila killing nearly 300 people and uprooting half a million more, heavily-pregnant Alcantara has been unable to leave the sports centre which serves as a refuge to more than 500 families because the waters around her home are still too high.
Since the disaster struck destroying crops, roads, bridges and schools and costing the Southeast Asian nation more than 10
billion pesos ($210 million), Alcantara has mostly slept on a straw mat in the corner of a basketball court, steeling herself for labour.
"I might give birth any time this week, and I'm afraid I won't get any help with it," the 21-year-old said. "It's really hard to live like this because there isn't any privacy. Every day is the same. We're just waiting for time to pass."
As residents started a laborious clean-up operation in the capital, which is home to 15 million people, another tropical
storm -- Parma -- slowly headed to the northern tobacco-producing region after killing at least 22 people.
The successive storms forced the Philippines to appeal for international aid. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo placed the entire country under a state of calamity and declared a price freeze on items ranging from medicine and cooking gas to cement and funeral services, local media said.
"Some people are still living in their flooded homes because of fears of looting," Oxfam's humanitarian coordinator for East
Asia, Arif Jabbar Khan, told AlertNet.
"Of course, living in such unhygienic conditions can be a recipe for disease."
On Oct. 3, the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) launched a $74 million flash appeal for the Philippines to address the most urgent needs -- food, drinking water, sanitation and health.
Apart from providing shelter, aid agencies have been supplying water and essential items such as blankets, soap, cleaning equipment, clothes and water containers to the worst affected families.
MONITORING FOR DENGUE, CHOLERA
In Marikina, one of the sprawling capital's worst-hit areas, the waters had receded dispersing debris in the streets and filling the air with the stench of sewage.
Some hawkers picked through the mud-sodden rubbish piled along the streets, picking through the shattered glass, soiled clothes and wrecked furniture, for anything worth retrieving.
Huge tractors that scooped up the garbage held up traffic as motorcyclists skidded through the sludge. Along the river, some women washed clothes in the floodwater.
Back in the sports hall, and surviving on bottled water, noodles, canned food and rice supplied by aid agencies and well-wishers, evacuees like Alcantara were trying to retain a semblance of normality.
Washing was left to dry on seats and lines strung up outside where mothers doused their naked children with soapy water from a plastic container. Officials in charge of organising aid delivery appealed through megaphones to parents to stop their children from littering.
Many evacuees were worried about the health risks due to close contact with others and poor sanitation -- there was a dozen temporary toilets for more than 1,000 people -- but Alcantara said conditions in this evacuation centre were better
than the one, an elementary school, she was first sent to.
There, people had to form queues for the toilet and wait to be called before they could use it.
Food supplies ran low, sparking arguments between evacuees, she said.
A visiting medical officer with the U.S. Marines said the most common ailments he had seen were respiratory problems, colds and skin infections from people wading through the mud.
"Fortunately there is not a lot of diarrhoea and flu which is what you'd expect to see in a post-disaster situation where there are a lot of evacuated people living in tight quarters, unable to bathe or wash their hands," said U.S. Lt Commander Todd Endicott, who had treated people in three evacuation centres.
However, several aid workers expressed concern about the threat of dengue fever due to the volume of stagnant water and said they were monitoring for any sign of cholera.
"There have been cases of dengue so we're trying to get bed nets out to areas wwhere the water is stagnant. We have no confirmed cases of cholera, but we remain vigilant in case of an outbreak," UNICEF's Angela Travis told AlertNet.
Below are pictures taken by AlertNet correspondent Katie Nguyen on Oct 8, 2009 in the Philippines.
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