This was my experience of supertyphoon Yolanda aka Haiyan.
The night before the storm, which was projected to hit Ormoc
City at seven am, I posted one last message on Facebook to my friend Billy Ray
in San Diego. It had been raining, and then the rain suddenly stopped. There
was an eerie silence in the city, except for the occasional vroom of a
motorcycle driven by a foolhardy idiot.
The rain stopping that way worried me, I told Billy Ray.
Then I went to sleep. I woke up around six o’clock AM and noticed that the wind
had started to rise. I looked out the
window. Strong gusts of wind were making short work of the tarpaulin roof of
the used-clothes flea market (ukay-ukay) below me. I chuckled.
“Here we go,” I said to myself. It looked like a normal
tropical cyclone, like the numerous ones I went through in the past both here
and abroad (hurricanes in Florida!) Fun, but nothing to worry about.
At seven, the brunt of the storm descended and started
really shaking the trees. The wind was so strong that it drove the rain almost
horizontally. Still no need to panic, I
thought. But I already felt that there
was something different about this particular typhoon. The wind made too much noise
and blew too many crumpled sheets of roofing across the streets like so much
flimsy cardboard. The roofs of the tile store across from me were starting to
shed like the scales of a skeletal insect.
The house shuddered, something it never used to do before.
After an hour of this caterwauling, the wind suddenly died.
The sun tried to peep through an opening in the clouds. It was so eerily quiet.
“The eye of the storm is passing above us,” was our
universal opinion.
“So that was it?” I remarked.
I went outside to survey the damage. There were pieces of roofing everywhere.
Posts leaned from the shock of the wind. Roofs lost their sheathing, but not a
whole lot. I walked down to the bridge to see if the river had risen. It was
frisky, but not by much. I had a tete-a-tete with my friend Godillo who lived
beside the dike. His house bore little damage.
Then, as quickly as the wind died, the wind rose again and
brought fresh drops of rain. It had changed direction, from the Northeast.
“I’m off,” I yelled at Godillo. “ This is the second round!”
I hurried back to the safety of my house and with the rest of family tried to plug in
the nooks and holes and crannies that
the wind and the rain seemed to find, exploit ,
and point out to us ruthlessly.
The kitchen took on water. The wind slammed against the glass jalousies like a sledgehammer. I did
not realize it at the time, but it was already smashing down plate glass windows all over the city.
The wind rose, and rose and at a certain point, it did not
shriek anymore. It hummed at a high pitch.
This was something new and terrifying to me. I went up to my room and looked
out the window. The flea-market was
totally roofless, and the tile and hardware store across from the house as
well. This storm ate roofs like munchies. A tall leafy caimito (star apple) tree had toppled on the
street. Another one on the other side that I had grown up with had been bodily
snatched and thrown down to the ground, roots and all by the wind. Later , I
saw for myself that the wind had blasted trees , some ages-old, like kindling. Yolanda:
Roof muncher. Tree-totaller. And over on
the other side of the island of the unfortunate
island of Leyte, a tidal wave of gross and obscene proportions, something that we in Ormoc were
spared from, but not the poor people over there.
In my room, I listened to the wind rise and rise and hum
like a macabre, celestial spindle. And then I heard something even more
terrifying: the sound of our roof being peeled back. I felt that I was living
in a scene from the movie “Twister.” That was fiction. This was real life.
I rushed downstairs.
“The typhoon is peeling back the roof!” I announced. What
had happened was the wind had already blown away most of the roofs in Ormoc.
Ours were harder to blow away because the roof was made of old-fashioned high
grade iron, as opposed to the flimsy ones sold nowadays. The iron sheets were
fixed to solid wooden trusses that were tied together with a combination
of bolts, umbrella nails and iron
clamps. Try as she might, Yolanda could only manage to peel back two
side-panels. She could not destroy the roof system of the house that my
late father Uldarico Sr. built back in
the 70’s. What she did manage to do was to dislodge all the gutters, break the PVC pipes through which the rain coursed
and cause the collapse of the eaves on the east side of the house. On the looks
of it, compared to the rest of the houses, our house got off relatively
undamaged. Two weeks later, I had the roof examined and fixed for damage. The carpenter told me that only six umbrella nails remained. The rest had been pulled out by the force of the wind. One single nail held on to a line of corrugated iron roofing.
