TACLOBAN, Philippines: Emily Sagalis gave birth on a concrete slab after battling storm surges that killed thousands, then like many new mothers in razed communities of the Philippines began another perilous struggle for survival with her baby.
About 250,000 women were pregnant in areas hit by Super Typhoon Haiyan a year ago, and in the weeks that followed babies were born on shattered roads alongside corpses, in the rubble of destroyed buildings and other places where exhausted mothers lay without adequate or any medical care.
Successful deliveries, such as for Emily, became powerful moments of hope for traumatised families struggling in the typhoon’s desperate aftermath, as well as for those involved in a massive international relief effort.
The strongest winds ever recorded and storm surges higher than two-storey buildings destroyed entire towns in already poor farming and fishing areas, killing or leaving missing more than 7,350 people.
“She is my miracle. I’d thought I would die with her still inside me, when high waves came and took us all away,” Emily, then 21, said as she lay on the concrete slab moments after giving birth to Bea Joy.
The birth took place three days after Haiyan amid the ruins of the airport in Tacloban, one of the worst-hit cities.
Emily had survived the tsunami-like storm surges, which killed her mother-in-law and wiped out her shanty home, by holding onto a fence with one hand and protecting her swollen belly from crashing debris with her other.
She then rested at an evacuation centre with hundreds of other survivors, before going into labour and frantically catching a tricycle to the airport, where the military had set up a makeshift hospital.
But for every “miracle baby”, many others died because of a lack of medical care shortly after the typhoon, and then over the next year from malnutrition, illness and other complications, according to aid groups such as Save the Children and UNICEF.
“We know mortality goes up for newborns in a typhoon affected community,” Save the Children Philippine country director Ned Olney said in an interview ahead of Saturday’s one-year anniversary of Haiyan.
There are no official figures for the number of babies who died in the year after the typhoon.
But an average of 750 babies have been born every day in the typhoon-hit communities, including during those initial weeks and months when access to medical care was at its worst, according to Olney, whose organisation played a big role in providing aid to newborns and children.
“It was common that children were being born every day on the side of the road wherever there was space, in unhygienic conditions,” Olney said.
Infections, respiratory illnesses and hypothermia are the typical killers of new-born babies in disasters such as Haiyan, according to Olney.
Even for the babies that survived, most begun their lives in bitter poverty.
Emily and her husband, Jobert, spent the first few months after the disaster living in a shanty on the same site as their previous home in San Jose, a small fishing town facing the Pacific Ocean on the outskirts of Tacloban that was almost entirely wiped out by tsunami-like waves.
AFP
