Isabela sends medical team, relief goods to Tacloban
ILAGAN CITY, Philippines—The Isabela provincial government has sent a 90-member medical team to Tacloban City to help victims of “supertyphoon Yolanda” (international name Haiyan) there.
Gov. Faustino Dy III said the team would help medical workers treat the wounded and assist survivors in Leyte.
The group, expected to arrive in Tacloban on Tuesday, is composed of 10 doctors, 10 nurses, two firemen, four policemen and Philippine Red Cross and provincial rescue volunteers.
Dy said the team, with two ambulances, brought relief goods and 600 sacks of rice.
“This is our form of help to typhoon victims. They are in need of immediate help so we must lend a hand,” he said.
The Isabela provincial board also passed two resolutions calling for donations from Isabela residents and for the allotment of financial assistance to areas hit by the typhoon in the Visayas.
Article continues after this advertisementIn Pampanga province, more than 1,000 employees of the Clark Development Corp. canceled their Christmas party so they can use the money allotted for the event to typhoon victims.
Article continues after this advertisementA CDC official said representatives of the state-owned firm on Tuesday turned over P1 million to the national office of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) as their contribution.
In Baguio City, the country’s vice mayors had committed to convince their respective town and city councils to appropriate portions of their local governments’ calamity funds to help in the relief and rehabilitation of typhoon-stricken towns and provinces in the Visayas.
Members of the Vice Mayors League of the Philippines (VMLP) are meeting in the summer capital but most officials from areas hit by the typhoon in the Visayas were absent.
Vice Mayor Joe Espinosa III of Iloilo City, whose area was also hit by Yolanda, urged local councils to pass ordinances to donate a portion of their unused calamity funds to Leyte and other provinces in the Visayas devastated by the typhoon.
Members of a Christian group in Baguio City also initiated a relief collection drive for the typhoon survivors. The Christ Commission Fellowship-Baguio (CCF-Baguio), a Christian group, began the drive, encouraging members and friends to donate food, medicines, blankets and cash.
Donors are asked to bring items to the CCF-Baguio office at the EDY Building on Kisad Road.
Businesswoman Lingling Claver also emailed her network of friends to do the same. Her family is coordinating a relief collection drive with the National Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP), a group of 10 Protestant Churches nationwide based in Quezon City.
Claver offered their house, called Frangeli House, at 1 St. George Hill, Bakakeng Norte in Baguio [tel. no. (074) 422 0483] as relief collection center.
The University of the Philippines Baguio started a drive to collect money, food, clothes and medicines to elp typhoon victims, especially the more than 1,000 students, faculty and staff of the UP extension campus in Palo, Leyte.
In Pangasinan province, a farmers’ group on Tuesday asked the national government to immediately distribute to Leyte and other typhoon-devastated areas in the Visayas all smuggled rice seized by the Bureau of Customs (BOC) to help solve the scarcity of food there.
The Samahan ng Industriya ng Agrikultura, a coalition of 33 farmers’ and irrigators’ organizations in the country, said 800,000 metric tons of rice were seized by the BOC in 2012 alone.
(Reports from Villamor Visaya Jr., Desiree Caluza, Maurice Malanes and Gabriel Cardinoza, Inquirer Northern Luzon, and Tonette Orejas, Inquirer Central Luzon)
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