I was seven years old when I first experienced the terror a typhoon brings.

It was 1998 and my family - me, my parents and my two brothers - lived in Marikina City in the Philippine capital, Manila.

When we began to prepare for the storm, I was excited at first because it meant no school. As we all gathered at home, I thought this was an adventure. I was just a child.

When I began to realise it was going to be dangerous it became very frightening, very quickly. Our house was in one of the most flood-prone areas beside the Pasig River. In the morning, there was just a puddle on the street but by the afternoon, our village and the river were indistinguishable.

The water kept rising. My family took refuge on the second floor of our house and we were stuck there with no electricity. The water engulfed the first floor of our home up to the ceiling. In the dark and the cold I didn't know when it would end or if the water would stop.

Finally a rescue boat arrived. It docked on what was once our staircase. It felt like a dream as we travelled by boat through streets I'd walked just days before.

In 2009, another typhoon struck and it hit us even harder than the first. Our two-storey house was completely submerged: the river had simply turned into sea. One of my brothers and my father were stranded on a rooftop for 20 hours before rescue came.

There were many deaths and my family moved to the other side of Manila, away from the river, where we would not be so vulnerable.

Typhoon Haiyan's arrival in the Philippines brought these memories rushing back. Haiyan is the most powerful typhoon to have hit the Philippines in recorded history and 12 million people have been affected.

The total of 5200 deaths so far is likely to rise as aid workers reach remote areas. I realise how fortunate I am that my own family survived Typhoon Haiyan and is safe.

My mother, Rose, is a humanitarian aid worker for IOM (the International Organization for Migration) in the Philippines and she is in a storm-struck province called Roxas helping typhoon victims.

I now live in Scotland and it is enormously difficult to contemplate the level of devastation in my homeland. Images dominating newspapers and television of children shivering and hungry, and people grieving for their families, are incredibly hard to see.

All too often for the people of the Philippines, despair comes as thunder, lightning and rain. The impact is greatest among the most vulnerable and in the Philippines, poverty isn't hard to find: a quarter of people live on less than £2 a day.

But hope is manifest in little things: dry clothes, clean water, and food. It's these that charities such as Oxfam are helping to provide through the Disasters Emergency Appeal launched after Haiyan.

I'm hoping the people of Scotland will donate what they can. I came to Edinburgh on an internship last year, met fantastic people, made good friends and decided to move here, so I returned and began volunteer work with Oxfam Scotland.

Already there has been an incredibly generous response to the DEC Philippines Appeal with more than £4 million given by Scotland so far. I hope Scots will continue to back the appeal.

This time my family are all OK but for too many people in the Philippines, their loved ones are gone. We were lucky we could move but some stay because they have no choice. We also had the financial security to get back on our feet. For all those affected by Typhoon Haiyan that will feel like a distant prospect.

Please give what you can to help them.

You can donate to the DEC Appeal at www.dec.org.uk or call 0370 60 60 900.