The Logistics hub in Cebu

It is every time impressive to see a logistics hub of a humanitarian organization in action. Yesterday, almost 100 tons of emergency supplies arrived here in Cebu – I think first of all this deserves a big thank you to KLM, who provided a jumbo for this flight. But here in the warehouse, all the health kits, early childhood development kits or peanut paste packs against malnutrition don’t help, therefore our people do all they can to bring the supplies on the road to the affected regions. Our Filipino colleague Jaya is impressed: “These guys really work hard, from early morning until late at night, until everything is un- and re-loaded and on its way to the children…”

Boxes and palettes are being piled up, packed, wrapped, rolled – today alone, five trucks were loaded with 16 so-called „health kits“ on board. These kits contain everything a destroyed health post or clinic desperately needs: medicines, first aid and dressing material, antibiotics, all the way to midwifery equipment. One such kit, assembled and packed based on long-standing experience, is sufficient to equip a health station for 10,000 beneficiaries for two months. This means that the five trucks today will help 160,000 people. Impressive. 

The same afternoon the trucks start rolling, embarking on their 18-hour journey to the children in different affected towns and villages across Panay Island. And still this appears only a drop in the ocean when considering the sheer scale of the destruction across the islands. In the hotel lobby, two people address me because of my UNICEF shirt: “We just came from Tacloban. It looks like a bomb hit that town. In some areas there’s literally nothing left, only some toilets built with concrete foundations are still sticking out of the nothing. Some people are still desperately waiting for help. Thank god you guys are there, but these people still need much, much more help.” That’s when you feel comparably powerless with one plane and five trucks full of aid.

It is the UNICEF colleagues who already worked in several different emergencies who spread optimism: “If you need five trucks here, you can probably get five trucks tomorrow. In the Congo that may take two weeks. In Haiti, there were times when we had none at all. Moreover, here the airport is working, we have accommodation and food and internet and electricity – no comparison to Haiti, where the whole capital and with it the whole administration and infrastructure of the country got destroyed.”

In Tacloban however, and everyone comes back with the same eyewitness report, things are looking significantly differently: “I have worked in many disaster zones. But I have never seen before a whole city literally wiped out like that. That is ripping into your heart.”