High School Life Magazine

With the increases on the recorded natural disasters that hit the country, the aftermath screamed a national scare. Hence, disaster risk reduction awareness was raised.

But what help can awareness give to people in times like this? Or is it really necessary to begin with? Can awareness provide relief goods during calamities and disasters? And what's awareness got to do with the students, or the youth in general?

You may ask a lot of questions, I suppose.

And this exactly was the sole purpose of raising public awareness—people to ask questions. The eagerness of each individual to know about such thing. The impatience of people to be heard and be answered. Disaster awareness triggers the people to raise questions and to seek answers. This results to unity, in preventing more lives to suffer and to lessen the damages.

Being aware of what's happening and what we can do to prevent the bad to turn worse, that is beneficial enough.

During natural disasters, or even man-made calamities, the high numbers of casualties are due to lack of knowledge of the people.

Say a landslide that occurred after a heavy rain. Houses near the area were crashed, a number of people were fortunate to survive. Reason? They were unaware that it is dangerous to stay within the area which is prone to landslides when it rains. Same goes in coastal areas where people were washed off to death in just a big blow of a tsunami attack.

And for students, of course, you've got to be aware of these things because it's the only weapon you can bring along in this battle. In your own simple ways, you can prevent the increase on fatalities caused by these disasters. Start joining earthquake and fire drills which are being held in schools at least once every quarter of the year in order to secure your safety when you’re not at home. Furthermore, we request you to take these precautionary measures and drills seriously. All together, we can prevent the series of tragedies caused both by natural calamities and man-made disasters

They say prevention is better than cure. But we can't prevent something we are unaware of, can we? Just like in school, you won't be a top-notch student unless you studied your lessons and be able to answer the questions in your exam correctly.

On other note, the weather forecast was right. It was a heavy rainfall. And though I wanted to go out, I didn't take my chances. I stayed safe and sound at home until the sun was up again.