"The typhoon stopped just in time, " said the carpenter. "If that nail went, you would have lost your roof".
"The typhoon stopped just in time, " said the carpenter. "If that nail went, you would have lost your roof".
When does a typhoon really live up to its billing as a
super-duper feak?
When you look out the square window of the kitchen, staring
horrified in the surreal darkness (remember, this was morning) at a branch of
our backyard jackfruit tree being seized and grappled and thrown against the
wall, with the noise rising as if there was a bombing raid consisting of
shrieking steel and loud crashes and collapsing trees, and the wind shakes the house as if a giant is shaking a glass of wet rags with
you in it, and the bile starts to rise from your stomach and suddenly you start hating this typhoon and
you yell : “Enough already!” and nobody
hears you because the wind is too strong and too noisy for that. And for a
moment, you are afraid that this typhoon was an actual personality bent on
making a point by wrecking your house, as if to say:” You think you’ve seen a
typhoon? You ‘aint seen nothing yet, dahlink!.”
One storm is bad. Two storms is the worst. Two high winds
occurring from two different directions
in less than half a day. Plus a devastating storm surge. And do you want
fried tin roofs with that?
And that’s all I can say about supertyphoon Yolanda. The
aftermath had/has its own miseries, but
at least she’s gone.
For now.
**********************************
My grandnephew Aaron,
who is seven years old, is a funny fellow. Her older sister Annika, three years her senior, who cares for him as much as a put-upon sister of a
hyperactive PSP-addled addict can, reported to us amused adults that at the
height of typhoon Yolanda, when the rafters were shaking and the walls
threatening to tumble down, he had cried
melodramatically : “ I’m gonna die! I’m gonna die!”
“Didn’t he say ‘We?’” I asked.
“No,” Annika answered, “ just him.”
He had of course heard these same words on countless
Hollywood films, so for a Filipino kid like him to utter such a typical movie
line is both amusing and not too far from the truth. Yolanda, at the height of
her fury, terrified me as well into nearly
thinking that we were really all
gonna die, or at least suffer grievous bodily harm.
*************************
My grandnephew Mark , 19 years of age, a culinary student
and as much an addict of games and the internet, came visiting today from
Valencia where they lived. In that
family estate, all the fruit trees that had so abundantly borne fruit last
summer had all been felled by the typhoon. We would have no limes, mangoes,
avocados, santol, rambutan, lanzones, or
coconuts next summer and in the years to come. Mark had been helping cut the downed trees into firewood.
“I’ve been doing a
lot of reading!” he announced excitedly as if it was a new experience for him. Before
this blackout, I would always see his nose before the computer, playing
internet games or doing Facebook stuff. I was not aware that he read books until
today.
“What have you been reading?” I asked.
“Something about artists, by this Gor, or Ba something.”
“The Lives of Artists, Giorgio Vasari,” I said.
“That’s it!” he said.
“You know, it has a second volume,”
“Really?”
“Would you like to read it? It’s in my library above. Let’s
go find it.”
We went up to my library, a whole wall of shelves lined with
books. I easily found the book because I had cleaned up this long-neglected,
unloved corner of my house and re-organized the books.
“Take any book you want,”
told him. “I recommend “Spycatcher”).
Mark left to return to Valencia,
several books in tow. My library was
getting some use. I even noticed that Lorez, she of Naruto fixation and hours
of YouTube watching K-Pop, was constantly reading books. Her favorite seemed to
be a series of illustrated Bible stories for children. I’m sure the handsome
Davids and Isaacs there who looked less Jewish than US high school jocks, had something to do
with it.
******************************
On the seventh night after
supertyphoon Yolanda’s onslaught on Ormoc City, I had a Kafkaesque nightmare.
