reAl chOices, reAl lives Over the past seven years Plan’s ‘Real Choices, Real Lives’ cohort study has followed 142 girls, born in 2006, who live in nine developing countries around the world. Earlier this year, we ran a series of focus group discussions with teenage girls from the same communities as the cohort study participants in the Philippines, El Salvador and Vietnam. Plan’s researchers in each of the three countries also conducted in-depth interviews with the girls. The insight they provided reinforces the views and research outlined elsewhere in this year’s report. It also underlines the importance of girls’ participation in disaster risk management and in formatting strategies to encourage resilience and reduce risk.
The psychosocial impact of disasters on adolescent girls – ‘It seemed too much for us to bear’ Often the psychological stress caused by a disaster can be overlooked in the urgency to respond to immediate, physical needs. Almost all of the girls we spoke to in all three countries (Vietnam, the Philippines and El Salvador) talked about a change in their behaviour as well as that of those around them
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surveying the damage in el salvador.
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following a disaster and about the impact this had on their lives. Linda, 16, in El Salvador talked about the lasting effect the flood had on her and her family: “Well, i still feel like crying when i remember what happened. There are a lot of things we need at home, and i haven’t been able to get help from anyone. i don’t have running water, i don’t have electricity, i’m not safe at home, it’s not the same if you don’t have lights.” She told us her parents are elderly and in poor health and as such she and her sister are committed to working to provide money for their family. “my sister is 23 years old, and she works too; we’ve always been very responsible for our family… i had already left school when all this [the floods] happened.” It can be much harder for female-headed households to seek the support they need as many aspects of disaster relief are organised without taking into account the needs of different sections of the population – young and old, girls and boys, men and women – and areas such as food relief or temporary camp coordination are led by men. 35 When recalling the events following a previous typhoon, Monica, 14, from the Philippines, told us that as her father was “not around” it was just herself, her siblings and her mother. She paints a bleak picture of their struggle to ensure they had a safe place to sleep and food to eat: “during the first typhoon no one helped us or donated anything… We asked for favours to sleep in just about anyone’s house.” She told us how they survived on “canned sardines and rice… i don’t know for how many days, but they did not give food continually. many bananas fell, so we got the fruit and cooked them… After the typhoon we didn’t get to eat rice, we ate bananas all the time.” Monica told us it took her a long time to recover, and she was “scared and worried… because i felt pity for my mother”. The extreme stress brought on by lack of housing and food following the typhoon led Monica to worry: “i thought then that we would die… Because of too much cold; it seemed too much for us to bear.” Duyen, a 14-year-old from Vietnam, told us about the impact of drought upon her daily life, including her education: “i felt tired, unpleasant and distracted and my study results are also worse.” Likewise, even if girls themselves were not directly affected, there were still emotional consequences of disasters, as Ofelia from El Salvador says: “Emotionally i felt sad to see so many people