At mid-morning, the area in Cala-Cala by the banks of
the Cagayan River, called Isa de
Oro, was serene, tall grass swaying in the breeze and the river flowing
languidly toward the Macajalar Bay.
The river has a sizable sandbar
island. There was once about a thousand
houses here, but it was swept away by the swollen river and the massive flood
caused by tropical storm Washi, locally known as Sendong, on Dec. 16, 2011.
What remained was a tall mango
tree, which was made into a monument called the Tree of Life. A plaque reads:
“This mango tree saved more than 50 people, residents of Isla de Oro, at the
height of the unprecedented flooding caused by Tropical Storm Sendong last
December 16, 2011.”
The flood came at night. The
following morning, people and even animals were clinging to the tree. The
unlucky ones were swept out into the sea. Cagayan de Oro City, the commercial
and educational hub of northeast Mindanao, along with Iligan City, was one of the
hardest hit areas during the storm. Isla de Oro in Cala-Cala was one of the
most affected along with the barangays of Consolacion, Macasandig,
Kauswagan, Carmen, Canitoan, Iponan and Balulang.
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| Isla de Oro a year after typhoon Washi |
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| The Tree of Life |
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| The resettlement area in the sitio of Calaanan in the barangay of Canitoan |
In its aftermath, Washi, which
also struck the Visayas and Palawan, affected
131,618 families, destroyed 51,144 houses and damaged properties amounting to
P2.1 billion, making it the world’s deadliest storm that year.
Aid came and many countries
launched humanitarian efforts for the survivors. Help was generous. When Marco
Flores, director for operations of the Unilab Foundation, arrived in Cagayan de
Oro to see how they could help, he saw a surfeit of relief goods that were
starting to spoil. Food was taken care of along with other material needs.
However, the psychological well-being of survivors were rarely addressed,
especially the children’s, the most vulnerable group. There were more than
87,500 children left orphaned and homeless by Washi.
With Rhodora Palomar-Fresnedi,
senior vice president for corporate affairs of Unilab, as executive director,
the Unilab Foundation thought of building a safe place where children can play
and generally be themselves, facilitating healing from trauma and spurring positive
growth.
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| Rhodora Palomar-Fresnedi, senior vice president for corporate affairs of Unilab and executive director of the Unilab Foundation |
The Unilab Foundation is the
corporate social responsibility arm of the Philippines’ biggest
pharmaceutical and healthcare company United Laboratories or Unilab. With a
concentration on health, their approach is holistic addressing both the
physical, as well as the mental/emotional/spiritual — areas of concern they say
that are important but often left neglected. Their projects delve on
developmental and therapeutic play, health in public schools, leadership
training for healthcare professionals, health of senior citizen and social
enterprise.
Cagayan de Oro became the pilot
site for its post-disaster developmental and therapeutic play intervention
program called Play It Forward. Playing has long been scientifically proven to
be essential in children’s growth and important in maintaining well-being as
well as helping in the process of healing.
The therapeutic benefits of play
is recognized by the Association for Play Therapy in the United States,
helping “children experiencing a wide
variety of social, emotional, behavioral, and learning problems, including:
children whose problems are related to life stressors, such as divorce, death,
relocation, hospitalization, chronic illness, assimilate stressful experiences,
physical and sexual abuse, domestic violence, and natural disasters,” says a
study by Dr. Linda A. Reddy, Dr. Tara M. Files-Hall, and Dr. Charles E.
Schaefer.
According to Play Therapy UK, between 74 to
83 percent of children receiving play therapy showed positive change, that is,
showed “improvement in the emotional, behavioral and mental health of the
children.”
The children survivors of Washi
have undeniably undergone tremendous stress, most experiencing displacement and
many losing loved ones. Before Sendong, they were not afraid of the rain, but
after that they cried whenever it rained, related Susan Colades, a community
leader in the one of the relocation sites for storm survivors in the sitio of
Calanaan, in the barangay of Canitoan.