I dreamt I was trying to get into a McDonald’s in downtown San Diego. However, instead of entering a welcoming space where you went in,
made your order at the counter and sit down at one of the formica tables to
wolf down your burger and fries, I now
had to enter through a narrow turnstile, much like a TSA gauntlet, and eventually ended up in front of a high counter from which an unfriendly looking
cashier looked down disdainfully on me. The cashier surprisingly looked like
Charice Pempengco in her current lesbian-butch incarnation.
“Whaddaya want?” she barked down at me.
Appalled, I was going to say “ An Angus beef burger with
mushrooms and Swiss cheese and a large Coke,” but what came out from my lips
were: “This used to be a welcoming place. What happened?”
The cashier eyed me coldly and like a military drill
sergeant snarled: “ What is your order, sir?” She was not going to give me the
time of day.
I turned around and walked away. I found another McDonald’s
nearby and found the same set-up and the same attitude from the employees. It
seemed that McDonald’s had re-arranged the furniture to guard against
terrorists and undesirables and instructed its employees be correct but cold,
ruthless and unfriendly.
Typhoon Yolanda, in her own
ruthless way, had re-arranged the furniture in Ormoc City. After her,
Ormoc would never look the same to me.
*************************
*************************
The families Lastimada and Batucan stayed at my house today.
This man came knocking on the door. He had seen the sign “Room
for Rent” and asked if he could rent it. They
came from Tacloban and were on their way to Cebu, but they needed time
to get tickets on the ferry. I asked him how many people were in his party.
He replied nine: himself, his wife, his mother, two daughters,
a one year old infant, two teen-age boys and a little girl. I explained to him
that the room was basically good only for one person and they would not all fit
in.
“We don’t mind”, said the man. “Just give us five hours
till we get our tickets for Cebu. “We
don’t care for ourselves, it’s the baby we’re worried about and my mother. She’s having some bleeding and we
need to get her to Cebu as soon as possible.”
I agreed to let them stay for the five hours they needed.
The five hours stretched to an overnight stay because there was absolutely no
way they could just show up to get tickets on any of the fastcraft that went to
Cebu. The port was jampacked with people from Tacloban and surrounding areas
desperate to get out of Leyte. I had heard of rumors and reports earlier of
some bad things happening in Tacloban, but could not confirm anything because
we had no TV, newspapers or internet whatsoever. The presence of this family was my first inkling
that something terrible was happening in Tacloban and that people were in full flight from it. True,
Ormoc was devastated as well, but water was plentiful, order was swiftly
restored, and the people, used to having a calamity of this magnitude before,
did not panic and commit mayhem. There were tempers at the gas station and
bread lines but in general everyone
queued in an orderly manner. Tacloban, however, seemed to be a different story.
After I had ushered the family ito their small room, the
relief on their faces at being able to just sit and rest on a bed and on the
floor was palpable. After mulling it a
little bit, I had the spare room that was reserved for guests and family
members from Australia cleared and
cleaned up and gave the family to use it as well.
‘Oh,” the matron informed me, “My sister and her family are
arriving from Tacloban later this evening. Can they stay here as well for the
night?”
I said yes.
I asked the young man,
the father of the infant , what was
going on in Tacloban.
The young man looked at me with a slightly dazed expression
on his face, as if he had just seen some unmentionably horrible things, which he probably did, and
replied: “ The people in Tacloban are not normal anymore.”
He told of the decision of the
authorities to free the inmates of a prison so they could escape the storm
surge. The unintended result of this was
a crime-spree that terrorized the Taclobanons.
Saddled by the storm, they were now seemingly at the mercy of thugs with
no police or military protection. He
recounted the story, which I’ve heard before, of a prominent doctor who was
killed and his daughter raped and murdered in their home presumably by
escapees. He talked of people so gripped by hunger they would snatch the food
from your hands. He talked of the looting of malls. He talked of the dead lying
bloated and stinking on the streets,
uncollected and unmourned, the awfulness of their stench provoking people to
flee for the sake of their children and their own sanity.
