Today reports say Typhoon Lupit is expected to make landfall around the far northern tip of the main island of Luzon by Thursday and it may be even stronger than the earlier storms.

Natural calamities always seem to get a lot of coverage. Those created by people often don’t.

The Philippines has been dealing with two armed conflicts that have been a major drain on its economic and political life, not to mention the deaths and destruction these conflicts have brought to the people.

The first is a rebellion throughout the islands led by the New People’s Army, the military wing of the Philippines’ Communist Party. The NPA, formed in 1969, has undergone a lot of changes, politically and materially since then – reportedly shrinking from a maximum of 25,000 guerrillas to about 4,000 now – but it continues to fight for what it calls a more democratic form of government. The Philippine government has been intermittently (and sometimes half-heartedly) attempting to negotiate a peace treaty with the NPA for years.

The second conflict is with Muslim guerrillas, primarily in the southern islands of the Philippines. Muslims have been struggling for their independence for several centuries, dating back to the first colonization of the islands by Spain, which called them “Moros” after the Moors of Northern Africa. The name stuck.

The United States battled Filipino rebels, including Moros, during our colonization of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War of 1898. We didn’t give up control until July 4, 1946. And then it was in name only. The U.S. continues to play a major role there politically, militarily and economically.

Today, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is continuing the struggle, although a small region in the south has attained autonomy – the provinces of Maguindanao, Lanao del Sur, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi. For the moment a truce between the guerrillas and government troops is holding, but only a few months ago the two sides clashed in battles that killed hundreds.

Recently the MILF asked the United States for help in ending the conflict. Ghazali Jaafar, MILF vice-chairman for political affairs, said in a statement they are asking the U.S. government to help resolve the root cause of the Moro conflict, which, he claimed, began after the U.S. government – during the colonial years – failed to recognize the Moro people’s aspirations for self-rule.

I met Ghazali Jaafar in the jungles of Mindanao in 1979, describing him as an “affable and eloquent politician” for a story I wrote on the Moros and the NPA for Mother Jones. It never occurred to me that he would still be at it 30 years later or that both conflicts would still be unresolved.

Maybe the Philippines would be a great place for President Obama to start living up to his Nobel Peace Prize.

In the past couple of days a 7.6 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia has killed at least 531 and trapped thousands in rubble, a separate quake-related tsunami in the Samoas has killed 120 people and left thousands homeless, and a massive storm in the Philippines left more than 270 people dead and flooded the homes of nearly 1.9 million. But, what can we do?

For starters, there are two hardworking aid organizations in our region (Pacific Northwest), Mercy Corps and World Vision, rushing to help.

Mercy Corps is responding to the two quake-related disasters. Emergency teams are already on the way to the areas most affected.

World Vision is trying to help the estimated 100,000 people affected by flooding in Manila which was caused by Typhoon Ketsana. Many of these people lost everything they owned to the flood. World Vision staff, working with the Philippine Coastguard, has already begun distributing aid by helicopter.

These are hard economic times for a lot of us, I know, but we can do a lot more than just shrug our shoulders. No help is too little; only too late.

Both groups are in urgent need of money to make sure aid continues to reach those in need. Both aid agencies accept donations through their web sites. Both web sites also have more details on their aid efforts in the region.

Go there. Give what you can. Mercy Corps – http://www.mercycorps.org; World Vision – http://www.wvi.org/wvi/wviweb.nsf