CAINTA, RIZAL?Angry flood survivors Tuesday queued for tinned fish and noodles, while other evacuees formed another line for the lone toilet at a gymnasium that has been turned into an evacuation center.
On the concrete floor of the covered basketball court, bedraggled children wearing dirty clothes or barely anything at all lay on flattened cardboard cartons, sleeping side-by-side with dogs.
Parents attempted to build fires with charcoal to cook their meager food rations.
?Get in line!? Candy Regavillo, a local official, barked at the hungry hordes. ?Show us some discipline and we will assure everyone gets their share.?
Some in the crowd angrily yelled back: ?When will we get ours??
About 3,000 residents of the poor neighborhood of San Andres, situated beside a creek in Cainta, Rizal, fled to the government gym after floodwaters swamped their homes on Saturday.
The government is having a hard time coping with the vast numbers of people needing help, saying it was short of food, clean water, medicine and other supplies.
At the Cainta evacuation center, those needs were on full display.
Grumbling at breakfast
?I lined up at 4 a.m. and all I got was a bottle of water,? Primo Orcillo grumbled at breakfast time. The 67-year-old grandfather, who was barefoot, carried the trouser-less child of a missing neighbor.
Like many others, Orcillo had missed out on a blue plastic bag of two canned sardines and a pack of noodles designed to sustain each family for an entire day.
?We are very hungry. I haven?t even had coffee,? Orcillo complained.
He said his own daughter was in a different shelter in another part of town. Her daughter?s husband had gone back to their home to try to salvage what he could.
Even though the food was gone, the lines continued to stretch 250 meters as people hoped more supplies would be delivered.
A municipal fire truck arrived to deliver water, but no one knew when the next batch of rations provided by the local government would come.
Some nursing mothers were also asking for infant formula milk, while a top concern was stopping any outbreak of disease that could arise from having so many people crammed together in dirty conditions, officials said.
Teaching sanitation
?We are trying to educate them on proper handling of water and sanitation,? said Cristina Bernaldo, a social welfare worker. ?That?s the most difficult thing to teach.?
Teaching sanitation gets doubly hard when 3,000 people have access to just one toilet.
Bernaldo?s boss, Joe Ferrer, summed up the exasperation felt by so many evacuees in Cainta and hundreds of other shelters set up over the past few days.
?We need clothing, food supplies, food rations and medicines,? Ferrer said. ?We don?t know how long we will be able to sustain this.?
