Philippine Chapel Becomes a Medical Center

Updated Nov. 12, 2013 3:52 p.m. ETTACLOBAN, Philippines—In the second-floor chapel of this city’s only functioning hospital, Gelly Abucejo sat before the altar in a teal dress, her stomach still rounded from her recent pregnancy. On the pew beside her was a white plastic-wrapped bundle.
“My first child,” said Ms. Abucejo, 20 years old, gesturing limply with her chin to the slim package she said contained the baby.
It was Sunday when Ms. Abucejo gave birth—one of more than 70 the hospital has seen since supertyphoon Haiyan made landfall in the Philippines, leaving a swath of destruction behind it.
But on Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., her daughter died from severe perinatal asphyxia. Nurses said she needed a suction device to keep her breathing, but the lack of electricity made that impossible.

The chapel of the Eastern Visayas Medical Center in Tacloban, Philippines. Te-Ping Chen/The Wall Street Journal

It was another loss in a city that for five days has been teetering between survival and desolation. In the streets outside, dead bodies still await collection even as the first major relief efforts bring food and water into the city.

Thousands of homes were felled like matchsticks and the families of the missing still patrol in an increasingly desperate search for loved ones. The official death toll from the disaster reached 1,798 on Tuesday, though authorities say they believe the number will rise significantly.

Before and After Typhoon Haiyan

Left: Digital Globe/Google; Right: Digital Globe/Getty Images

Philippine President Benigno Aquino III told CNN on Tuesday that the nationwide toll was closer to 2,000 or 2,500 lives, not the 10,000 local authorities estimated.
The U.S. Marines and Philippine Air Force flew in supplies of clean drinking water and food in C-130 transport planes while private relief teams hand-carried essential medicines to replenish sorely depleted supplies.
The United Nations, meanwhile, launched an appeal for around $300 million to carry out a plan to revive the areas devastated by the storm within six months, particularly the hardest-hit islands of Samar and Leyte—of which Tacloban is the capital—in the central Philippines.
The battered Eastern Visayas Regional Medical Center, in a low-slung green building on a quiet street littered with debris, shows the storm’s scars. Its floors are sluiced with mud and supplies are running low. Yet it is now the only operating hospital for this city of more than 200,000 people, and faces failing power and burnt-out staff.
Only about 70 hospital workers have been showing up for work out of a total of some 300, officials said. The others can’t reach work, are dealing with family emergencies or other trauma, or are missing.
With electricity knocked out across the city, the hospital has been running on a single generator brought in after the typhoon from Samar province, three hours’ drive away. The hospital’s own two power generators were sitting downstairs when the storm surge flooded in and have been clogged with mud and rendered unusable since.
Patients and staff rushed to the chapel on the hospital’s second floor in the darkest moments of the storm on Friday, huddling beneath a statue of Jesus’ crucifixion on the second floor. Since then, the chapel has taken on a new role as a maternity ward as staff grapple with a lack of space for all their patients.
The wooden pews are full of shrieking babies and nursing mothers. Both ends of the room are lined with intravenous drips. Before the altar sits a row of oxygen tanks and bassinets in which 16 babies, many premature, are sleeping or drowsily waving their arms.
“We have no other place that’s available at the moment, and of course it’s a place where people can find comfort” in this heavily Catholic country, said Faith Alianze, 31, a doctor, as she stood outside the chapel in a nearby hallway, watching candles flicker.
Alberto De Leon, who has headed the hospital for seven years, acknowledged the problems in the hospital were partly its own fault: No one believed a typhoon, a common event in the Philippines, would be so dramatically stronger—and so much more devastating—than usual.
“We were complacent,” he said in an interview. “We heard on the news the waves could rise as high as nine meters, but I thought it could not happen, we did not think the typhoon would be that big.”
Mr. De Leon was at home when the waves began to rise just before dawn on Friday, lying in bed in his one-story bungalow adjacent to the hospital building.
He was pushed up in the water alongside other objects in his home as the rooms quickly flooded. He floated up to his refrigerator and gripped it for ballast, hanging there suspended and waiting for the waters to retreat.

Typhoon Hits Philippines

Survivors walked under a fallen electric post Sunday. Reuters

At the hospital’s central building, as the winds started to hammer the walls, university student Jeremy Dagano, 22, stood by his mother’s side and watched as metal sheets began to fly outside. He had accompanied his mother that week from his home in neighboring Samar province after she experienced abdominal pain. She was admitted with a case of acute pancreatitis.
He stayed by her side for days, hospital staff said, leaving only to collect medication. When the storm hit in the dim morning light on Friday, hospital staff hustled the ward of more than 50 patients, including his mother, downstairs to the first floor.
They thought that the downstairs level would provide better protection against the fierce winds, as the sound of breaking glass reverberated around them. “I didn’t panic. I was thinking of my mother,” said Mr. Dagano, whose mother survived.
But as staff peered outside and saw the waves rising fast, they realized danger was approaching from the sea more than the sky. Rushing, they sent people back upstairs again, this time to the safety of the chapel.
Staff carried patients in their arms and whisked wailing newborns upstairs, in some cases three to a bassinet to save time. Once inside, the patients and nurses crouched in the pews and around the altar, some crying, some shuddering in fear. Nurses lit candles as they waited for the storm to pass.
“I went to the tabernacle and prayed there hard,” said Ma Donna Pelicano, 32, a doctor who has been working almost around-the-clock since the typhoon struck. “I can’t ask for help from anyone, only from Him. He’s the only one who controls everything.”
It was three hours until the waves and winds subsided and patients were able to return to other parts of the hospital. Mr. De Leon, the hospital chief, climbed out of the glass shards of his window at home and rejoined his staff.
Over the next few days, staff treated storm victims suffering from lacerations and other wounds. They also handled 15 bodies that arrived for placement in a morgue at the back of the hospital.
But the deprivation remains acute. With the lack of power, tools such as the hospital’s anesthesia machine aren’t functioning. Nurses said antibiotics for new mothers were running out, with just two days of supplies left. There are only enough sanitary materials to perform three more operations.
On Tuesday, the staff was heartened by the sight of 55 volunteer medical personnel who arrived from Manila. More supplies are supposed to be en route, Mr. De Leon said.
Yet as evening fell Tuesday around 5 p.m., the hospital’s corridors grew dark. New patients were admitted by the light of candles and flashlights. By late Tuesday night, the chapel was quiet except for the sound of dripping water outside and the occasional crying of a child. The candles cast shadows over a statue of the Virgin Mary above a huddle of sleeping women.
If more help doesn’t arrive soon, said Mr. De Leon, “we will operate in darkness, or light some more candles.”
—James Hookwaycontributed to this article.
Write to Te-Ping Chen at te-ping.chen@wsj.com

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