Ways to help
Four days after Typhoon Haiyan struck the eastern Philippines, assistance is only just beginning to arrive. Authorities estimated the storm killed 10,000 or more across a vast swath of the country, and displaced around 660,000 others.
• UNICEF is a worldwide aid organization shipping food and medicine to help children affected by Typhoon Haiyan.
Donate at unicef.org, or if you have a Verizon phone text RELIEF to 864233.
• Red Cross helped to evacuate hundreds of thousands before the storm hit and continues to provide shelter and food to those in need.
Donate at redcross.org
• World Food Programme is a frontline United Nations organization shipping food to the Philippines.
Donate at wfp.org
• Chi Alpha, a Ball State Christian Fellowship group, spent time in the Philippines about a month ago.
• Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines and devastated cities, possibly killing thousands last weekend.
• Most of the contact the group has had with their friends overseas has been via Facebook.
Recent headlines have caused a Ball State Christian Fellowship group to worry about the safety of its friends after it spent time in the Philippines over the summer.
Last weekend Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines and devastated entire cities, possibly killing thousands and leaving others in need of aid.
Chi Alpha, a Christian Fellowship group, spent time in the Philippines from July 19 to Aug. 2 to help university students across Manila discover their faith.
“One student I connected with the best was a guy named Emmanuel. We were able to connect him with some other Filipino believers,” said Daniel Kaelin, a Chi Alpha faculty member. “When the storm hit, they were mainly in a different area of the country, so all of our friends were all .”
Most of the contact the group has had with their friends overseas has been via Facebook.
“A lot of people are wondering how could this happen and even struggling faith, like the big question a lot of people have, ‘If God is good, why do bad things happen to good people?’” Kaelin said. “We’ve seen a lot of people on Facebook talking about that back and forth and a lot of them saying, ‘Hey we need to go over there and help.’”
Mercy Karanja, a Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship faculty member, said the news of the tragedy was heartbreaking because of the connection she had made with some of the people in that country.
“It’s really affecting the way I pray for them and pray for their country,” Karanja said. “It makes me want to go back and help, even though I know right now going back would not really help.”
Most of the places Chi Alpha had visited in Manila were not affected by the storm, said Josh Boman, director of Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship, but some of the places were similar to the ones that saw destruction.
“One day we got outside of the city and we saw the countryside and the way the houses were put together; a lot of people were living in shacks and to think of hundreds of mile an hour winds coming through and knocking those over,” Boman said. “I didn’t actually see the places that were hit the hardest, but I think we saw a good representation of what those places were like and you could just understand how thousands of people could have easily lost their lives.”
When he found out about Typhoon Haiyan, Boman remembered a party the group had at the end of the trip.
“We were able to rent out the penthouse and skyscraper in Manila, it was only about 20 stories up, but our party got rained out because a typhoon came in,” Boman said. “It was a small one compared to the one that just hit them, but to just see rain dumped across a city and you have this view and there is just water everywhere.”
While Boman found the news worrisome, he was not surprised because multiple, destructive typhoons have hit the country in the past.
“It was a bad case of déjà vu when I saw the recent stories with cities being knocked over, flooded and lives lost,” Boman said. “It’s just tragic it keeps happening over and over.”
Questions filled Boman’s mind after hearing of the typhoon.
“I wanted to check if it was hitting any of the people I knew, is it hitting Manila?” he said. “[I was thinking] don’t let this be like one of those tsunamis that wiped out so many people. Even though it was tragic, I was, in part, relieved it wasn’t a lot worse.”
At the moment, Chi Alpha has no plans to send official aid to the Philippines.
The thing that struck Boman the most about the Filipino reaction was not the expected posts about asking prayers, but how some people were casual and posting YouTube videos and complaints about homework.
Rebecca Ludwig, student president of Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship, said the stark difference between before and after was that the buildings made out of what people could scrap to get together were gone and the traditionally built buildings were all that was left.
“I saw some floating bodies mixed in with debris [on a video] and trash, and you couldn’t really see the body because it just blended in,” she said. “But the fact it was a body that was floating there and that could have been someone that we knew was probably the most striking. Once I started see the bodies, I couldn’t really watch anymore because it just broke my heart.”
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