Matarinao is a fishing community surrounded by water on three sides, and, after your head settles from the jarring drive in, is quite beautiful. The scenes of the ocean are breathtaking and all of the flora and fauna there is quite lovely. It would seem that Matarinao would be the perfect place to live, but there are people there who would beg to differ with that sentence: the poorest of the poor who are still suffering the effects of Typhoon Haiyan, 5 years ago last November. These people have lost their homes and their livelihoods, have held their dead family members after the typhoon...or never found their bodies because they were washed away. They live in homes along the coast of the ocean, but unlike the mansions and resorts with an ocean view in the US, these people live in places one could barely call a home.
Last June, the Oikos Mission went to Matarinao with a group of missionaries from Oswego, IL. We lived there with the people for three days, and we prepared food for them, played with them, prayed with them, taught them, brought our mobile dental clinic and medical mission with us...we had a mission of about 30 people, and we loved being there! Being on the dental team, I stayed in the plaza of the town helping to give medicine out after the patients saw the dentists. But the group from Oswego went with the Oikos Sisters to visit some of the homes bringing food and household supplies with them. I heard the stories of these homes, but didn't see them in person until the other day...
So, the people who live in these "houses" have lost everything in the typhoon and they haven't recovered. They built these makeshift homes on the seaside because they don't have any land of their own, and because the typhoon also took away their livelihoods, at the present time, they have no hope of going somewhere better. The government of the Philippines has designated these areas as "no build zones" because of the obvious danger from coming storms and because of that, they will not help people fix their homes or rebuild for them if they stay there. Even the Oikos Mission is not able to help them do that, so says the government. But we can help give them food, clothing, tarps for their roofs, and flooring as you can see in some of the pictures. Imagine living on, sleeping on rocky shells!! Imagine not having privacy in your home, not having a bathroom in your home, not having a roof that keeps you dry and safe. This is where these people live.
So, how can we help? Well, the Oikos Mission is going to start teaching their livelihood programs there, FAITH and the Piglet Recycling Programs.... for more information on that, you can visit our website at http://www.poorhouseholdofgod.org. We also will visit them often, as we did a few weeks ago, and can bring with us food, clothing, tarps, and other things that can be helpful to them. The difficulty in going there and the distance from Borongan is great, too great for fare money to high school and college, so we will try to find sponsors to help send these kids to school and places for them to live while attending school. This is what we do... we bring hope...we let them know they are not forgotten...we let them know that God loves them so much and we bring His blessings to them. Seeing the happy and relieved tears of an over-burdened mother as we tell her that we have a sponsor for her oldest child and she will be able to attend high school and college, providing hope for the future for this family...makes everything worth it...even the body-jarring ride!!! xxoo