Their world, as they knew it,
had ended “Yolanda” came screaming down from the skies.
*********************
*********************
The little girl’s name was Sophia, just like my sister.
Sophia was a hyperactive kid of six. She became the ad hoc
playmate of my grandniece Lorez, who was three years her senior. They played
LEGO and Pirates of the Caribbean cards.
She was a very talkative and communicative girl. When our househelp Veny asked her what happened to her home, she
replied in Waray: “Nagbaha” ( It flooded.) “Kutob dida,” (Up to there), she
said, indicating an area near the ceiling. “May-ada gin-rape,” (Somebody got
raped). “Damo an patay” (There are many dead people).
Then she pranced off
to join Lorez in a game of tag.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
They lived outside Tacloban proper, near the San Juanico
bridge, said the young man. After the storm
he and his brother went to explore the effects of the storm. The road to Tacloban was impassable due to debris and fallen powerlines, so they found a
route over the hills into the city. Downtown Tacloban was a dead zone, a city
that nature seemed to have wiped clean from the face of the earth. A two-storey
McDonald’s beside the wharf still stood, but all its contents were washed out
into the sea.
“I have a story to tell,” he told me, “about a friend of
mine who survived the tidal wave. He was a trucker. He and other truckers
normally parked their trucks at the Tacloban pier. He told me that he saw the
big wave come in. He said the wind did not seem to strike the sea as much as
suck it out. After the sea receded, the giant wave came crashing in to the pier
and swept all his trucker friends out to sea except for one, who was clinging
to his feet. For himself, he had managed to cling by two fingers to two nails
on the roof of a building. He kicked his friend who was clinging to his feet
for fear that he would be swept out as well. The friend let go and disappeared
into the sea.”
He paused, then confessed that he had stood outside
Robinson’s Mall as it was being looted. He was tempted to join in, but he did
not. People were going crazy and smashing into stores, emptying them of their
contents. A San Miguel Brewery warehouse was ransacked. He could see people
trundling carts of stolen beer on their carts.
At first, he and his family were able to fly out to Manila on a private jet
owned by Willie “Wowowee” Nepumoceno through the intercession of a connected
aunt who lived in Manila. They stayed for a while in her condo in Manila. When
her sister, who worked for Mercury Drug
was called back to work, she decided to return to Leyte, choosing Ormoc
City as her temporary base. I asked him why she did not stay in Manila instead?
“She’s afraid of the big city,” he replied. He accompanied
her back to Tacloban , together with their parents. His other family members,
including a baby, remained behind in Manila.
****************************8
It was already dark, around 7 PM, when the Batucans arrived.
The elderly Batucans worked at the department of Agrarian Reform. The matron
looked weary and apologetic.
‘Pasensya ka na han
pagmerhuwisyo,” (So sorry for imposing on you), she said. I eased them
to their room. They seemed as relieved as their other relatives to have
been able to make it this far away from Tacloban city, within the relative
comfort and safety of a rented room.
Afterwards they went to the plaza to get a bite to eat. They
came back an hour later.
‘We just bought barbeque chicken to go,” she said. “There
was no room to sit. There are so many people.”
I gathered that they
were eventually going to Danao City in Cebu. That was where the elderly Batucan
was from. They were going back to Tacloban City only when the situation had
normalized.
“That’s where my home and work is,” she said wistfully,
almost in a bittersweet voice. . “ I don’t know where else I would work.” They lived
in the V&G housing subdivision, a community
that was relatively unscathed from the storm surge but was now under the grip of fear from marauding
criminals and home invaders. She told me
that, aside from their home in the subdivision, they had an apartment in the
city. They were there when the storm
started. A nurse who roomed with them rescued
them and guided them to safety. Her daughters who were with her were
both nurses as well. The future for them was not very clear.
After a prolonged relay by family members queuing at the fastcraft
offices through the night, the Lastimadas and Batucans were finally able to
leave for Cebu at ten in the morning.
