Legazpi City–The Department of Social Welfare and Development Field Office V again forged into a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with the Department of Education (DepEd) for its Emergency Brigada Eskwela. The simple MOA signing happened last January 10 at the DSWD Regional Office.

According to DepEd Regional Director Gilbert Sadsad, the Emergency Brigada Eskwela is one way of achieving fast recovery and rehabilitation of school facilities after a disaster. It also promotes values of cooperation, camaraderie, and sense of involvement of the community.

Under the agreement, the DSWD will provide food for work or food assistance to community volunteers who will help in the clean-up, repair, and rehabilitation of school facilities in the schools affected by Tropical Depression Usman.

“The provision of food for work would like to address the basic subsistence needs of the affected families at the same time will help in rebuilding the damaged schools,” said DSWD Bicol Regional Director Arnel Garcia.

Last January 13, the DSWD has already provided 5,777 family food packs to DepEd for distribution to the nine (9) municipalities in Albay and Camarines Sur.
Way back 2017, the two agencies in collaboration with Educo, a nongovernment agency, has already partnered in rebuilding schools for Typhoon Nina affected families.

DSWD Efforts on TD Usman

Aside from the food and non-food items, the DSWD provided financial assistance to thirty-three (33) families with reported death and injury among its members. Likewise, to ease the agony from being displaced, the agency also conducts psychosocial and debriefing activities in the evacuation centers such as film showing/storytelling to children, livelihood and gardening to parents, among others.

Meanwhile, as of January 16, 2019, 12NN Disaster Response Operations Monitoring and Information Center (DROMIC) report, there are still 458 families or 1,966 individuals staying in 19 evacuation centers, (9) in Albay and (10) in Camarines Sur.

TD Usman’s aftermath has affected a total of 106,687 families or 497,903 individuals in 598 barangays in the Bicol Region. The DSWD also recorded 8,368 families with damaged houses.

To date, a total of Php 80,085,261.75 relief assistance has been provided to affected families from DSWD (Php 28,450,685.75), Local Government Units (LGUs) (Php 7,362,303.00), Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) & other Government Organizations (GO’s) (44,272,273.00).

The agency is closely coordinating with the LGUs for resource augmentation to the affected areas.