SENANDO APILAN SITS ON A makeshift bamboo walkway, raised inches above the murky water, picking bones out of a plastic container full of ground fish meat, which he plans to turn into fried bola-bola (fish balls).

Just a few feet away, on the same bridge, someone’s laundry is left on a tub full of suds.

“That’s the way it is here,” Apilan said in Filipino. “We use every available space to do our chores.”

The covered court of Barangay Poblacion Ibaba in Angono, Rizal, located close to the shores of the Laguna de Bay is still knee-deep in water as of Monday.

It shelters nearly 100 families, whose homes have remained submerged as the lake swelled from rain brought about by recent typhoons that hit Metro Manila and nearby provinces.

“Before, we were staying at the Angono Elementary School,” said Apilan. “But we were made to leave once classes started again.”

Apilan, 39, earns a small sum from working as an extra in construction jobs, but job opportunities are scarce nowadays. His wife earns P550 a week from doing laundry.

A few meters from where he is sitting, his wife is busy sewing dresses in their “house,” old wood and bamboo put up to form a cubicle, raised inches above the water. Measuring about five square meters, it is barely enough to accommodate the couple and their two children.

Only 3 aisles

The court is filled with similar structures, leaving only three aisles to move through. A lack of bridges in the interior means evacuees have no choice but to tread in dark brown water if they should go outside.

Plastic wrappers, fruit peelings, wood chips and saliva float on the water.

“After I wash clothes, I just throw the water into the flood,” said Lita Espenida, the owner of the tub sitting on the bamboo bridge.

“Sometimes, we also urinate here, since the water is already dirty,” said Apilan.

Outside the court, near the gate, are four restrooms set up by the international aid group Oxfam two weeks ago. They now reek as two large drums are already full of waste products that have yet to be siphoned.

From a hose attached to a public faucet evacuees get clean water for cooking and drinking. This is also where some of them bathe, their feet submerged in the flood.

Raquel de Borja says she goes to her house a few blocks away when she needs to use the toilet or take a bath.

“There’s still running water there, but we can’t stay there because the floors are still under water,” she said in Filipino. She uses a raft made of banana tree trunks to travel to her house without getting wet.

She sits on the edge of their makeshift shelter, chatting with a neighbor, while her husband sleeps inside.

“Right now, all we can do is wait for the flood to subside,” said De Borja, who will be celebrating her 50th birthday today.

Evacuation center?

“This place should not have been declared an evacuation center,” said Dr. Emmanuel Luna, a community development professor at the University of the Philippines (UP).

On Friday, faculty members of the University of the Philippines’ College of Social Welfare and Community Development visited the area, along with Oxfam staff members, to provide relief goods to the evacuees.

“It’s the responsibility of the local government unit to find a proper relocation site for the victims,” Luna added.

Barangay chair Renato Reyes said he was trying to talk with the owner of a vacant lot in Tayuman, Binangonan for its use as a relocation site for the evacuees.

“We are just a small barangay with little income,” he said.

Reyes said he spoke recently with Oxfam about the construction of six more toilets for the evacuees. He said he also called Manila Water regarding the siphoning of sewage from the existing toilets in the covered court.

Barangay request

He said he had requested the municipal government for wood to build more walkways for the evacuees inside the covered court.

“I made that request right after Typhoon ‘Ondoy,’” Reyes said. According to him, Angono Mayor Aurora Villamayor told him that he will be handed the wood once the municipal office has gathered enough.

“The question is, when will they give it?” asked Reyes.

Villamayor’s public information officer, Richard Gappi, said that maybe the barangay leader was not following up his request as often as he should.

“Besides, they can purchase the materials themselves and reimburse the expenses with the mayor’s office,” he said. “If we do not give them the materials, are they just going to wait and not do anything?”

Regarding the state of the evacuation center in Poblacion Ibaba, Gappi said the municipality was “constrained by the situation.”

“There is another evacuation at Angono National High School, which is also under water and also houses around 100 families,” he said. “Even if we had a place to transfer them, it will be overcrowded, which in evacuation center standards, is also unacceptable.”

Around Angono are 17 evacuation centers, Gappi said. The provincial government was considering a parcel of land in Montalban that could be developed into a relocation site, he added.

At the Angono Elementary School, 83 families are housed inside 13 classrooms at the back of the campus. A majority of them are from Barangays San Vicente and Kalayaan, where floods are still more than a meter deep.

Ricardo Cielo, who is from San Vicente, said the water was still above knee level inside his house when he visited last week.

But while he still has a place to go home to when the floods recede, some people are not as lucky.

Burglary

Marylou Vila of Barangay Kalayaan found her house stripped of construction materials and other belongings when she visited it on Friday morning.

Her washing machine, galvanized iron sheets from their roof, and electrical wiring were only some of the things taken from her home.

“We’re already victims of the flood and now we’ve been robbed,” Vila said in Filipino. “Those thieves have no shame.”