The new ‘bakwit’

The deadly eruptions of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 resulted in, among others, “tent cities” materializing in Pampanga and other provinces in Luzon, serving as temporary shelter for the thousands of families driven to evacuate their homes yet enduring for months, years, until the families could be resettled and helped to pick up the pieces.

Now, with the fighting in Marawi still raging a month and two days after it began, up to 230,000 people have fled the city. Of the number, nearly 40,000 languish in evacuation centers put up in gyms, community halls and Islamic schools in certain towns in the Lanao provinces.

As can be expected, the new “bakwit” are prey to illness and death — the result of thousands of families forced to live in extremely close quarters. At least 24 evacuees have died since arriving at the centers, Health Secretary Paulyn Ubial announced early last week. They were felled by dehydration, pneumonia and diarrhea — the usual suspects in such desperate situations. In a report, Inquirer Mindanao’s Allan Nawal quoted Alinader Minalang, the health director for Lanao del Sur, as saying that 300 cases of diarrhea had been monitored among the evacuees. Minalang attributed the spike to “sanitation issues and a lack of sources of potable water.”

Then as now, the centers simply aren’t equipped to handle big numbers of  bakwit. In some cases, more than 100 people are forced to share one filthy toilet.

And malnutrition is a creeping menace to the children, warned Nelia Sarap, nutrition specialist of the Lanao del Sur Integrated Provincial Health Office. The fact is that what has been available so far for the displaced families simply isn’t enough. “The relief goods consisting of sardines, noodles and rice will not provide them the needed nutrition,” Sarap pointed out. She said the situation would get worse when more evacuees contract diarrhea: “When this happens, we will see more weak bodies, more diseases, and possibly deaths.” According to Dr. Kadil Sinolinding, health secretary of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, all it would take is one case of cholera for the disease to burn through the  bakwit  and “cause an outbreak in no time.”

The rest of us can only imagine the misery: Residents of Marawi snatched violently from their everyday lives, forced to flee bullets and bombs, and, reaching safe ground, struggling to survive in the direst conditions. If the fighting goes on, things will deteriorate even more.

Yet the fighting continues and more and more of Marawi is reduced to ruins. What this means is that the bakwit will not be able to leave their temporary camps anytime soon, even with rehab plans for Marawi being touted. And even with Social Welfare Secretary Judy Taguiwalo’s announcement that individual tents are being procured for each displaced family. “It’s temporary, but it’s necessary,” she told reporters. It’s a chance to do something right now to help improve the situation at the evacuation centers, to make things better before they get worse.

There’s a risk that the evacuation centers may become more permanent structures, as the Pinatubo experience has shown. And as the Pinatubo experience has also shown, an evacuation center is no place for children to grow up in, let alone thrive. The young children of Marawi that will be brought up in these centers will live a life of deprivation and limitation. They will wake and sleep to a brutish rhythm and a fragile future.

How to help the  bakwit  apart from donating cash and sending the usual relief (temporary, palliative) goods to this shattered city in the South? The continuing education of children whose lives were disrupted by this war is imperative, as is the protection of girls and women forced to live in such sordid settings (the conditions in the evacuation camps put up in the aftermath of the Zamboanga siege of 2013 are hugely instructive). And more than ever, earnest efforts to bring about a just and enduring peace in the South, based on a clear understanding of the roots of the conflict, cannot stop now.