TACLOBAN, the Philippines — Identified as orphans by local officials after Typhoon Haiyan, five siblings ages 8 to 18 were suddenly taken from an evacuation center here, prompting an immediate search by municipal officials and Unicef representatives who feared that human traffickers had abducted them.
All five have since turned up nearly 400 miles to the northwest in Manila at a Christian orphanage, having been sent there by the Philippine government agency that organizes international adoptions.
The story of how the siblings wound up there underlines the strengths and weaknesses of the way the Philippines has handled children in the weeks since the typhoon came crashing ashore on Nov. 8, killing more than 6,000 people and leaving more than four million homeless.
Often, such major disasters leave many children orphaned or separated at least temporarily from their parents. They can easily become prey for human traffickers, who may seek to force them into prostitution. Previous natural disasters have also resulted in large-scale airlifts of children to other countries for international adoption, a practice that stirred particular controversy after the Haiti earthquake nearly four years ago.
International aid groups and senior officials in the Philippines say they believe that children have generally been well protected since the typhoon, and there has been no discernible spate of trafficking. Extended families tend to be very large yet remarkably close-knit in the Philippines, and numerous aunts, uncles and cousins have stepped forward since the typhoon to look after children whose parents may be dead or missing.
In the case of the siblings in Manila, Bernadette Abejo, the executive director of the Philippine Intercountry Adoption Board, said her agency would contact their relatives in an effort to determine where they should live and did not intend to offer them for overseas adoption.
The national government began running public service messages on the radio right after the typhoon, urging caregivers to keep children close by. Schools were quickly reopened, even in heavily damaged areas, in order to keep daily track of children, said Corazon Juliano-Soliman, the country’s secretary of social welfare and development.
“We haven’t found that trafficking is a problem at all,” said Lynette Lim, a spokeswoman for Save the Children. “The family units are quite tight.”
The typhoon has still taken a heavy toll on children, who seemed to have been particularly likely to drown in the storm surge that sent waves up to 20 feet high over extensive coastal areas. Adults were more able to stay afloat in churning waters thick with fast-moving corrugated steel roofing sheets, broken boards and other debris. Many of the bodies strewed along roads after the storm were small.
While the Philippine government appears to have prevented large-scale trafficking, its methods for ensuring the safety of orphans have sometimes been confused and have not entirely followed the guidelines of international groups like Unicef. Those guidelines call for keeping children in their communities and with members of their extended families whenever feasible.
Jomar Pascual, who is 18; his 17-year-old sister; and their three younger brothers, who are 8, 13 and 15, survived the typhoon. But they lost their parents and three of their siblings, ages 3, 5 and 11. The surviving family members were profiled in an article in The New York Times on Nov. 27.
Unicef and Lili Baltazar, the director of the municipal social welfare department, identified the five children as orphans on Nov. 21, when they were living in a kindergarten room at a school that had been converted into an evacuation center.
The siblings refused to be moved to a nearby orphanage, insisting instead on staying with a second cousin, Frederick Centino, and his wife, Jornalyn Palo. The couple, who have a 3-year-old and 2-year-old of their own, had lived next door to them in the shantytowns where they spent their entire lives before the typhoon, and moved into the same kindergarten room at the evacuation center after the storm.
Various aunts and uncles of the siblings showed up from elsewhere in Tacloban and from nearby Samar Island, but the siblings refused to leave their home neighborhood. Unicef and city officials agreed to let them remain with Mr. Centino and Mrs. Palo but did not immediately begin the legal process for them to assume formal custody.
A day after Unicef and the city officials made their decision, and coincidentally hours after the siblings had been interviewed, several men and women showed up at the kindergarten room, said that they were from the national government and demanded that at least the 8-year-old, Janiño, leave with them in a van because it was not safe there for such a young child.
That led to a tearful scene. His 17-year-old sister, Jesper Anne, insisted that the children not be separated, so the team in the van took all five siblings away.
“Jesper Anne was crying and telling me, ‘Please help us; we don’t want to go with them,’ ” said Mrs. Palo, adding that she had been unable to do anything because the team said it was from the government.
Mrs. Baltazar, the municipal welfare director, was at first very alarmed, saying she had not been notified of the removal of any orphans from her city and was in constant touch with national government representatives in the area. And she had just warned social workers to beware that traffickers might pose as government officials.
“I hope my intuition is wrong, but this might be a trafficking case,” Mrs. Baltazar said as she began searching for the siblings.
Later, a bureaucratic explanation surfaced.
After evaluating the damage to a government orphanage in Palo, a city next to Tacloban, Ms. Abejo, with the Philippine Intercountry Adoption Board, obtained the approval of the Department of Social Welfare and Development to evacuate virtually all of the orphans to government-approved sites elsewhere. Hearing about Janiño, she went to Tacloban to evacuate him as well, but ended up taking all of the siblings when they refused to be separated.
Ms. Abejo said she instantly concluded when she arrived at the evacuation center that Mr. Centino, a manual laborer, and Mrs. Palo were not acceptable caregivers for the orphans because they were fairly distant relatives, had two small children of their own and had virtually no money or prospects for earning money. The couple were also about to be forced to move from the kindergarten room into a refugee tent, where they now live.
After an orphanage on an adjacent island, Cebu, said it could not take the older children, Ms. Abejo sent the siblings instead to Gentle Hands, an orphanage in Quezon City, a Manila suburb, that specializes in the most difficult cases: children who have been through severe traumas or are in large family groups.
Gentle Hands provides longer-term care, putting older orphans through high school in Manila and raising money for them to go on to a university in the Philippines as well, while keeping siblings together, said Charity Graff, the orphanage’s director. She and Ms. Abejo emphasized that Gentle Hands had not asked for the siblings, but had been asked to take them by Ms. Abejo.
Ms. Abejo said she did not foresee international adoption for the siblings, but planned to document their surviving relatives. Domestic adoption in the Philippines would be a possibility only if their extended family could not look after them, she said.
Mr. Centino and Mrs. Palo said they missed the five siblings and would like to have them back with them in Tacloban. But Mr. Pascual and his younger siblings all expressed happiness with life at the orphanage during an interview there on Thursday, and they voiced a desire to stay at Gentle Hands.
All liked the orphanage food and particularly the frequent servings of chicken, a luxury their family had been unable to afford before the typhoon, subsisting on rice, noodles and occasionally fish. All five are very short for their ages, frequently a sign of poor nutrition, with Jesper Anne fully grown but measuring only 4 feet 10 inches.
Mr. Pascual said he dropped out of school three years ago at the age of 15, began doing odd jobs and started drinking heavily and smoking cigarettes and marijuana. Since arriving at Gentle Hands, he has resumed his education at the neighborhood public high school and stopped drinking and smoking, which the orphanage strictly forbids.
“It’s better here because I can go to school and there are no vices here,” he said. “It has been a long time that I wanted to stop.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/25/world/asia/a-new-jolt-to-filipino-siblings-orphaned-by-a-typhoon.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print