Hagupit (Ruby) Tracking a Little Further North and Weakening But Still Dangerous

Please note: this is not an official forecast. Please use official forecasts for any decision making in regard to Hagupit.

Somewhat good news for Tacloban. The storm center is expected to cross the Philippines north of the city so devastated by Haiyan (Yolanda), last year. This will mean that the worst winds should be coming from the northwest which makes a major storm surge is unlikely in that area. 

Storm surges of up to 13 feet (4 meters) are expected north of the storm center. Central winds have weakened since Wednesday night and the storm has been down-graded one category. There will still be damage from winds but nothing like what Wednesday's 180 mph sustained winds could produce.

The forecast course for Hagupit is for it to pass very close to Manila, the capitol. By then the mountains should have taken some more steam out of the storm, and I can't see how a significant storm surge can develop there unless the centre stalls just west of the city.

Hagupit is expected to hit the islands Saturday evening Manila time - Saturday morning EST. It will move painfully slowly across the islands depositing as much as 2 feet of rain. 

One would expect many mudslides and, unfortunately, many lives lost. It is not uncommon for such typhoons to be responsible for taking more than 1000 lives.

Rainfall amount forecast - good grief!

Again, as yesterday, I ask you Christians to be in prayer for the people of the Philippines, especially the children, that they would not only survive the storm, but that they would be safe from predatory pedophiles after the storm.

Friday night satellite picture - pretty ugly

Post Haiyan evacuation

Some of the damage done by Haiyan last year

Super Typhoon Hagupit Strengthens as it Nears Philippines

Oh no! Not Tacloban again!

Typhoon Hagupit has strengthened into a super storm over the Pacific as it approaches the Philippines.

Hagupit, or "Ruby" in the Philippines, has gusts of up to 250km/h (155mph) and is forecast to reach land on Saturday.

It is on course for the Eastern Samar province and the city of Tacloban, where thousands were killed by Typhoon Haiyan a year ago. 

Tens of thousands of people, many of whom still live in temporary shelters, are moving away from coastal areas.

Typhoon Hagupit (4 Dec 2014)
The typhoon is not as powerful as Haiyan but still presents a threat to life

Officials have warned the storm will bring heavy rain, storm surges and the risk of landslides.

Schools and government offices are closed and there were long queues at shops and petrol stations as people stocked up on supplies.

People wait for evacuation from San Jose village in Leyte, Philippines
Many people are still living in temporary accommodation after Typhoon Haiyan

Hagupit is not expected to be a powerful as Haiyan, but could bring storm surges up to one storey high.

Residents at shops in Tacloban, Philippines (3 Dec 2014)
Local people have been stocking up on supplies ahead of the storm's arrival

The Philippine weather authorities said that as of 04:00 local time (20:00 GMT Thursday) the storm was 500km (300 miles) east of Eastern Samar and moving at a speed of 13km/h. It has sustained winds of 215km/h and gusts of up to 250 km/h.

Meteorologists had said there was a chance Hagupit could veer north towards Japan and miss the Philippines altogether, but there is a growing consensus that this scenario is now unlikely.

The Philippines gives its own names to typhoons once they move into Philippine waters, rather than using the international storm -naming system.

Haiyan, known in the Philippines as Yolanda, was the most powerful typhoon ever recorded over land.

It tore though the central Philippines in November 2013, leaving more than 7,000 dead or missing.

This is my concern and why I posted this on my Child Abuse blog. After a natural disaster, children become very vulnerable to kidnapping. They can be snatched away by pedophiles who can do what they want with them, even kill them, and nobody would ever know.

Please pray for the children of the Philippines.

Philippines - Trafficking in Innocence after the Storm

Social worker Marlyn received a message that a 14-year-old girl named “Princess” had been trafficked and sold to a sex bar here in the Philippines. Marlyn alerted me and we began planning to rescue the child, just one of thousands of children trafficked for sexual abuse each year in this country and many more around the world. It is a problem of global reach. 

Fr Shay Cullen - Preda

 The recent agreement signed by the heads and representatives of the major religions to fight it is a positive encouragement. It’s now almost six months since the the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) and many more children will fall victim to sexual predators as the poverty grows and young people and parents become desperate to get jobs and money. It’s all too common.

Marlyn, who herself was rescued from sex-trade traffickers, works with me in the Preda Foundation organization I founded 40 years ago. Preda actively responds to and rescues victims, and then helps them get an education and start new lives of dignity.

Preda is one of many NGOs doing great work in rescuing trafficked children and reintegrating them into society. Please consider supporting them or other NGO's like them such as IJM, either financially or with your prayers.

This time, we organized a police raid on the sex bar, called the Crowbar, and rescued Princess and five other underage girls who had been entrapped there through debts and fear of retaliation against their families.

The operator of the sex bar, a US national, was arrested, and during his arraignment, Princess whispered to her social worker: “I never thought this could happen; he’s rich and connected. I can’t believe we got out.”

Princess was rescued and was helped at the Preda Home for Children. Over the years we have rescued thousands of children and youths from the scourge of “sex tourism,” even as the sex industry continues to spread and grow with impunity.

