Philippines in crisis: Three remarkable stories you aren’t hearing

"They know nothing about the internet and going viral," Mayette Cinco wrote on Facebook about a group of boys she had met -- boys she had turned into a symbol of the Filipino spirit when she recounted their story in a post that would be shared almost 30,000 times.

A few days after the typhoon struck, Cinco, who lives in the unaffected province of Rizal just east of Manila, wrote on Facebook that five street kids were waiting at her door. Knowing that Cinco was sending goods to Tacloban, one of the cities most devastated by the storm, the boys handed her a small paper bag, she wrote, and asked if she’d please send it to the people in need. The bag contained a kilo of rice, two sardines, and three ten peso coins, about 69 cents.

“These kids gave out of the only things they've got,” she continued. “It's not easy being chased by dogs & cops and be bullied by all sorts of 'tambays' in the streets of Rizal.. Not easy to walk the entire day looking for scraps in every street garbage drums.. But they braved the heat of the sun and all other challenges just to come up with what they think would be of help to others.”

In the next month, 12,000 babies will be born in the storm-battered areas of the Philippines, according to calculations from the World Health Organization. With food scarce and trauma fresh, those babies are far more likely to be born underweight and premature.

But as people around the world mobilize to send supplies like baby formula to the Philippines, WHO representatives caution that sending dry formula presents risks.

“Mixing formula with dirty water would be deadly for babies,” Julie Hall, the Philippines’ WHO country representative told the Philippine Star. Because dry formula must be mixed with water, the risks increase in disaster-affected areas where clean water may be hard to come by, she warned. Twenty-two percent of infant deaths could be prevented, according to WHO estimates reported by the paper, if newborns are breastfed within the first hour of life.

That’s where the group Medela Moms comes in. It’s a Manila-based organization that serves as a venue for breastfeeding moms to come together, and it is currently working with the Philippine General Hospital to donate pasteurized breast milk to Haiyan’s surviving mothers.

On its Facebook page, the group says that more than 1,800 ounces of breast milk were donated between Nov. 13 and 14 alone. Facebook posts describe in detail the exact procedures for collecting, handling and storing the milk, and the challenges in distributing it.  

Three days after the typhoon, there were still battered spots of the country that were left without food, electricity or water. So an off-duty Air Force captain decided his squadron would deliver supplies on its own. Photographer John Chua heard about the rogue relief mission and hopped on board, as two helicopters piled with rice flew from Tacloban to Tanauan, Leyte.

"It’s an illegal move," Chua said. "But in that time of crisis... they felt they should do something."

The pilots found an open clearing and landed. Chua jumped off the helicopter to help unload the sacks of rice. When he turned around, he saw 100 people rushing towards him. 

"One of the crew signalled to me ‘get in, get in,'" he told America Tonight.

They tried to get the desperate crowd to stay back, so as not to be cut up by the blades of the plane. "Everyone was tense. They couldn’t control the crowd," Chua recalled. "The crowd just came in. We had about eight sacks of relief goods, and it’s all gone in a second."