Sophia came running down the stairs and gaily announced: “We’re leaving!
We’re leaving!”
I never saw such gratitude expressed in not so many words
but with looks and smiles on their faces as they left to join their ship for
Cebu. Sure, they paid me for the accommodations, but their thank-you’s were
priceless.
They had the looks of
people who had just stepped back from
the abyss.
*****************************
*****************************
On the same day, in the afternoon, after the two families
had left, there was a knock at the gate.
A gentleman and a young man, presumably his son, stood
outside. I noticed the line of people outside queueing to withdraw from the ATM
at the Land Bank. There were no functioning banks in Tacloban city and its
environs. The ATM’s there were smashed and looted. Just round the corner, in
the same building beside my house, there was another queue in front of the Mercury
Drug store. There are two Mercury Drug store branches in Ormoc
City. There were five or six in
Tacloban City. All of them were ransacked and looted. An apologist for the
looters was quoted in the newspapers as saying that desperately hungry people
were justified in looting the stores.
Looting for food, I can understand, but
baby diapers and 40-inch flat
screen TV’s? Without a doubt, greed, not desperation, was at work there. Without effective police or military
protection, the result was anarchy. I
heard that the military was now starting to assert itself in Tacloban City, effectively putting it under martial
law.
“Can we please rent a room for the night,” said the man. “We
need a place to rest. We are priority number 1500 in the hydrofoil to Cebu.”
“How did you learn
about me?” I asked.
“A woman told us about your place, the house with the red
gate behind Land Bank. They stayed with you last night.”
Naturally I agreed. He left to fetch his family and half an
hour later I showed them to their room. They had a son and a daughter.
“I was going to send my family to Manila and stay behind and
watch the house in baras but they wouldn’t let me,” explained the gentleman.
Are we safe here?”
I assured him that it was. ”My children have become anxious
about noises ouside,” he said.
Slowly I pieced the family’s story.
The man was originally from Guian and now lived with his family in Baras, in Tacloban city,
an area that was smack in the path of the storm surge. He was in Manila when
the storm happened. In Baras, his wife and two kids, a boy and a girl, were
nearly caught in the floodwaters and managed to escape to the roof. The girl
fell into the water but was urged up into the roof by her mother and
brother. She suffered deep cuts and
bruises. After the storm, they went to escape to the town of
Alang-alang. There they were terrified
of reports that some armed men were knocking on doors and looking for
well-to-do people from which to extort money or otherwise do harm upon. Meanwhile, in Manila, the husband wangled a
seat on a C-130 flight from Manila and proceeded
immediately to Alang Alang. He was
intending to stay behind to watch after their house, but his family nixed the
idea, so they rented a van and went to
Ormoc instead . From there they would take a hydrofoil to Cebu and eventually Manila.
Once inside their room, the wife and kids stayed inside all
day. When the hm husband would go out for a while, th kids would call out to
him in concern, if not panic: “Dad? Dad?”
A van driven by the
husband of the wife’s sister was supposed to fetch them in Ormo and bring them to Davao. It turned
out that the brother-in-law had family stranded in Tacloban City whom he was going to rescue as well and bring
to Davao. That meant that my guests would have to return to Tacloban City, a
city they had just escaped from, back to the dragon’s lair, so to speak. They
would then take the route to Southern Leyte via the decimated towns of Palo
and Tanauan.
From the jaws of hell and back again. Just like in the
movies.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Not long after my Davao-bound
guests had made themselves confortable in my home, there was another knock on
the gate. My househelp Veny opened it, listened to whoever was there and came
back to me.
“These girls want to rent a room….for seventeen people,” she
announced.
I gulped.
“Seventeen?”
“Just talk to them,” said Veny.
I went out. A young woman who had obviously done some
travelling looked me with anxious eyes.
“Sir,” can we please rent a room in your house?” she asked.
“And how many would you be in your party?” I asked.
