“It’s terrible – simply terrible.”

“The people we’ve seen today in the town of Iligan are still wearing the clothes they were wearing when typhoon Washi surprised them last weekend. And for most of them, these clothes are all they have left.”

The inhabitants of Iligan try to salvage some of their possessions from the rubble. Photo: humedica/Peter Pilz

Peter Pilz, who is humedica coordinator in the Philippines and currently active in the disaster region on Mindanao Island, tells us about his exhausting day in Iligan, one of the worst-affected towns in the northwest of the island. In Iligan and Cagayan de Oro alone, more than 50,000 persons had to be evacuated after the devastating typhoon Washi.

The damage caused by the storms can hardly be described in words, tells the coordinator from Munich. “After the typhoon had raged on the island, it was followed by two flood waves, and everything that had not been destroyed by the storm was swept away by the massive waves that towered up to 15 metres. The river could no longer take the amount of precipitation, its flow became faster and waves started to form.” Within only a few minutes, the water masses had flooded and ruined everything, Peter Pilz reports sadly.

Due to the urgent demand, humedica will send out a doctor team even before Christmas. The team will consist of the experienced medic Prof. Dr. Heiner Laube (Gießen), nurse and paramedic Philipp Nowack (Hamburg) and coordinator Margret Müller (Berlin) and is presumably going to depart tomorrow, on Thursday.

The team will take along medications for treatment of the first 3,000 patients. The German doctors will mostly be faced with infections of the respiratory tract and the eyes, inflamed wounds and feverish colds. These illnesses do not seem to be particularly serious, but without medical treatment they can entail severe consequences. Decisions regarding the purchase of further relief goods will be taken once the team is at their mission location.

We would like to ask you to support these efforts. Homeless, without sufficient food or clean drinking water, suffering from physical complaints and with external aid being their only hope for escaping this situation, the people in the Philippines depend on our help.

Flood waves of mud and water buried everything that was close to the riverbank. Photo: humedica/Peter Pilz

Please do not only help, because it is Christmas time. But you might consider it to be an additional reason for living charity in action together with us. Thank you very much!

      humedica e. V.
      Donation reference “Flood relief Philippines”
      Account 47 47
      Bank Code 734 500 00
      Sparkasse Kaufbeuren

Please also support us by means of making a donation via our online form or by sending a text message: send a text message containing the reference DOC to +49 8 11 90. By doing so you will make a donation of 5 euros, with 4.83 euros of this amount being directly channelled into the humedica disaster relief projects.