It is here, in the western part
of the city, Unilab Foundation is building its Play it Forward play space. The
local government designated an 1.8 hectare area as the resettlement site, the Shell-Gawad Kalinga Village, where 272
houses were built with the help of Shell, the city government and private
donors. It took about eight months constructing the houses after Washi. Many
Isla de Oro survivors were relocated here. The community sits beside another
relocation site built by Habitat for Humanity in 2008. About half of residents
are from two to 12 years old.
The local government originally
earmarked about 400 square meters of lot area for Unilab Foundation’s play
space, which was eventually increased to about 1,200 square meters. The
programs will involve building science-based play spaces, developing customized
play curricula, and training volunteers to implement the programs and maintain
the play spaces over the long term.
Palomar-Fresnedi said, “We want
everyone to realize that play is as essential as food and water; and that it is
not a privilege of children, it is a basic right.”
In building the play space,
Unilab Foundation got help from several companies and institutions, experts in
the fields of play therapy, human kinetics and architecture.
Architect Angelo Mañosa of the
prominent architectural firm Mañosa and Company designed the playground free of
charge. The playground has crawl tubes, a sandbox, a three-storey jungle gym
and a stage, among others.
The College of Human Kinetics of the
University of the Philippines, which specializes
on human movement and physical education, gave advice on usage and safety,
while the Bulatao Center for Psychology
Services of the Ateneo de Manila University’s Department of Psychology, is the
consultant in developing the play curriculum development and in training
facilitators.
The play space will be maintained
by Gawad Kalinga, which works to provide the basic needs of the poor. Unilab
Foundation also sought the help of local universities, which provide youth
volunteers for the facilitated play.
The playground was much
anticipated by the children in the community, who had no space for play and
usually resorted to the street. While still to be completed, the Play it
Forward play space was opened in October 2013, and children flocked to it.
Volunteers began the facilitated play sessions with the children, divided into
age groups. Laughing and doing fun activities, they became ordinary children
with dreams and desires. Few people will know that they suffered from the
trauma of horrors of a storm. With Play it Forward, they are helped to overcome
this and grow to be well-adjusted and productive members of the community.
Postscript:
Haiyan
A few weeks after the Play it
Forward splay space opened in Cagayan de Oro, the typhoon Haiyan, locally known
as Yolanda, devastated many parts of the Visayas, especially Tacloban City, considered to
be the strongest typhoon in recent history with a death toll exceeding 5,000.
Unilab Foundation is said to be
assessing “the sequence of intervention necessary in addressing the emotional
recovery of the children affected by Yolanda.”
“An essential element in
rebuilding our country after Yolanda’s onslaught is ensuring that the children
affected by the disaster are able to continue to develop into holistically
healthy adults,” Palomar-Fresnedi said. “Almost five million kids have lost
their home, a parent, a sibling, a friend, a school bag, a toy because of
Yolanda, but what must never be lost is that space for a child to play.”
She said that “therapeutic play
intervention defends that sacred space where children can be kids again. It is
through play that a child understands, that a child makes sense of his
surroundings. What horror, grief or trauma after a disaster that children can
never express in words, they can do so through play. As we invest in the future
by rebuilding physical structures, so too must we invest in rebuilding what is
broken inside the hearts of our country’s children.”
“The situation needs to be
approached delicately and sensitively as it deals with post-traumatic stress of
children. If not done properly, it may do more harm than good,”
Palomar-Fresnedi further stated. “As with all our programs, we are convening
experts who believe in the same health cause and are willing and ready to ‘play
it forward.’ We are working with doctors and academicians to come up with a
systematic approach for the intervention. This ensures that what we bring in is
a long term sustainable solution- therapeutic play with a proven formula of
play space plus curriculum.”
She also said: “What we’ve
started in Cagayan de Oro for the children affected by Sendong is a prelude.
The devastation brought by Yolanda magnifies the need for therapeutic play
intervention. Stories of children whose lives were shaken in CDO are the same
stories in Tacloban, Samar, Leyte and Cebu. As long as
there is a child in need of therapeutic play intervention, we continue to ‘play
it forward.’ Because as we rebuild lives, we continue to build a healthier Philippines, one child at a
time.”
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