Typhoon Season

A neighbor's house

Wow, typhoons do not make for easy blogging! It has already been a month since Typhoon Glenda (Rammusan) hit my area and things are still not back to normal. It took 3 weeks for electricity to come back to my house and I live in the center of the city!  Luckily, Jeff's power came on after 2 weeks.  Although both of my offices are in mains areas of the city, they are still running on generator; the transformers still need to be repaired. People who live in rural areas, like the village, are projected to get their power back by the first week in October.  As you can guess, internet is not easy to come by either.

I will never take electricity for granted again. Getting a good night sleep is next to impossible; if you don't wake up from your own sweat, you'll wake up from mosquitoes buzzing in your ear. Preparing food is difficult with no refrigeration. Every meal is day to day. Icing any injuries is not possible at all.  Bedtime comes as soon as the sun goes down. Water doesn't always come out if the pump is connected to an electric line. Any water that you save pain buckets i a prime breeding ground for mosquitoes. Communication is much harder when batteries are constantly dying and cell signals are weak. The electric sockets are the first thing that you notice when you walk into a building with power.  Work productivity decreases if you rely on emails, typing and accessing digital documents. Some people are still dealing with this, or deal with it their entire lives. When I got home and realized the current was back, I had to resist the urge to turn on every light and electronic device. I wanted to celebrate all things electric. I wanted to have a celebration of light. But I didn't. I charged up, washed up without stumbling my toe, turned the fan on and had a good night sleep.

Even though this typhoon was not on the scale of Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), it still brought a lot of destruction and illuminated the importance of disaster preparedness and response.  The day before the typhoon hit, classes were cancelled so that families could prepare. People living in flood prone areas were evacuated to centers. Neighbors were cutting off branches hanging over their houses. Big advertising banners were taken down from scaffolding. Business owners removed their hanging signs. Advisories, information and directions from the government were posted all over Facebook. Because of this preparation (and because there was no flooding), my province had zero casualties.  The winds were the most extreme part.  A lot of people lost their homes, their crops or have expensive repairs to make. Jeff had a wood and bamboo hut that was a couple of hundred pounds and wired to the roof, ripped off in one piece and smashed on the road in front of his house. 

The view from my front door

For those of you who received my SnapChats during the typhoon, it might have looked like I was in danger- think videos taken while debris was getting tossed over roofs next to the hotel and trees bent sideways.  However, we were safe the whole time. After Typhoon Yolanda, PC made a rule that if a level 3 typhoon was heading to a volunteer area, all the PCVs there must be consolidated at a safe hotel. Because Special Olympics was the day before, over 30 PCVs, a Regional Manager and the Country Director were all consolidated together. Even though the hotel ran out of food at times, ran on a generator for periods of the day, had flooding from the extreme rains and had a tree crash through the front windows, we were ok. 

And, of course to keep things exciting in the Philippines, the Mayon Volcano that I look at everyday was elevated to Level 2 awareness a couple of days ago!

Aerial shot of the crater from 2 days ago