BY: REY ANTHONY H. CHIU
BOHOL, July 4 (PIA) – Start them young and everything should follow.
This is what most teachers here believe as the Department of Education (DepEd) and an international humanitarian organization Save the Children (StC) signed an agreement on School-based Disaster Risk Reduction and Management, one that lets school children be an active part in disaster planning and risk reduction.
During a signing activity at the South Palms Resort in Panglao, StC Bohol project director Roxanna Epe said town disaster reduction and management plans are so generic, the children and their needs have not been among its focused areas.
There are towns with disaster response plans, but those are only known in paper, communities are lucky if they see these plans, so you don’t actually expect people to know and respond according to plans, said a teacher from a school in Maribojoc town, who was there during the signing of the agreement.
DepEd Bohol officials and StC authorities led by Edward Olney, StC country director inked the agreement.
The dire need for the school based DRRM was best exemplified in a case when, in an aftershock, a child was seen in a yard, arms wrapped around a tree, his head planted on the ground.
Asked why he did that, the boy replied: “I think the world was going to invert itself, if that happens, I would be upright, I could easily wrap my feet around the tree and not fall off."
In Bohol, stories of how children shiver and shout at the event of an aftershock depict a psychological trauma which is common among people who were not properly-appraised of a disaster and were not aptly prepared for what would happen in such.
Children who were traumatized in the October 15 aftermath were just left to fend on their own and their needs were not among the high priorities for response if not for humanitarian organizations seeing this specific need, admits Leah Bugtay, Save the Children Communications Officer at the Kapihan sa PIA recently.
The project, funded by Prudence Foundation and implemented by StC is piloted in 2 earthquake damaged towns of Maribojoc and Loon, where children, teachers and immediate community are given trainings on disaster related skills to better respond to any disaster, Bugtay remarked.
The worst is that parents think schools are the safest places for a child during a disaster, not really realizing that the teachers and the kids do not have any plan on what to do in times of disaster, Bugtay added.
The program would allow kids to set up early warning signals, coordinate disaster evacuation routes and designate evacuation areas, plan for the mobilization and eliminate panic which is often the culprit for most disaster response flops, she said. (mbcn/rahc/PIA7-Bohol)