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“During our meetings, he told us of his experience in Carbon during his younger years as an activist. He would sleep at Carbon,” a vendor said in Cebuano. “His enthusiasm in helping us was clear to us because he was always early and the first to arrive during our meetings.”
A year on, community- and women-led efforts that responded to the Filipino poor’s needs continued to face harassment.
Mimi Doringo of Kadamay said these community kitchens were a testament to the poor pandemic response of the government. They also coupled it with calls for better response as seen in Sitio San Roque.
While waiting for the government’s stingy and slow aid, they have to activate their survival mode by pooling their resources to help each other. All these, the people have to do amid militaristic community quarantines. And as they say when it rains it pours, calamities from typhoons, earthquakes, farm infestation, among others, did not stop afflicting communities.
Described by the health department as “the first batch of fund transfers,” the P311.79-million ($6.2 million) SRA funds is a measly 2.6 percent of the unused P11.9-billion ($238.2 million) allocated for health workers’ Special Risk Allowance and Hazard Pay, which the Commission on Audit recently flagged.
A group of human rights lawyers in the Philippines said that the “overwhelming support” that the International Criminal Court received from approximately 1,530 individual victims and 1,050 families who fell victims of the government’s “war on drugs” may lead to a formal investigation.
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