This has all been exacerbated by the recent natural disasters in the Philippines. Another Typhoon is lashing Southern Mindanao as I write. But Yolanda last November 2013 it was the worst ever. I have been through ferocious typhoons during my 44 years in this Southeast Asian nation, but have never seen anything like the sheer savagery of Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Typhoon Yolanda. 

After this super storm, bringing winds of up to 150 miles an hour, torrential rain, flooding and landslides, hit the Philippines I flew to visit the northern towns on Cebu Island to assess the damage. Two Preda staff members were with me. Our goals were to deliver aid directly to the people who most needed it and, equally important, to protect orphaned children from would-be abductors and traffickers posing as relatives.

Now months later much has been done to get electricity back and people fed, but hundreds of thousands of houses have yet to be repaired–and jobs created.

Horrible as the prospect of such exploitation is, it has been a cruel reality in times of natural disasters, and Haiyan was the most devastating typhoon known to humankind: as many as 6,500 or more were killed, countless injured and made homeless. And the orphaned children remain the most vulnerable. Their towns and villages and homes are gone and their parents are dead. They face the threat of hunger, malnutrition, abduction and forced degradation in the sex trade and as slave labor.

Orphaned, vulnerable children

These children need our attention and direct intervention to rescue them from child traffickers and pedophiles. Preda social workers have been giving training to workers to help find the children and give them help. Under the pretext of saving the children, traffickers abduct them and may sell them as “brides” to pedophiles, or earn hundreds of thousands of dollars supplying these children for illegal adoption, organ transplants, sexual abuse and exploitation in brothels and for forced labor as movie stars in porno films.

Poverty often makes exploitation easy. Reggie is a clear example. The 17-year-old jobless youth and his family lived on the edge of severe poverty even before Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan pushed them into absolute poverty and left them with nothing. In the midst of the chaos and destruction, human traffickers forced him and six other youth from Cebu into unpaid labor on a fishing boat, only to abandon them hungry and unpaid. 

Then, Reggie’s freedom and human rights were taken from him when local authorities jailed him for being a vagrant. He was recently rescued from illegal imprisonment and is recovering and rebuilding his life back in his home village. We can all continue to do more and to help the people in greatest need.

Though the work goes on, it never gets any easier to stomach.

shaycullen @preda.org
www.preda.org

The Survival of Erica through Typhoon Haiyan

This column is from Fr Shay Cullen of the Preda Foundation as printed in the Manila Times about a little girl's Haiyan nightmare.

Tacloban,  Leyte, The Philippines

I arrived here with the Preda team of social workers to prepare the way for a series of training seminars to combat human trafficking and give the many survivors in the squalid evacuation camps group therapy to cope better with the tragedy and great loss they have suffered because of typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda). For the children we have puppet shows that teach abuse prevention.  But I went first to find the missing orphans Here is the story of one of them.

We found Erica in a white canvas tent with her auntie and uncle about three hundred meters from where her parents’ house once stood. She was willing to tell us of  her tragic experience. The home Erica was half a kilometer from the shore line. On the night of November 7,  she,  her parents and two brothers slept  together in her parents’ small room as the rain was lashing down and the wind was rising. They woke after an hour.

“This is going to be a strong storm, everyone stay close tonight," her father told them. By 2 am the howling wind was tearing at the coconut trees and they could hear coconuts crashing into metal sheet roofs across their village. The family of five huddled together and embraced each other. It was to be their last embrace.

By 5 am on the November 8 a great wave of water about twenty to thirty feet high reared up from the ocean and driven by a 230 kilometer wind rushed inland across the open land towards the village. It knocked down everything before it. It was unstoppable,  mango trees toppled before this wall of water as if a dam had suddenly collapsed.

The great wave of water suddenly burst into their little bungalow house, smashing through the windows, collapsing the door and the water gushed in and quickly filled the house.  They cried out for help and were trying to swim to stay above the water. Erica’s father shouted to them to cling and climb into  the ceiling. But it was too late. The water engulfed them so quickly there was no escape.

Then the  roof was torn off like a scrap of paper ripped from a notebook and disappeared in an instant into the dark sky.  They were trying to swim and float on the rising water and a tree came rushing by and was held momentarily by the remaining wall of their little house.

“Grab the branches,  hold the branch,” her father shouted above the deafening noise of the wind. Her father and mother and two brothers caught the branches but Erica could not reach them she was clinging to the remains of the rafters. The water was up her neck. Her mother saw they were being separated and cried out in the storm: “Erica, we love you, we care for you,  survive , survive!"

Then they were swept away and Erica was also carried off with the surging waters. They disappeared into the darkness and that was the last Erica ever saw of them. She was carried on the wave and bumped into a coconut tree and she grabbed it and wrapped her arms around it and clung on for dear life.

After a long while the powerful wave began to lose its power and strength and receded. “I prayed to God to save me, save my family, to please to let me live,” she said.  She clung on  the  tree until the waters fully retreated. Exhausted and trembling, in shock she fell to the ground and Erica survived. Her parents and two brothers were lost.

Two months later she still has nightmares. “I cannot sleep so well I have bad dreams that I am drowning.  I miss my family,” tears welled in her eyes and she grew silent.