“Seventeen,” she replied. We have four kids, sir, please for
their sake, rent us the room.”
“Why don’t you go to a hotel?” I asked.
“We would if there was any room available. There’s none.
Please sir.”
“ I have two rooms that could hold ten people, but seventeen…”
I replied doubtfully. “You’re too many.”
“We just need rooms for the kids and their nannies, sir. We
don’t care about ourselves.”
Her pleas felt so heartfelt and desperate that I answered:
“Come back later, I’ll see what I can do.”
I talked to my niece-in-law Erma about the seventeen people
wanting to stay the night with us.
“That’s a lot of people,” she said.
Later, I talked to my nephew Butch about the situation. He
had the same reservation. I knew they were leery about taking in guests in to
the house, basically strangers. There had been a rumor that brigands disguised
as beggars or destitute were knocking on doors in Tacloban. Once the door was
opened, they would stage a home invasion and rob, if not kill, the occupants of
the house.
I took a pause and sat down on the sofa facing the gilded
wooden bust of the Enlightened Buddha that I had bought and laboriously shipped
from Koh Samui, Thailand here to my hometown. My mind turned back to one of the
shocking revelations I heard about the storm surge in the Palo-Tacloban area.
During the course of my conversations with the first guests
in my house, the Lastimadas and the Batucans, they noted my fluency in the
Waray dialect. I explained to them that I studied at theSacred Heart Seminary
in Palo for eight years, hence my familiarity with Waray. Despite barely speaking a word of it
in the years after I left the seminary, the knowledge never left me. They asked
me if I knew the late Monsignor Estanislao Abarca. Of course I did, I said. And
Avestruz? Years below me, I replied. The sisters it turned out were from
Barugo, a town I had occasion to visit many times as a seminariwan.
“And how is the seminary in Palo? Was it affected by the
typhoon?” I asked quite disingenuously.
They looked at me with stricken faces.
“It’s totally destroyed,” said one. “ The waves went over
it. Bodies were seen on the rooftop.”
If I remember rightly, the seminary had three floors. The
first floor housed the classrooms and the two upper floors housed the
dormitories.
“On the roofop?” I uttered incredulously. “Were there
students there at the time?”
“There must have been,” said a woman. “They had classes, or
they were staying there since it was the start of the semester.”
I fell silent. An institution which was practically my home for eights
years studying Latin, music, philosophy and theology: gone, its scholars dead,
perhaps those bloated corpses reportedly on rooftops. The sea was distant
enough from the school to discount any storm surge reaching it. But evidently,
a tidal wave did reach it, as well as most of Palo. What kind of providence was at work here,
divine or demonic?
I decided to accommodate the troupe of seventeen in my home.
I dedicated this act to any dead seminarian from my former alma mater.
Somehow they fit into
three rooms. I had given up my room and slept in my studio downstairs. When I
agreed to let them in, the girls clasped their hands in gratitude. I never saw
such desperation in their eyes followed by gratitude for my willingness to
accommodate. Ironically, I was housing an old man who was a retired seaman. His three sons were
working on ships and were abroad at the moment, probably out their mind with
worry. You see these were their kids and wives who I was giving shelter to.
Back in Tacloban they all lived in a compound that the storm had destroyed.
Whatever it was they were fleeing was to horrible for me to
imagine. Ormoc has painful memories of
the 1991 flood where thousands were killed as well. Now, although house were
destroyed, few lives were lost. Not so in Tacloban. This is something I wish I never had to deal
with, ever, in my life.
*************************
This morning I served coffee to a group of travelers
who had come in the night from Davao and
intended to drive to Tacloban to fetch family members of Armand Dacuycuy of Davao. Armand was the brother in
law of the wife , a Mrs. Yu, of Alang Alang, He had driven in a two car Toyota
Grandia caravan for eight hours from Davao
City to the ferry point in Matina.. They
had intended to do the crossing over the Surigao strait and into Leyte at 10 AM
and arrive in Ormoc by noon, but the relief trucks bearing food and and supplies for the stricken people of Leyte
and Samar were given priority on the ferries. They were only able to load their
vans at 2 in the afternoon. By the time
they arrived in Ormoc, it was already 7 PM and quite dark.I had a discussion earlier with Enrique and his
wife. They were hesitant to go back to Tacloban,
but they had no choice as they were just riding along. Armand had an important mission, and that was to
save his own kin and bring them to Davao.
