President Benigno Aquino 3rd wants more volunteers to help in the packing and delivering of relief goods to areas devastated by Super Typhoon Yolanda.
On Thursday night, Aquino visited the relief centers at the Villamor Airbase in Pasay City and the Army headquarters in Taguig City.
In his short message, the President appealed to the volunteers to devote more time and services to the relief operations.
He said there are 275,000 affected families and the food packs are only good for two days.
”So we are trying to produce 140,000 food packs per day,” Aquino told volunteers.
He said most of the stricken families remain isolated since power and communications have yet to be restored in many places.
”There is no easy solution. For power, over a hundred transmission towers went down. Some lines connecting Luzon and Visayas were also destroyed. Our geothermal plant in Leyte, that was also affected,” he added.
Given the scale of the disaster, it was crucial for volunteers to redouble their effort to reach a goal, the President said.
”The longer the time aid fails to reach them, the more desperate they get and that is what we want to avoid,” he said.
”So I won’t hold back. If you can, convince others to help out here so we can quicken the pace of transferring food, water, tents, and other supplies badly needed by our countrymen who have really gone through great suffering,” he said.
The President thanked volunteers, who are mostly students, for doing their share in helping typhoon victims.
The volunteers are helping the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) speed up the repacking of the food packs.
”We have to make people feel they are not abandoned, so the tension will go down and they will not turn desperate,” he said.
The DSWD aims to turn out 2.04 million family food packs within two weeks starting Thursday. Each pack can feed one family for three days.
To achieve its goal, the DSWD has set up additional repacking stations around Metro Manila in addition to the DSWD-National Resource Operations Center.
Regional repacking centers in Regions 5, 6, 10, and Caraga remain open.