A Taiwanese nonprofit organization is working to provide clean drinking water to students on the Philippine island of Siargao, in the wake of a deadly typhoon that damaged infrastructure in parts of the country last year.
The Taiwan Fund for Children and Families, which has a branch in the Philippines, inaugurated a solar-powered water pumping station in Siargao only days before Typhoon Rai ripped through the southern Philippines on Dec. 16 last year, leaving a trail of death and destruction.
Official data showed that 405 people were killed, 1,147 injured and 82 remained missing, while 500,000 were displaced and a total of 4.45 million were adversely affected in some way by the storm.
Photo: CNA
Siargao Island, a popular tourist destination known for its sandy beaches and surf spots, was reduced to a tangle of downed power lines and poles, smashed buildings, and toppled palm trees.
The solar-powered water pumping station, built by the fund to supply clean drinking water to underprivileged families, was damaged, rendering it nonfunctional in the wake of the storm.
Immediately after the typhoon, the fund moved quickly to assist with emergency relief supplies for the Siargao communities, and it is now working to repair the water pumping station, said Kelly Chang (張凱莉), a representative at the funds Philippine branch.
Students have had to buy drinking water at school, because despite the ample rainfall on the island, there were no adequate collection or storage systems before the fund’s facility was built, she said.
The repairs on the pumping station would be carried out in collaboration with another nonprofit organization, Espoir School of Life, to ensure that Siargao students from underprivileged families would again have access to clean water, Chang said.
Espoir, meaning “hope” in French, provides free education to underprivileged children in the Philippines and in 2016 opened its first establishment in Siargao, in the town of Del Carmen, the school’s Web site says.
Most of the residents in the area are construction workers, farmers and fishers, who earn barely enough to support themselves and their families, and they see no way out of poverty because they think there are no opportunities for people in remote areas of the country, school administrator Jerlyn Rabaca said.
However, Espoir is aiming to end that cycle of poverty by providing “free high-quality education” to students in the area, Rabaca said.
“Everything is free here, including school uniforms and supplies, even crayons and pencils, because we believe we must provide these children with free education and options in life so that they can acquire knowledge to make the right choices,” she said.
The school has 96 students, in classes from kindergarten to grade 4, but expansion plans are in the pipeline, Rabaca said.
“We’re hoping to add a new class each year, until we reach 12th grade,” she said. “We hope that by then, we’ll be able to prepare the students to apply for university scholarships, because that’s the only way they’ll be able to attain higher education.”
Aside from focusing on providing clean drinking water, the fund’s Philippine branch is also part of an effort to eradicate urban poverty and create a better life for Siargao students.
In 2020, the fund introduced a program that allowed the shared use of tablet computers by students in Siargao, after the island’s schools switched to remote learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Chang said.
On Siargao, where Internet connectivity is limited, students were able to collect the tablets every day and pass them on to others, to ensure that they could all participate in the remote classes, she said.
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