While we try our best to provide the basic necessities and services to our sisters and brothers who were affected by the recent natural calamities, let us not forget our differences as individuals. Donations such as rice, canned goods, noodles, clothes and blankets not only assuage their hunger, thirst and exhaustion.

However we need to keep in mind the specific necessities of people, especially women and girls. They continue to perform their reproductive roles wherever their families have managed to temporarily settle. They are vulnerable not only to sickness as everyone else, but also to physical and sexual abuses especially in the midst of confusion and desperation.

Let us include sanitary napkins, wet and dry tissues, body soaps and clean briefs in our donations. We hope that local governments and other institutions that are organizing relief efforts and setting up evacuation centers will take into account our differences as people with particular identities, gender and sexualities, among others. Let us strive to give affected people a level of privacy and security, however pressed for resources.

Learning from the lessons of past tragedies, including the Asian tsunami?where far more women were killed and injured for they did not know how to swim and found it difficult to climb to higher grounds and where some women were raped in exchange for being rescued?let us be gender sensitive in this time of tragedy.

?NINA SOMERA,
Isis International,
3 Marunong St., Barangay Central, QC