Yesterday, was definitely what you would call a sick day. I didn’t leave the pension house the entire day and never strayed very far from the bathroom. I ate nothing the entire day, which is my usual treatment for this. I have no idea if it actually starves the bacteria out, but at least not eating denies my digestive system anything with which to make the massive stomach cramps that make my life such a misery so much of the time.

I intended to catch up on my journal and tell the story of the American firefighters, but I was too tired. Exhausted, really. My brain was drained, and my legs felt like they each weighed a thousand pounds. I just lay on my bed for a long time, unable to find the energy to move.

At some point, I got out of bed, and despite my fatigue, I set about doing some housekeeping. I had to get water, as my supply of buckets in the bathroom were empty. Once I got my first two buckets up to my room, I started doing some cleaning and I cleaned the entire bathroom. I also swept the floor and did some much needed laundry. I washed my shirts and shorts and underwear. My bedsheets desperately need to be washed, but I left those for another day.

On the positive side, I realized that I had some podcasts on my Nano that I hadn’t listened to – 19 short documentaries from the BBC. And my Nano was charged up. So I lay on my bed for most of the day and night and listened to them. I had actually spent most of the previous night when I was really sick also listening to these documentaries. It was such a breath of fresh air – like a blast of Western civilization. It’s nice to hear something that is not just the usual Filipino interrogation about my age, marital status, and family. What is up with Filipinos and age and family? To say that they are obsessed with the topic is a tremendous understatement. I just had a chat with John, my relatively new Filipino neighbor. I had stepped outside of my room just to look up at the grey and rainy sky while my water boiled for coffee. There are millions of topics for conversation out there, and I’m more than eager for any of them. However, John, apropos of nothing, asked me how old I was. Then he asked me if I was married and had children. Then he asked me about brothers and sisters. By that point, I’d had enough of him and I excused myself and went back into my room.

Anyway, the BBC documentaries were very refreshing – to hear the intelligent voices of these British broadcasters. Of course, the topics were all international. The stories were set in Iraq, Egypt, Ghana, and Australia. There were also a bunch from the “What if” series. The topics were things like “What if everyone owned a car?” “What if women ruled the world?” See? I wanted to say to all the Filipinos. There are other things to talk about and think about other than my age and my marital status.

Things have been changing at the pension house. The large families have suddenly vanished. I came back one night to find that they were gone. I’m sure they were asked to leave by the owners of the pension house. The owners are making more efforts toward fixing the place up and doing all the laundry and this is difficult work to do while there is a village living here. Rene told me that they were displeased when they came back and found so many people living here. They had given permission for Grace and her immediate family to stay here and that’s all. But Grace had extended that invitation to many more people. I wouldn’t think it was a problem, though. These people were very clean and neat and looked after the rooms very well. Personally, I found them extremely annoying, but they were good for the pension house as they maintained it.

Currently, there are a bunch of young guys staying here. I finally got something of their story from Rene. One group of guys are car mechanics from Manila. A cousin of the pension house owner runs a used car business, and they arranged for these mechanics to come down from Manila and work on their cars. Part of the deal was that they could stay at the pension house. The other group of guys consists of the generator mechanics. They are working on the pension house generator but also generators around the city.

The two youngish “house boys” have also reappeared. I guess they have officially started their work again, and they are cleaning the rooms and the office on the first floor. Joy, the young woman that was usually at the front desk, has also reappeared. She has no front desk duties at the moment, of course. She has joined the cleaning crews. Two older women have been very busy washing all the sheets and towels and curtains. That is a huge job especially when you consider that they are doing it by hand. What a nightmare of a job. This job, which could be done in a couple of hours by a commercial washer and dryer, is taking many, many full days – and a lot of water. One of the women is very interesting. She’s a Tina Turner type of woman – a hot grandmother.

With the reappearance of these pension house employees, I’ve had the chance to gather up some more typhoon stories. Unfortunately, Filipinos don’t seem to have much interest in story-telling. Getting anytjing but the absolute basics out of them is like pulling teeth. I learned that Joy’s house was in the Anibong area somewhere near all those ships. Her family house was completely destroyed, and she and her family had to climb a tree to escape the storm surge. That’s all I’ve managed to drag out of her. I keep wanting people to start at the very beginning and tell me the whole story, but it’s hopeless. They’re either incapable or uninterested in doing so.

