COPING WITH ONDOY: Strategies of Urban Poor Women who are Head of Households

Abstract

The goal of this study is to describe how women coped with the effects of typhoon and the problems they have encountered. It will specifically focus on women who were head of households and part of the urban poor. The objectives of the study are to determine whether or how gender, role as head of household and socioeconomic status influenced their coping strategies. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the coping strategies employed by women was also considered. The nature of this study' s research design is mainly descriptive but the researcher used both qualitative and quantitative methods in gathering data. Survey questionnaires were used for the quantitative method and focused group discussion was employed for qualitative. Since there was no official list on the number of female head of household, the researcher gathered all possible respondents through referrals from different chairpersons of the two barangays. A total of 47 respondents were gathered, 35 came from Nangka and 12 from Tumana, Marikina. For the Focused group discussion, eight participants were pooled from the 47 survey respondents. Findings showed that there were four main themes that determined and influenced the coping strategies of women. These were faith, family, finances, and self. Faith gave women a will to meaning, that there is reason for their suffering and their sense of family within the community enabled them to do acts of pakikiramay and pakikiramdam and be more willing to help other victims. Finance is another. With little financial support, women were constrained from coping better with the situation. Since they generally relied unto themselves, self was also another theme in their coping strategies. Self was embodiment in the existence of others. Coping strategies were also influenced by gender. As a woman, strategies were inclined to preserve than to risk. As head of households, study showed they tried to exhaust all possibilities because they believed in the power of pagbabakasakali. In the context of the disaster, culture of poverty is ruled out because women were not fatalistic and they did not have weak ego development. They were also conscious that part of their poverty or their hardship was due to structures of society that discriminated them as a class. Although their efforts were directed more on the attempts of coping, they deemed that all their strategies were effective. Their collective experiences from the disaster created a bond in them. A bond born out of the same suffering and shared happy moments which enabled them to smile and laugh when reminiscing some of their experiences.