Gov’t lacks Maranao-speaking staff to lead therapy of evacuees

A highanking official of the Department of Social Welfare and Development said language barrier could be a problem of the department once they start conducting psychosocial intervention among hundreds of thousands of evacuees.

In an interview, DSWD Undersecretary Luz Ilagan said they see a shortage of Maranao-speaking social workers and the agency is already planning to tap social workers from other regions in Mindanao to serve internally displaced persons.

“While we have the experts basin ang language ang barrier so ang social worker nimo kailangan kabalo og Maranao,” Ilagan said, adding that they will get more social workers from other towns in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, Iligan City, and Cagayan de Oro City.

Drieza Lininding, a Maranao evacuee and head of civil society organization, Moro Consensus Group, said the problem of language barrier is possible in reaching out to children who are used to speaking their mother tongue.

“I think speaking to adults will not be a problem, but to children, it could be,” he said. Maranao adults, Lininding said, can speak and understand Tagalog and Bisayan.

Ilagan said aside from more personnel, the DSWD has also requested to set aside a building or shelter where the agency may conduct their psychosocial intervention activities.

“It’s not only the area that has been damaged. It’s the person. The inhabitant has been damaged so how do you put that person together again so that he or she can recover,” she said.

Aside from the challenge on the language barrier, Ilagan said they are also cleansing the lists of evacuees both home-based and those in evacuation centers.

“Right now we are creating a masterlist of (evacuees). The list is being reconciled with the list of other agencies,” she said. Initially, the DSWD has listed around 77,000 evacuees.  (davaotoday.com)