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Day 28 Super Typhoon Yolanda
It hardly seems appropriate to write “Day 28 Typhoon Yolanda.” The typhoon feels long in the past. It’s still affecting the town in that there is no electricity and no services and few open shops, but I don’t wake up thinking about the typhoon anymore. I think about fixing my bike and moving on. I think about what comes next.
Yesterday, Mar mentioned that the BFP …
Days 26 & 27 Super Typhoon Yolanda
The term “squatters” almost never came up before the typhoon. But in these post-typhoon days, I hear it all the time. It’s generally used in the way you’d expect – in a negative way – and is used to describe the bad qualities of the people who suffered most from the typhoon, those living in the crude shacks along the shoreline and in the spaces …
“Want to see dead bodies?” Day 25 Super Typhoon Yolanda
“Want to see dead bodies?”
I hear this question a lot as I walk around Tacloban. You’d think that nearly four weeks after the typhoon, we’d come to the end of the dead bodies, but you’d be wrong. There seems to be no end to them. As people remove debris and move back into the areas where they used to live, they keep uncovering more of …
Day Twenty-Three – Typhoon Yolanda
It’s hard to believe that it has been 24 days since super typhoon Yolanda struck. The streets outside my pension house are still a mess, filled with debris and garbage. All the vehicles dumped there by the floodwaters are still there blocking the roads. I guess these streets are not a priority, as they don’t lead anywhere in particular or connect anything important.
I don’t think …
Day Nineteen – Super Typhoon Yolanda
My NEO word processor ran out of memory, so I have not recorded anything on it for the last two or three days. I made notes in a notebook (my sprained finger won’t let me write even in my childish scrawl), and I’ll get to those notes in a minute. First, I’d like to talk about the experience of getting my journal downloaded from the …
Day Eighteen – Super Typhoon Yolanda
Yesterday was a day of much interest. I was supposed to go with Dan to the Bohol bicycle shop, but Dan never showed up and never contacted me. I located the Bohol bicycle shop on my own and found it closed. I spoke with one of the owners, and he spoke with a mechanic, but they wouldn’t do anything for me. They were busy cleaning …
Day Eighteen – Super Typhoon Yolanda
A city without power can be a very quiet place. Last night, the silence was so complete and for so many hours that I imagined that I had gone deaf. I made some noise from time to time to ensure that my ears still worked.
At four a.m. this morning, the sole rooster left in this part of Tacloban began his totally unchallenged (and therefore rather …
Day Seventeen – Super Typhoon Yolanda
Yesterday was a day for public urination. No matter where I went, which street I went down, which corner I turned, I came across a man sending out a splendid stream of bright yellow liquid. That’s not uncommon, of course. There aren’t thousands of “Don’t Urinate Here” signs all over the Philippines for nothing. But yesterday was something special, like there was a urination festival …