Southerners help 'Odette' victims in Negros provinces

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Soldiers in central Mindanao are facilitating for five days now the continuing shipment of relief supplies from local benefactors for residents of the typhoon-stricken Negros provinces.

Among those who donated food and other provisions for displaced communities in the adjoining Negros Oriental and in Negros Occidental provinces in the Visayas are families of soldiers belonging to units of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division.

“We also ought to thank the local government units in our area of responsibility for providing relief supplies to augment what we got from `helping hands’ reaching out via the 6th ID,” Major Gen. Juvymax Uy, division commander, said Saturday.

The division had initially dispatched to the Negros provinces 3,439 food packs, water containers, hygiene kits and medicines for common ailments.

Uy said their 6th Civil Military Operations Battalion under Lt. Col. John Paul Baldomar is leading their relief works for victims of Typhoon Odette in areas outside of Mindanao.

He said the regional government of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, whose capitol is located in this city, also supplied the 6th ID with provisions for typhoon victims in the Negros provinces.

The initial shipment of relief goods for the two areas arrived there Friday, military officials in both provinces told reporters in central Mindanao Saturday.

The 6th ID covers the provinces of Maguindanao, Sultan Kudarat, Sarangani, South Cotabato,  a number of towns in Lanao del Sur and in North Cotabato, the cities of General Santos, Koronadal, Tacurong and Cotabato, where there are settler communities that originated from the Negros provinces.