Hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines, Asia’s largest Roman Catholic nation, are marking Christmas without homes, adequate food and water, electricity and cellphone connections after a powerful typhoon left at least 375 people dead last week.
Alona Nacua, right, stands beside her son as she looks at their damaged house due to Typhoon Rai in Cebu city, central Philippines on Christmas Day, Saturday, Dec. 25, 2021. Nacua said she and her husband managed to receive rice and four small cans of sardines and corned beef so they could feed their family Saturday. "It's the saddest Christmas for me, seeing my children suffer this way on this day," added Nacua, who is pregnant.
Australia is marking the holiday amid a surge of COVID-19 cases, worse than at any stage of the pandemic, which has forced states to reinstate mask mandates and other measures. Gov. Arthur Yap of hard-hit Bohol province, where more than 100 people died in the typhoon and about 150,000 houses were damaged or destroyed, asked foreign aid agencies on Saturday to help provide temporary shelters and water-filtration systems to supplement Philippine government aid.
In Manila, which was not hit by the typhoon, Filipino Catholics were relieved to be able to return to churches on Christmas, although only a fraction were allowed inside and worshippers were required to wear masks and stand at a safe distance from each other. Christmas celebrations were subdued in much of India, with more decorations than crowds as people feared a new wave of the omicron variant potentially sweeping the country in the coming weeks.
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