ShareMANILA: Fourth-grader Ella Araza sat on a tiny plastic box in her Manila slum home, trying to finish her homework before the afternoon sun sent temperatures soaring to unbearable levels. The Philippines shut down more than 47,000 schools nationwide from Monday, as the temperature in Manila crossed a record high, clocking 38.8 degrees Celsius (101.4 degrees Fahrenheit) at the weekend. Over 7,000 were still closed on Thursday, including 10-year-old Ella’s elementary school in the capital.
Many schools in the tropical country have no air conditioning and students must sweat it out in poorly ventilated classrooms but conditions at Baseco, Manila’s infamous docklands slum, are even more desperate. “The heat makes her lazy. Sometimes she fails to do her online homework,” Ella’s mother Cindella Manabat, 29, told AFP from the slum community that houses 65,000 residents inside half a square kilometer (124 acres).
In their tiny one-room dwelling, Ella squints at her mother’s cell phone to decipher the day’s lesson, which her teacher posts online. The apartment, which has no running water, must be kept dark because Ella’s younger brother, Prince, suffers from cerebral palsy and could be hit by an epileptic seizure. Several doors down, sixth-grader Jalian Mangampo and her younger brother Sherwin lie on their shared single bed and try to finish their schoolwork on mobile phones.
The online lessons do not come cheap—the siblings have to drop five pesos (nine US cents) into a neighbor’s WiFi vending machine to gain three hours of internet access. Their widowed mother, shopkeeper Richel Mangampo, 43, took on a high-interest loan to buy them an 8,500-peso ($148) mobile phone. A stranger earlier gifted the siblings another phone. “The heat is terrible because the ceiling is so low,” the mother said, pointing to the corrugated iron roofing that she has partly covered with a scrap of plywood to keep the heat at bay. “We have to step outside from time to time just to be able to breathe.”
But she does not allow her children to stay out too long because the blazing sun is not the only danger in Baseco. “Out of nowhere youths armed with broken bottles would be going at each other after getting high sniffing glue,” she said. The state weather service has warned the extreme heat will persist for the next two weeks at least, meaning the students could be mostly stuck at home before the school year ends on May 31. Mangampo said she has her children bathe twice daily, once in the morning and a second before bedtime. “It’s so hot they have difficulty falling asleep,” Mangampo said.
Cartoon cat
As millions across Southeast Asia suffer a blistering heatwave that is melting railway tracks, a Thai village resorted to an unusual method to seek rain: parading a Japanese cartoon cat. Thailand has sweltered in recent weeks as the temperature climbs across the region, with experts saying climate change is making heatwaves more frequent, longer and more intense. In the kingdom’s central Nakhon Sawan province -- which has been without rain for months -- villagers in Phayuha Khiri District hoisted Japanese manga cat Doraemon to break the drought.
Sparkly dressed paraders bore a tinsel-decked cage containing the stuffed toy through the village while onlookers sprinkled it with water.
Theirs was a new take on an old dry season ritual known as “Hae Nang Meaw”, literally, the parading of a female cat. The well-known feline aversion to water means some link the animals to rainfall, with their furious meows after being drenched thought to summon precipitation. Most villagers no longer use real cats, lifting Doraemon or HelloKitty dolls instead. As Doraemon was paraded in Thailand’s heartland on Tuesday, in the south, the searing heat buckled railway tracks in Nakhon Si Thammarat province. Railway workers doused the rails with water to try to bend them back into shape after the mercury hit 41 degrees Celsius (105 Fahrenheit). The State Railway of Thailand said the “extreme heat” was to blame for the tracks warping between Ron Phibun and Khao Chum Thong on April 30.
“Officials brought water and ice to cool down the rails,” the statement said, with the tracks usable again after an hour-long dousing. Deputy state railway governor Jaray Rungthani said engineers would be keeping a close eye in the coming days as temperatures remained high. “All railway station managers will help passengers, and be ready to handle the heatwave situation based on the forecast,” he said.
The heat gripping much of the region -- from Bangladesh to the Philippines -- has strained energy grids and forced millions of children to stay home as schools close. While the El Nino phenomenon is helping drive this year’s exceptionally warm weather, Asia is also warming faster than the global average, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.— AFP