The other story I got came from one of the “house boys”, and it was more satisfactory. He was at the pension house when the storm surge hit and was trapped inside his room. He said that he couldn’t open the door because of the water.

At this point, the story sort of broke down because all the doors at the pension house open inwards. Since they open inwards, it would be impossible for the water to block them shut. In fact, the force of the water would likely burst them wide open. I questioned him a dozen different ways about this, but nothing he said made any sense to me. Finally, I asked him to show me the room. He took me through a kitchenette area to a back part of the pension house I’d never seen before. I didn’t even know it was there, but I guess the rooms for the pension house staff are located there.

His room faced the back of the pension house and there was a high cement wall just two feet away. The storm surge had apparently hit this wall with a great deal of force because it had been knocked right over and slammed against the wall of the pension house. This was a very interesting piece of information because it gave me proof that the storm surge had reached as high as this pension house still with enough force to knock over cement walls.

As I suspected, the door to this room opened inwards. Therefore, it was impossible that the water would keep it shut. I pointed this out to the guy but he didn’t understand what I was saying. He just kept agreeing with me and stating again that he couldn’t open the door because of the water.

His story made little sense because he then said that he escaped from his room by opening the door. I pointed out to him that he was contradicting himself. How could the door be jammed shut by the water and then he simply opened the door to get out? He just agreed with me. This sort of thing drives me crazy and I wanted to grab him by the throat and shake him. Instead, I just gave up.

Still, it was a very interesting story and a dramatic sight to see that cement wall crashed against the pension house and his door. The cement wall had not broken apart. Ironically, if the door did open outwards, he really would have been trapped and would likely have drowned. The fact that the door opened inwards had saved his life. Which only makes it stranger that he kept insisting that the door couldn’t be opened. Even with the door open, there was only a narrow gap between the top of the cement wall and the top of the door frame. The water was above his head, he said, and he had to float and swim and fight his way through that narrow gap and then make his way over the shattered cement wall and into the pension house courtyard where he could climb the stairs to the second floor. He said that he was cut quite badly in several places while doing this.

A strange thing is that I don’t remember seeing him at all during the typhoon. I didn’t see anyone bleeding from cuts and no one said anything about this dramatic escape in all the days and weeks after the typhoon. If this had happened in Canada, we would spend weeks dissecting every element of everyone’s story, reliving it again and again. I’d want to tell my story, and I’d want to hear everyone else’s story in detail. Despite sharing this pension house with all these typhoon survivors for weeks, I never heard any stories at all. They never seemed to talk about it and they would only provide simple details when I asked them for their story. It’s very frustrating for a story-oriented person like myself. It’s like this extremely dramatic and exciting event meant nothing at all. Perhaps to really appreciate stories you have to grow up on a diet of “True Life Adventure” from Reader’s Digest and things like that.

This house boy’s story astonished me partially because all this was taking place while I was busy packing up my gear in my room, and I had no idea it had happened. It makes me think of the difference between real life and movies again. Or perhaps it is just me. In any event, it never even occurred to me that someone in the pension house could be in trouble. I looked outside and I saw the rising floodwaters and I saw all the people from the first floor climbing up the stairs to the second and third floors. And that was it. If this were a movie and I were Bruce Willis, I guess I would have plunged down into the raging water and gone from room to room and shouting inside to see if anyone had been left behind or if anyone was in trouble. (Isn’t there always a child crying in a closet, a 90-year-old grandmother in a wheelchair, or a kitten that needs rescuing?) I did plunge down into the water to rescue my bicycle, but that was because I knew my bicycle was there. I had no idea that there were even rooms behind the pension house where the staff stayed at night. I simply assumed that everyone on the ground floor had walked out of their rooms and walked up the stairs to safety. Of course, at that time, I had no idea that there had been a violent tsunami-like storm surge. All I knew was that there was a flood. And the flood was rising relatively slowly. Certainly, there was plenty of time for people to get out of their rooms. That’s assuming, of course, that a cement wall didn’t crash down and trap you inside. The whole thing is so strange. The storm surge was so violent and deadly, and yet I had no idea that it had occurred.

 

 

Tags: BBC, job, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Super Typhoon Yolanda, typhoon