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 had an official body count of about 5,700 dead plus 1,700 still missing. Those numbers seem quite low to me, but we’ll see.

I summed up most of my day yesterday in the afternoon, so there isn’t much to say. I did use my Trangia X2 to cook my spaghetti last night. It worked, but it was more of a disaster than anything else. For one thing, it wasn’t hot enough. The fuel that Dan gave me didn’t seem to burn hot enough. It would hardly even bring the pot of water to a boil whereas when I used gasoline, it came to a boil very fast. Plus, the stove kept blowing itself out. The flame would just suddenly vanish, and I’d have to take the risk of relighting it while it was still hot and the vaporized fuel was still pouring out of the jet. The children were another big problem. I can’t reasonably use this stove inside my room, so I was cooking out on the verandah, and the children would crowd around and go running past. People had taken away my two little tables long ago, so I had to put the stove on the ground. And no matter how many times I told the children to keep back, they insisted on getting close to the stove and even putting their faces right above it – a very bad idea when this thing could erupt into a fireball at any second. And then when it came time to drain the water and add sauce and the other stuff, I had no choice but to leave the stove with the exposed flame just sitting there out in the open. It was very dangerous, so I had to move very fast and keep shooing the children away. Meanwhile, the mosquitoes were driving me insane. I eventually put on long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and socks just to get some protection, so I was also very hot. And when my meal was finally done, the children just stood around in a circle and stared at my food and at me. It was disconcerting. Right in the middle of taking a forkful, they’d jam their heads right above the bowl and look down. They were so close that they were between me and the bowl and I wouldn’t be able to get another forkful. It was very strange and, in my humble opinion, very rude – another example of poor parental control. I eventually had to move inside my room and eat there in relative privacy. But that meant leaving the still hot stove just sitting there. I had the evil thought that if the children burned their hands on that stove, it would serve them right and maybe they’d learn to leave other people’s things alone.

I actually yelled quite loudly at some of the children – loud enough for their parents to hear me yelling at them. I did this when they started to chase and torment the cat that was visiting me. I was feeding the cat some Vienna Suasage from a can and the children hissed at the cat and kicked at it and chased it away. I yelled at them to stop several times, but it had no effect. The next time, they would just do it again. Children can be such  little savages.

The pension house is rapidly changing now – another reason for me to want to be moving on. The owners of the place have hired a team of mechanics to fix the big diesel generator in the courtyard. Three men showed up yesterday and started their work. As part of the deal, they are allowed to stay in a room at the pension house. Other people also showed up, and I have no idea who they are. Three cars and trucks were in the courtyard last night. I can feel the pension house coming back to life around me and getting busy. I miss the quiet times. And when the owners get the generator up and running, they’ll likely open the pension house for business. I will lose my squatter’s rights. Apparently, it’s true that squatters want to get everything for free. I certainly do.

It occurred to me today that the post office might be open or be close to opening. It’s an essential government service, after all. I’m going to check on that and see about shipping my Katadyn filter. It’s an expensive piece of gear to just leave behind and might be worth shipping, once more, around the world.

3:00 p.m.

After my journal session this morning, I made some oatmeal and I was sitting outside trying to enjoy it in peace. Then I saw a young boy across the courtyard suddenly stoop down and pick up a hefty piece of concrete and try to slam it into a poor little kitten that he’d spotted in the bushes right beside him. I was on my feet in a second and screaming at the boy to stop what he was doing. I really let my voice go, and then I walked down the verandah and kept pace with him as he ran away and kept yelling at him. I was extremely upset. The worst part was that the various mothers were all around on the verandahs. One of them was the mother of this little monster, but none of them seemed to care at all. They were laughing and smiling and getting a big kick out of how upset the strange foreigner was. The fact that their little boy was trying to kill a defenseless animal for no reason at all didn’t worry them in the slightest.

Then, when I left the pension house and was walking toward Mark’s house to charge up my Kindle, I happened to walk past a boy just as he picked up a rock and tried to hit a cat that was under the table by his feet. I stopped and approached the boy and asked him why he tried to hit the poor cat. The boy had nothing to say. A group of adults at a shop right there joined in. They spoke English, and they said that the boy had no reason to hit the cat. He just did it for fun. I gave my opinion that this was a very bad thing to do, but it didn’t seem to faze anyone. The obnoxious boy just lounged against his bicycle like nothing was going on. I really don’t understand people most of the time.

