Philippine Daily Inquirer / 06:20 AM
March 23, 2018
Lorenza Daa Memorial Elementary
School (LDMES) sits atop a hill on the outskirts of Tacloban City.
More than 200 students from
different villages in Tacloban and the adjacent towns of Alang-alang and Santa
Fe are all too familiar with the trip up and down the rolling road to this school.
“We’re used to this,” said Grade 6
student, Aira Dangkalan.
ADVERTISEMENT
But when it was time for her to help
fetch water for the day’s use, the 13-year-old Dangkalan would look at the
hill’s slope with much disdain.
Steep trek
“It was very difficult to fetch a
pail of water there,” she said, referring to the steep trek to a well outside
the school compound.
But it was a routine that Dangkalan
and most of the older students at LDMES had to endure because of the school’s
location.
In 2013, Supertyphoon “Yolanda”
(international name: Haiyan) damaged 90 percent of school buildings in Leyte
province, records from the Department of Education showed.
Rehabilitation efforts focused on
restoring the schools’ access to safe drinking water and improved sanitation.
With the help of the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) and nongovernment
organizations like arche noVa and Samaritan’s Purse, the Leyte Metropolitan
Water District (LMWD) installed solar water pumps in 95 schools, servicing
about 30,000 schoolchildren.
No comments:
Post a Comment