Visit school in Buyi, Bicol

Today we went to visit a school in Buyi, on the border of Albay and Camarines Sur, which has been struck by the typhoon Reming in 2006. We were picked up at the hotel with a governmental car, this you could see because the licence plate was red. Due to that fact we could drive on the left lane, which was pretty scary.

We picked up one other person before we went to the school, she was an engineer / project planner who was in charge of the construction for the school buildings. She told us that all the schools are built according to national governments prescriptions and that is why all the schools look the same. (we observed that this is true) It seems schooling is very well organised in the Philippines. Everywhere you go there are lots of schools. One mayor problem however, is the metal sheet roofings. These cannot withstand strong winds and turn into razor sharp head cutters during typhoons. She recommended concrete slab roofing, but this was to expensive and not part of the governemental prescriptions. It is amazing to see how this material has found its way into the building industry. It is so multi-purpose, flexible and, most importantly, easy that you can find it practically anywhere. Uncoated the material only costs 50 pesos (1 US$) per meter, so a 20 m2 roof would come up to about 40 US$, quite cheap.

After a long trip, we arrived at the school and accustomed to the Philippino tradition, we received a warm welcome. After drinks and a quick talk about what we do, we went for a tour around the school.

In the first place we saw the school from the streets, and you would never expect that behind the front building is this large playfield with more buildings around it.

The head of the school showed us every building which consisted out three classrooms.

One building was totally destroyed and al the others were damaged, ceilings and whole roofs were blown away.

We saw new buildings which were realised by Unicef and the government (separatly). These seem to be well structured.

But the main problem was the lack of enough classrooms, because some buildings are not rebuild yet, there were too many children in one classroom, but on the other hand, there were not enough teachers, and maybe that’s why there were to many children in the classrooms…but still it’s a big problem.

We saw each classroom, with a warm welcome from all the children every time that we passed the classes: ‘Good afternoon principal, good afternoon visitors welcome to class 1, please have a seat’.

It was very impressive to see what happened to the buildings on old photographs. Everything was underwater, because of all the rainfall. All the water came to the lowest point, which is were the school is positioned.

The people could evacuate into the school during the typhoon, but after that you couldn’t stay there, otherwise you would sleep underwater…

After a long stay in the school and some good talks with the staff, we had to move on.

We went to a lake where the smallest fish of the world are being caught and turned into fish-crackers. They are less than a centimetre long. We haven’t tried it yet.