Then after a while we all walked slowly through the widespread destruction and ruins of the  entire village to where her little house once stood. It was just a heap of rubble,  half of a block wall remained.  There was a broken mirror, a hairbrush, a crumbled photo in the ruins.  Outside was a little white passenger van, its front window and roof crushed by a fallen tree. Her father once drove it for a livelihood.  The  landscape all around was one of utter destruction. Not a house was left standing.

Bodies of the dead were strewn around the day after the  great wave, some covered by debris, it took a week to uncover them  for burial.  Over two hundred people died in that village and more are missing, their bodies were never found. Perhaps they were carried out with the receding waters of the great wave.

As I looked around this scene of devastation there were fallen trees everywhere and the remaining coconut trees stripped of their palms stood starkly silhouetted against a gray wet sky.

Back in the tent that is now her home Erica said that she is thankful to be alive and she had relatives who are caring for her.

“I miss seeing my parents and brothers. I don’t know where they are,  but wherever they are, I pray for them to God, they are in God’s hands now.”

Asked about her future, she replies: “I have a hope to study and become a teacher, thank you for listening to my story.”  She seemed a little happier than when we first arrived.  Erica and other homeless children of Tacloban are being helped by the Preda Foundation, P. O. Box 68 Olongapo city.
shaycullen@preda. org,

UK Charity Expands Philippine Anti-trafficking Work

Manila, The Philippines: A UK-based children’s charity said on Friday it will expand an anti-human trafficking project in the Philippines, as fears grow that young survivors of Super Typhoon Haiyan are becoming easy prey.

I predicted this in November: http://northwoodssaveachild.blogspot.ca/2013/11/save-filipino-children-from-further.html

Haiyan left nearly 8,000 people dead or missing in one of the worst natural disasters to hit the Philippines, flattening entire towns and displacing more than four million people.

“Experiences from similar disasters show that the potential for human trafficking, particularly of women and children, increases after a humanitarian crisis such as Typhoon Haiyan,” Plan International country director Carin van der Hor said in a statement.

The charity is therefore extending its project, first launched in 2005, for another two years, with a focus on the disaster zone.

Under the plan it will work with the government to raise awareness in communities affected by Haiyan to help residents understand the risks of trafficking within and outside the Philippines, van der Hor said.

Plan will also help the government boost monitoring efforts at airports and seaports where trafficked women and children may be removed from the country or sent to large cities.

Nearly a week ago, the charity raised concerns about the recruitment of suspected child workers from the central island of Samar, one of the areas worst-hit by the typhoon.

It said five high school girls were sent to work in Angeles, a northern Philippine city that has a large red light district, following the disaster.

The Philippine government has said it is investigating the recruitment of the girls.

Samar, the country’s third-largest island, is an impoverished, largely rural region wracked by a communist insurgency that has traditionally supplied young men and women to work as maids and construction workers to more economically vibrant parts of the country.

A 2013 US State Department report on global human trafficking described the Philippines as “a source country, and to a much lesser extent, a destination and transit country for men, women and children subjected to sex trafficking and forced labour”.

On Thursday, British, Australian and Philippines police said they had dismantled a paedophile ring that streamed live sexual abuse of Filipino children as young as six over the Internet, with victims’ parents involved in some cases.

See the post immediately below.

Van der Hor said Plan has worked with the social welfare ministry in the Philippines since 2005 to prevent trafficking and protect as well as rehabilitate survivors.

Lord, thank you for Plan International and other NGOs working in the Philippines to rescue children and to prevent their being trafficked. Bless them, Lord, with all the resources they need in both personnel and financial areas. Guide them in their work. Bless Your Holy Name, Jesus.

A Maddening Story of Hypocrisy in the Catholic Church

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Filipino Orphans in Danger of Kidnapping, Abduction and Being Sold into Sexual Slavery

Fr Shay Cullen, Preda Ministries, Manila, reports in the Manila Times that there is a great danger that orphaned children or children separated from their parents could well be kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. In the Philippines, Typhoon Haiyan is called Yolanda.

Fr. Shay Cullen

Besides the thousands that have been killed, injured, and made homeless by the most devastating typhoon known to humankind, the orphaned children are the most vulnerable. 

Their towns and villages and homes are no more and their parents are dead. They are threatened by malnutrition, kidnapping, and abduction.

Horrible as this prospect is, it has been a deadly reality in times of natural disasters.

These children need our special attention and direct intervention to save them from child traffickers and pedophiles. 

Under the pretext of saving the children, traffickers can abduct them and sell them as “brides” to pedophiles or earn hundreds of thousands of pounds or euros by providing these children for illegal adoption and even worse, sexual abuse and exploitation.

Let us join in prayer that God would protect these poor children with natural and supernatural protection against those who mean them harm.

The Philippine Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has called for urgent vigilance by aid workers to this form of child trafficking in the areas devastated by the most powerful typhoon in history to hit land. Called Haiyan or by its local name “Yolanda,” it has devastated and flattened entire towns, villages, and killed scores of people in the central Philippines. Their children will be known as the lost children of Yolanda.