It’s true, in fact, that I don’t understand people. It isn’t just children that are beyond me. I often feel completely out of step with the way the world operates. This morning, for example, it occurred to me to type the words Tacloban and typhoon into my Kindle’s web browser to see what news stories would pop up. I couldn’t read very much because the connection is so slow, and it is next to impossible to read Internet pages on the Kindle. However, I did read a couple of stories on the CNN website. As I read through them, I recognized the things the stories mentioned. And yet, it all seemed completely wrong to me. The tone was completely wrong. It just missed the point. It’s as if the writer had a preconceived notion of what the story was and then packaged everything to fit that view. And being here, I’m only too aware that you should be cautious about believing things that a Filipino tells you. They will repeat rumours and state them as fact when they haven’t the slightest clue what they are talking about. And oddly enough, I had an experience this afternoon that ties in perfectly. This has to do with a story about collecting dead bodies.

As could be expected, the article about collecting dead bodies focused totally on how awful and horrible and disgusting and terrible and shocking the job is. The people the journalist interviewed said all the right things to suit the article. The story was neatly packaged and processed and shaped to suit what our expectations of such an article would be. The people doing this work were presented as heroes engaged in a traumatizing task, people who will require counselling afterwards. But I’ve seen the collection of dead bodies in progress, and I know that it isn’t like that at all. It’s like anything else. It’s a job, and you get the job done. After you’ve dealt with five hundred dead bodies, it starts to get a bit routine. And on my way home, I saw this in action.

I was walking past the fire station, and a group of BFP guys and a group of SOCO guys were, for some bizarre reason, examining a corpse right beside the sidewalk. They had opened up the body bag completely and were arranging the body so as to take pictures for identification purposes. That they would do this in full view of the public says a great deal about the tone of the process and the style in the Philippines. Such a thing would be hidden far from public view in Canada or the United States. It would be considered disrespectful at the least to have this poor person’s naked, decomposing body on display for anyone to see. And it was a gruesome body – not even close to the worst I’ve seen, but still pretty shocking if you’re not used to it. And the smell was really bad. I stopped to watch the process, and I had to breathe through my mouth again. There was no way I could breathe through my nose.

The point to this story is not that they were examining a corpse in full public view. The point is that they were having a jolly good time while doing it. They were joking and laughing and putting the limbs of the body in different positions and then making funny comments and everybody laughed. They were essentially using this decomposing body as a prop for their own personal comedy routines. And these were not idiotic teenage boys but the official organization charged with collecting and identifying the dead. It’s the kind of thing that if someone had captured it on video and posted it on YouTube it would cause a huge scandal – showing the lack of respect that these men had towards the victim of the typhoon. Worse, this body was very small, and I’m quite certain it was a young girl, perhaps a teenage girl. So where would a scene like that fit into the CNN article? Frankly, it wouldn’t. And I could say the same thing about just about everything I’ve seen during this typhoon about collecting dead bodies: that bodies were left to rot for at least eight or nine days; the way bodies are dumped out of the body bags onto the ground when they are collected; that locally-made body bags were of such poor quality that they would split open and the bodies would fall to the ground with a big splat; that the ground would be covered with the liquid from the bodies and the blankets the bodies were wrapped in and not sanitized in any way; that barely the smallest effort was made at identification. These were all my personal observations. I could never have written that respectful and clichéd CNN article because I know there are so many more layers and details to what is going on. There’s no way to write a short article and have it make sense and really tell anything about what happened here. Then again, it’s not like this is news to me. The fact that the “news” has nothing to do with reality is something I learned through my own observations thirty years ago. That’s why I’ve long felt that reading newspapers is a complete waste of time.

I did a few other things while I was out and about. I went first to the harbor, and I was happy to see a large navy vessel there. I was even happier when I saw that it was LC551 and that Marie was sitting inside the shack at the entrance ramp. I was a bit embarrassed for her to see that I was still here and still roaming around trying to bum a lift to Cebu, but there was nothing to be done about that. I walked up to her and asked about taking this boat back to Cebu. I got the usual vague answer in reply about how this ship was probably going to go back to Cebu and maybe it would do so in two or three days and perhaps I could go on it. All probablies, maybes, and perhapses. But it was better than nothing, and I now have the ship’s cell phone number in my cell phone and they have my number in theirs. The chances look good that I will be able to take the ship in a couple of days.

I walked away from the ship feeling very pleased. But I was also a bit sad. This city and the typhoon have become big parts of my life, and it felt weird to contemplate leaving it. It felt even weirder when I got to the market area and then to Anibong and saw all the reconstruction going on. This is where all the action is, and I kind of want to see the story all the way through to the end. But who knows when that will be? It could be months and months before electricity is restored, and I certainly don’t want to stay that long.

My walk through Anibong was cut a bit short by the usual rain, but it was still a fascinating walk. There is so much going on there – none of which will end up in a CNN article. I don’t even have words to describe the scenes I saw and what they made me feel. And for these people, the situation was not a temporary one that will vanish with the ease of a ship ride to Cebu. They will still be there living in those shacks they’re rebuilding months and even years from now.

 

 

 

Tags: bike, cell phone, CNN, job, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Super Typhoon Yolanda, Tacloban, typhoon