At the very least, I said, try to tell him not to travel
tonight but at dawn or early morning. Better safe than sorry.
They would try, they said.
As it turned out, Armand
had decided to stay for the night and drive in the early dawn because
the drivers were exhausted from the long drive.
So I gave them a room to stay in the house free of charge.
In the early morning I boiled water for coffee at 3 AM.
Armand came down and I offered him and the rest coffee which
he accepted.
They had decided to go early, Armand said.
We got to talking. It transpired that he used to be a member
of the Kalipayan dance troupe. This was a famous and internationally
well-travelled dance troupe based in
Tanauan, Leyte, one of the hardest-hit in the storm surge.
“Does it still exist?’ I asked him, meaning the
Kalipayan Dance Troupe, not Tanauan.
“Yes, but the director is already old,” he replied.
He knew a few of the same people I knew: Tex Almeria,
Fr. Aguilos, the late Fr. Ben Bacierra.
“We had the same kind
of typhoon in Davao, Typhoon Goring,” he said.
“My business suffered a lot. But
Yolanda was definitely stronger.
“
Later they left in a convoy of two Grandia Toyotas. I bade
them bon voyage and not to stop for anybody on the road.
*******************
Mang Pilang Arradaza
lived in Tondo, Bagong Buhay, outside
Ormoc City proper. This is near our family rice farm. She was seventy years old
and sold native rice cakes for a living. She lived in a ramshackle house made
of cement blocks and wood. She was fond of her house, even if it was not
soundly constructed. Before the storm hit, her children urged her to move out
of the house and seek shelter in a safer
building. She refused. She considered the house strong enough for her.
Besides, at seventy, she had seen her fair share of typhoons and not one
managed to injure her. Her home had gone through unscathed. What was different
about this one?
After the storm, they looked for her. They found her
lifeless body crushed, pinned down by the rafters of her home that had
collapsed on her.
********************
Here’s one thing that our no-electric power situation after
typhoon Yolanda has taught me:
without electricity, man’s current veneer of
acquired civilization, his world of the internet, ipads, iphones, frozen foods
and illumination on demand falls apart like a deck of cards. What is left
staring him in the face are the stark basics: the need for food, shelter and clothing.
When you sweep away the need for TV, a
laptop or Netflix, these are the needs that remain and that you must fulfill in
order to survive. Then: family and, if you’re religious, God.
*******************************
Books I’ve read during this month of no electricity: “Doctor
Sleep” by Stephen King, “The Blue Hour” by Jefferson T. Parker, “A Tidewater
Morning” by William Styron, “The Alchemist”, by Paolo Coelho, the volume on The
Renaissance by Will Durant. Currently halfway through Tolstoy’s “War and
Peace”…an amazing achievement by my reckoning. Reading it is not nearly the chore that I thought it would be. It
helps that I have been to its main location, St. Petersburg, Russia. Simultaneously
reading “The Age of Napoleon” by Will Durant on my iPad. The Napoleonic age seen from two
different sides: the Russian and the French. Illuminating. In the days of complete darkness (we have
streetlights now), I studied the stars. Ask me what those stars are now and I’ll
tell you what they are: Betelgeuse,
Bellatrix, Sirius, Jupiter, Andromeda etc… I am inching towards the concluding
chapters of my third novel, "The Time Breathers". I am also working
on a symphonic piece for chorus and orchestra, a Requiem for the people who
died in this storm and the 1991 Ormoc floods. In my own way I will remember those who lost their
lives needlessly and are now buried in anonymous mass graves. Strange how having been deprived of power and
the internet, I now have all this free time to read, contemplate and create.
