Monday, 23 December 2013

Food distribution after Hurricane Haiyan

Crumbs, it's been exactly a year since my last post! Where did that time go?!

I wanted to report back after the kind donation from my UK church, The Lighthouse, following the super-typhoon that struck the Philippines this year. If you click the picture, it will take you to a photo gallery of the food packages we handed out.

The pictures show our food distribution to the Badjao people. We have a outreach ministry to this people group, so we have a natural connection to them, and were able to distribute the food fairly so that all the Badjao people received food. They are a fishing community that live in houses built out over the sea. Because of Hurricane Haiyan (which was followed shortly by another smaller typhoon) it meant that they weren’t able to catch fish for several weeks. For people living in poverty this made it very difficult for them and there was a lack of food. Thankfully the typhoon did not hit with its full force here at Palawan so there wasn’t much damage to the houses.

The Badjao living over the sea evacuated onto the land just in case and there was no loss of life here. But there was a huge lack of food and the Badjao people especially were very hungry. So we gave them all food (thank you to all who gave money the largest part from the Lighthouse Family Church). We used the money to give out 650 packs of food - one for every person in the Badjao village. Each pack contained rice, tined sardines, mineral salts, Kiat kiat (a fruit similar to an orange), noodles and coffee a Filipino favourite.

The weather has been fine here in the weeks after the typhoons and the Badjao have been back to fishing and have recovered now. They are very thankful for the food a help in there time of need, it kept them going when there was no other food.

It was a long day but very rewarding, we worked with the teenagers who are part of our regular outreach ministry to give out the food, which with God's help went very smoothly and there where no problems. It was a great day giving food to the hungry, thank you everyone for your generous gifts.