Around 170,000 people were killed or remain unaccounted for after the December 2004 tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia. Thousands more lives have been lost in other, smaller tsunamis and numerous major earthquakes and devastating floods in Indonesia and East Timor since then.

The Philippines is also threatened by natural disasters, as are many other regions of South East Asia in what's become known as the Ring of Fire. For the people living here, it means their world can turned upside down by a catastrophic force of nature at any time. How to be prepared for this?

DRR, or disaster risk reduction, has become a key focus for a great many non-government organisations working in regions affected by natural disasters.

A vital part of that work is education. How would you prepare your family if you lived in a tsunami-risk area? What should you do at the moment an earthquake strikes? How do you keep safe when the volcano you live below is about to erupt?

In 2007, No Strings teamed with the Irish aid organisation Trocaire who helped fund a series of four DRR educational films, Tsunami, Earthquake, Volcano, Flood / Landslide, which would answer these and many other questions. Together, the series became known as the Tales of Disasters.

A fifth film, Cyclone / Typhoon, has recently been completed, and will be ready to be used in the region following a workshop in November this year.

Brought to life through puppets, the key messages the films contain are quickly absorbed by children, and learning is fun. The boxes falling on silly Badu's head in Earthquake provoke hilarity, even from children who know they live in a high-risk region.

As well as natural disasters, Flood / Landslide, looks at manmade contributions, such as illegal logging, and the importance of protecting the immediate natural environment.

Accompanying this series, the Two Gardens film explores peace advocacy issues, and tells a cautionary tale of how easy it is to mistrust a person because they are different from you, and how that mistrust can quickly escalate.

In Indonesia and East Timor, the films have been dubbed into Bahasa Indonesian, Acehnese, and Timorese, and are being shown to schools and community groups by No Strings' local partners, IDEP, and JRS, the Jesuit Refugee Service.

In the Philippines, the films are dubbed into Tagalog, Bisaya, Ilocano, and Waray.

A workshop in February 2009 brought together facilitators from local and international partners, among them Plan Philippines, Department of Education, Trocaire, Unicef, Christian Aid, Save the Children, Oxfam, Center for Disaster Preparedness, Department for International Development, World Vision, Children International, Panday Kalinaw Philippines, Food for the Hungry, Hope Worldwide Philippines, ABS CBN Foundation Incorporated, Department of Science and Technology, CBCP – NASSA Caritas Philippines, Kadtuntaya Foundation Incorporated, CIRCA, the Centre for Initiatives and Research on Climate Adaptation.

Delegates were selected through membership of the Disaster Risk Reduction Cluster Group, which includes the Department of Education, and of which Plan Philippines is one of the lead partners. In addition, the workshop was attended by Trocaire’s local partners in the Philippines and by the interfaith group Panday Kalinaw from Mindanao.

The Undersecretary from the Filipino Department of Education attended part of the workshop, and is putting arrangements in place so that the programme is absorbed into the country’s elementary school national curriculum so that children in all 47,000 schools in the country are reached.

Plans are underway to significantly widen the reach of the programme into further regions of South East Asia as the year progresses.