Iligan university biggest haven for ‘Sendong’ victims

ILIGAN CITY—The biggest evacuation center here for families displaced by Tropical Storm “Sendong” may be likened to a well-oiled machine fueled by the kindness of strangers, according to officials of Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT).

Now tending to the needs of more than 2,000 families, the temporary shelter provided by the school sprang from simple acts of compassion that later grew to a massive scale.

It all started at around 7 a.m. on that fateful Saturday, Dec. 17, just hours after the heavy rains dumped by Sendong wreaked havoc across the city, when about a hundred bedraggled villagers, still dripping mud, some practically naked and shivering from the cold, knocked on the campus gates and begged for a place to stay.

School officials immediately welcomed the sorry-looking lot. “It’s the natural thing to do when you see people in distress,” said the university chancellor, Sukarno D. Tanggol.

Tanggol could still recall the moment he got a call from a staff member asking him whether the gates should be opened. The quick answer was yes.

“If they had come to us at the height of the storm, we would have opened the gates that very hour,” he said in an interview with the Inquirer.

The villagers were first housed in one of the school buildings.  They were allowed to wash themselves in the bathrooms and were given clean clothes. They were served hot porridge and given blankets and beddings.

The school officials thought that was the end of it.

Soon, however, more flood victims came knocking on the door, having heard by word of mouth that the university was accepting evacuees. At first they arrived in small groups, then followed entire families and neighborhoods.

Among them was Maribel Lagrada, a 40-year-old housewife from Purok 2-B in Barangay Santiago. “I was almost naked. A barangay watchman gave me a shirt to cover myself up. My daughter who was 8 months pregnant was also naked. We were all still wet from the mud when we came,” she said, now looking fine and well-rested.

‘Bye-bye, Ma’

Lagrada and the other members of her family were swept away by the surging waters that overflowed from the Mandulog River. As they struggled to keep their heads above the raging flood, all they could do was call out to each other in the dark, the mother of four said.

“I heard them shout, ‘Bye-bye, Ma.’ We had no hope of living through that,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes.

Fortunately, they all made it through the morning, including her two pregnant daughters. But then, as the receding flood revealed a chaotic landscape of demolished homes and uprooted trees, they soon realized they had nowhere to go.

“Our feet just took us here,” she said, referring to the sprawling campus.

“We couldn’t turn them away,” said Ernesto Empig, the dean of computer studies at MSU-IIT, who took on the task of overseeing relief activities at the multipurpose gymnasium that sheltered the evacuees.

At least 2,281 families were on the list and staying at the gym when the Inquirer visited the campus on Wednesday.

“We’re an academic institution. It was never our plan to put up an evacuation center. Everything was spontaneous. As more people came, we realized we had to do our part,” Empig said of his MSU-IIT community, which currently counts 12,000 students.

A system had since been put in place: The evacuees were clustered into informal groupings according to village. They put up barriers of plywood between clusters, forming partitions on the gym floor and in the bleacher sections.

A leader was appointed for each cluster to maintain order, with the evacuees expected to look after their respective groups, Empig said.

At first, the evacuees were asked to queue up for the food rations, but later student volunteers realized that it was better to distribute the meals by cluster. “It was a great idea. Now they don’t have to line up three times a day,” Empig added.

“A lot of the organizational matters I leave to the student volunteers. They have many ideas about how to improve our operations,” the dean said.

‘Contest’

“We started a contest among the clusters … The cleanest cluster gets a reward, such as extra food,” Empig said. The idea also came from the students.

Breakfast usually consisted of coffee and bread, while lunch and dinner were modest fares of rice, vegetables and meat or fish, depending on what’s available. “It’s nothing fancy. Our goal is to make sure no one goes hungry,” he said.

Donations had come from all over, according to Empig. “When people heard that we’re the biggest evacuation center here, they just started sending relief goods—food, beddings, etc. One student from the boarding house came with a bag of canned sardines.”

“It’s very touching to see the outpouring of support from all over Iligan,” Empig said, citing donations from local private companies, nongovernment organizations and private individuals. The health and social welfare departments had also sent personnel and more supplies.

As of Wednesday, four toilets on the campus have been made available for the evacuees’ use. (The university also received pledges for portalets.) Thanks to this added provision, the air in the gym has not turned foul despite the overcrowding.

But Empig conceded that more needed to be done. “What we really need are facilities to house them. Food comes aplenty. We have clothes coming in. There’s a supply of water. But we can’t accommodate everyone in the gym,” he said.

He noted that some of the evacuees had chosen to sleep on the lawn outside the gym, which was built to seat 3,500 people but ended up housing about 10,000 because of Sendong.

Tanggol, the chancellor, said the MSU-IIT evacuation center would continue operating as long as the residents need it.

But he urged the local government to immediately deliver on its promise to provide relocation sites for the displaced families, hopefully before classes resume next month.