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P S N A Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa |
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P S N A Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa |
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Bulletin
Board: 'Ondoy' & 'Pepeng' Disaster Relief Appeal
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PHILIPPINES DISASTER RELIEF APPEAL 10 October 2009 PSNA members & supporters, The media is currently full of horrific images of the catastrophic impact on the Philippines of a fortnight of typhoons and floods. Hundreds have been killed; hundreds of thousands are homeless; millions are affected. The first typhoon, Ondoy, dropped a month’s rain on Metro Manila in 12 hours – 80% of the huge metropolis was flooded, up to six metres deep in places. Immediately afterwards, typhoon Pepeng hammered the Cordillera region of northern Luzon (the main island, on which Metro Manila is located). Whole cities have been cut off by the resultant floods and killer landslides, left without food or water. Typhoons and floods are part of the normal weather pattern in the Philippines but these past couple of weeks has been something else again. The impact is exacerbated by a Government that is criminally negligent when it comes to any kind of preparation for these entirely predictable disasters. The causes include: corruption, inefficiency, a lack of planning and preparedeness, shoddy construction, building on a flood plain, illegal logging removing the forests that would stop the mudslides, a lack of any maintenance or garbage collection to prevent the stormwater drainage canals becoming blocked, and a grossly unequal society that sees the rich condemning the poor to fend for themselves when disaster strikes time and again (but this huge flood in Metro Manila got the attention of the rich because some of their gated communities got flooded as well). The Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA) has no track record in disaster relief or even fundraising for it. That’s not what we were set up to do. But this recent disaster (taking the whole fortnight, and counting, of storms, floods, etc as one continuous event) strikes us as being worse than any other Philippine disasters – natural or manmade – for many years. Accordingly, we have made our first ever donation for Philippines disaster relief. We donated $500 to the Philippines appeal set up by Christian World Service (the development, justice and aid agency of New Zealand churches, with its national office in Christchurch ). CWS has been a longstanding trusted partner of PSNA for years in many of our Philippine projects, and international disaster relief and development aid follow up has been part of its core work for decades. CWS has agreed to our request to earmark our donation, and any subsequent money that it receives via PSNA, for the urgent appeal from Karapatan, the Alliance for the Advancement of Human Rights, a group with whom both PSNA and CWS have a working relationship. They need the money to help poor communities who are already reeling from the impact of systematic human rights violations. We invite our members and supporters to match our donation. Send it to us and we will forward it to CWS in one lump sum, earmarked for Karapatan. Please make cheques payable to PSNA, Box 2450 , Christchurch , with an accompanying note saying “Disaster Relief”. Upon request, we will supply our bank account details for direct deposits, please accompany them with the words “Disaster Relief”. Murray Horton Secretary Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA) Box 2450, Christchurch , New Zealand email: cafca@chch.planet.org.nz www: converge.org.nz/psna |
